Prior to this he was Pro Vice-Chancellor for External Affairs at the University of Leeds.  He was also Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Education.  Before going to Leeds in 1992, he was for sixteen years Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement.
He was educated at the University of Oxford where he studied history and at the University of California at Berkeley where he was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Public Policy while holding a Harkness Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund of New York.

He has honorary doctorates from the University of Bath, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, the (former) Council for National Academic Awards, Anglia Polytechnic University and Grand Valley State University.  He is also a Member of the Academia Europea and an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences.

He was President of the Academic Cooperation Association from 2002 to 2008, the Brussels based agency that represents the interests of international organisations such as the British Councvil and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at the European level. He is also Chair of the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning (formerly the Universities Association for Continuing Education). From 2000 until 2006 he was a member of the board of HEFCE and chaired its Quality Assurance Learning and Teaching strategic committee.

He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2007 New Year Honours list for services to higher education.

His research interests are the governance and management of universities and implications for the organisational culture of universities (and academic ethos and social missions); the development of mass higher education systems in their social, economic and cultural contexts; the evolution of new patterns of knowledge production, and implications for knowledge-based organisations (including universities); the internationalisation of higher education, in response to wider phenomena of globalisation.

His most recent books are The Meanings of Mass Higher Education (1995), Governing Universities (1996), the Globalization of Higher Education (1998) and Higher Education Re-formed (2000), University Leadership: The Role of the Chief Executive (2000), Ten Years On: Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe (2000) and Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge Production in an Age of Uncertainties (2001).