Colin Campbell (academic)

Sir Colin Campbell, DL, FRSA, an academic lawyer, was the Vice Chancellor of the University of Nottingham, England and served until 2006 as Her Majesty's First Commissioner of Judicial Appointments.

Campbell retired as vice chancellor of the University of Nottingham in September 2008. He was appointed in 1988 as the country's youngest vice chancellor at the age of 43.

In 1999 he caused much cacchination in the HE sector by proposing the effective privatisation of universities, saying that what was good for telephone companies, railways and airlines must be good for academia, too. He was long a loud advocate of controversial plans to introduce tuition fees. He was criticised for the university's decision to accept, in 2001, a £3.8M endowment from tobacco multinational British American Tobacco aimed at establishing an International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility at Nottingham University Business School. Many current and prospective staff at the university felt that such a relationship with a tobacco company that has been accused, amongst other things, of illegal smuggling; trading with the Burmese junta; and illegally targeting their products at African children, was highly unethical however. This belief lead to resignations, including that of Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, the loss of at least one grant for £1.5m from the Cancer Research Campaign, and the decision of the director of the Gene Targeted Drug Design Research Group to take his 15-strong team to the University of London.

Further controversy came in 2008 when Campbell issued a statement in response to the then recent arrests under the 2000 Terrorism Act, of a student, Rizwaan Sabir, and member of staff, Hicham Yezza, at the university,. They had been held for six days before being released without charge after downloading documents relating to terrorism from a US government website for research purposes. Appearing to reject the notion of academic freedom, ¿Campbell said in his statement that "There is no 'right' to access and research terrorist materials. Those who do so run the risk of being investigated and prosecuted on terrorism charges. Equally, there is no 'prohibition' on accessing terrorist materials for the purpose of research. Those who do so are likely to be able to offer a defence to charges (although they may be held in custody for some time while the matter is investigated)." Many academic staff in the institution found this legal formalism an unacceptable abdication of managerial responsibility, which demonstrated to some that Campbell, to the end, had always been more interested in cutting a figure as a businessman in tune with the establishment zeitgeist than defending and extending academic values.

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