Taking on a vice-chancellor position for the first time is undoubtedly daunting – and perhaps now more than ever, given the deep financial crisis gripping British universities.

But, despite not having a long career in academia behind her, when Elwen Evans took up the position as head of the University of Wales and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) in 2023, she felt her past profession had helped prepare her for the current turmoil.

Before making the switch to academic leadership, Evans led legal teams as a criminal barrister and head of chambers in Swansea. The height of her law career coincided with what she described as “a time of major change” within the profession, with an ongoing movement to modernise the bar through regulatory changes granting a new level of freedom to barristers and solicitors.

Reflecting on this, Evans said she believes the higher education sector is “in a fairly similar position to where law was a while ago”. 

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“If you’re looking at what [new regulator] Medr’s doing in Wales, if you’re looking at where the [skills] White Paper is seeking to take HE, its intersection with [further education]…I wouldn’t use the word ‘deregulation’, but you’re seeing a more agile framework within which we are perhaps going to be asked to operate.”

Evans, who led the prosecution team in the case of murdered five-year-old April Evans and a defence team when four miners were killed in a disaster at the Gleision drift mine, said of leaving the legal profession that the time had come to make a choice about whether she would continue in what could be a “dark” job or turn her hand to something new. 

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She went with the latter, taking on a role heading up Swansea University’s law school, with a mission to make it future ready and “seeing if we could make it a bit more relevant to what was going on in [the legal practice]”. 

“We got a fairly significant amount of money…from [the] Welsh government to create a sort of legal tech centre as part of the law school,” she said. “We were feeling that AI and change was on its way. I think we were probably a little bit ahead of the curve if we’re being really frank.”

It was while Evans was at the helm that Swansea’s law school was adopted by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, later renamed as the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law. “A little bit, I think, to our surprise, she engaged with that request really quickly,” Evans said. 

Evans continued on to other senior leadership positions at Swansea before being appointed a vice-chancellor at UWTSD, a university formed through the merging of several Welsh providers, including two of the nation’s oldest higher education institutions. More recently, she became chair of Universities Wales. Hailing from Wales and a native Welsh speaker, the roles appear like a natural fit. 

But, like all vice-chancellors, there have been challenges along the way. Of particular controversy was the decision last year to relocate courses from the university’s Lampeter campus – a beloved historic site – to its main Carmarthen campus.

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At the time, campaigners said this undermined the university’s commitment to its cultural heritage. Reflecting on the decision, Evans said the intention was never to close the campus but conceded that was “understandably how people interpreted it”. 

She stuck by the decision, saying there were only 92 humanities undergraduate students there and, given Lampeter doesn’t even have a train station, they were isolated from wider university life. “We don’t want to close humanities, but how can we give it a potential of a vibrant future? The only way we could do that was to move it to Carmarthen, where there are other subjects alongside it.”

UWTSD is now planning to set up a vocational teaching centre in Lampeter, a small market town with deep Welsh roots. What the Lampeter community needs, she said, “is a location that is accessible to them” and “meets the needs of that rural challenge”, including Welsh language provision. 

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Of course, the decision was also driven by financial motives. A UWTSD spokesperson said in 2024 that the campus cost about £2.7 million per year to run, while the backlog maintenance and compliance costs for the campus were estimated at £33.5 million. 

As a whole, UWTSD recorded an £12.5 million underlying deficit in 2022-23, prompting a review of the institution’s operations. 

“We have had two years now of being quite focused on the core business,” said Evans. “That opportunity to reflect on who we are has enabled us to very much look at what is core, what is essential, and what’s incredibly important for our students.

“We’ve taken some tough decisions like Lampeter, but we actually returned a surplus [of £380,000] last year,” she said. At the time of writing, UWTSD has yet to publish its 2025 accounts, but Evans said she expected another slim surplus. 

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“There has been a radical change,” Evans said of her two years at the institution. This mirrors the level of upheaval she expects to see across the sector in the coming years. And the former lawyer’s advice? Own it. “Unless you try and take ownership of that change, it’s done to you, isn’t it?”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com