David Mba: from washing cars to leading a university

David Mba graduated with a first-class degree in engineering, but that wasn’t enough to land him a job. “I washed cars for about a year, with a first-class honours. I could shine a car brilliantly,” he said with a grim chuckle.

UK-born, Nigeria-raised Professor Mba is now the new vice-chancellor of Birmingham City University, one of just a handful of black leaders the UK sector has ever had. He sees a connection between the challenges he faced and those he wants to help overcome for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) higher education staff and students, as BCU leader and as creator of an Ethnic Representation Index for the sector.

BCU is a university of some 30,000 students of whom 54 per cent are non-white, 45 per cent are from neighbourhoods in the most deprived quartile in the UK and 69 per cent commute from the surrounding West Midlands region.

The institution is “a transformative platform”, said Professor Mba, who took over on 2 October, leaving his previous role as deputy vice-chancellor for research, knowledge exchange and enterprise at the University of the Arts London.

“For a leader like myself, from a minoritised group as well, providing the opportunity to support these [students] that are first [in their family to go to] university or have faced socio-economic obstacles throughout their lives, working with a university like this to create that transformation, that social mobility, that sits very much with my values…I feel I belong here,” he said.

Birmingham is one of the UK’s first two “superdiverse” cities, where ethnic minorities make up the majority of the population. And BCU is at its physical centre, having completed its exit from its suburban Perry Barr campus in 2018 into a multimillion-pound city centre campus.

While highlighting BCU’s strength in applied, practice-led education and its position as “the biggest supplier of graduates into the creative industries in the West Midlands”, Professor Mba said employability would be “critical” for him at the university. He saw room to improve against the Office for Students’ new quality metric on progression, which judges each university on the proportion of graduates heading into “managerial or professional” jobs or further study 15 months after graduation.

“We’re clearly above the [OfS] threshold – but it’s something I want to do more of,” he said.

“If we’re bringing in students from minoritised groups, from IMD [Index of Multiple Deprivation] quartile 1, I want to make sure they are ending up in jobs that can actually show the social mobility.”

Part of the answer will be in seeking to “leverage our networks and city to provide job opportunities, internships, secondments for our students”, said Professor Mba.

In his time at UAL, Professor Mba launched an Ethnic Representation Index, now in its second year, showing data including each university’s percentage of BAME students, staff and executives, and its attainment gap between white and BAME students.

As dean of engineering at London South Bank University, Professor Mba found that he was “being approached by students with challenges around racism, obstacles they felt were limiting their opportunity to progress and realise their potential”. Since then, he has “tried to be a champion for equity”.

In terms of boosting the number of BAME academics rising up the career ladder to senior levels, he said there is “a lot of mentorship required to help with this; there’s a lot of social capital that minoritised staff don’t have in terms of networks”.

Professor Mba felt something similar earlier in his career. To help save up before starting a UK engineering degree, he had returned to the country from Nigeria and “worked in a warehouse stacking boxes for about a year – Ovaltine in Watford”. But after gaining a first-class degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Hertfordshire, he “couldn’t get a job”.

“This comes back to the issue about social capital,” said Professor Mba. “There was no one to guide me.”

He “made a mess of a couple of interviews”, but changed path and gained his PhD in mechanical engineering from Cranfield University via a scholarship from Severn Trent Water. As an academic, his research focused on machine vibrations, at Cranfield running a laboratory testing parts for gas turbine engines.

Since taking up leadership roles, he has worked with the Black Minority Group for Engineers, “which is very much about supporting engineering students with mentorship and skills for interviews”.

Meanwhile, the UK's biggest “superdiverse” city is facing a tough future, after Birmingham City Council in effect went bankrupt.

Professor Mba’s work will include helping to shape a new BCU strategy to 2030 and beyond. While that is to be “co-created” with staff, he would “expect that being a university for Birmingham is going to be part of that”.

He added: “We have significant intellectual capital and power within the university across all sorts of disciplines: health, business, law. And given Birmingham City Council’s current financial position…I want us to play a role in helping to address that and get Birmingham back up on its feet.”

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com