John Anthony George Craven (born 17 June 1949) is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth. In 2006, he founded the University Alliance, and served as its first chair until 2009.
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John Craven was educated at Pinner County Grammar School, then King's College, Cambridge where he read Mathematics and Economics and then took up a Kennedy Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He went to University of Kent at Canterbury where he spent 25 years, first as a member of the Economics Department and then in a variety of senior management roles. He was promoted to Reader in Economics in 1980 and Professor in 1986. In 1987 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences; a position which he held for four years. He became Pro Vice-Chancellor in 1991 and Deputy Vice-Chancellor in 1993 when he had responsibility for planning and resource allocation. [1]
He was appointed as Vice-Chancellor at the University of Portsmouth and took up that position on 1 January 1997. His inaugural lecture on taking up the position of Vice-Chancellor at the University of Portsmouth brought together his main interests in social choice theory and reflected on the relevance of that theory to the issues of accountability facing Vice-Chancellors and others in publicly funded organisations. [2]
John Craven's main academic interests lie in theoretical economics and the theory of social choice. He has published three books including a well-known textbook on introductory economics which has been widely used in schools, colleges and universities.
Vice-Chancellor Craven founded the University Alliance in 2006, and served as its chair until 2009. The University Alliance, previously convened informally as the Alliance of Non-Aligned Universities, comprises a mixture of pre and post 1992 universities, which are not members of the other mission groups; the Russell Group, the 94 Group or Million Plus. [3] In August 2009 he was replaced as chair by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, Professor Janet Beer. [4]
In 1974 he married Laura Loftis; they have a son and daughter.