Professor James Tooley, PhD, was Vice-Chancellor (President) at the University of Buckingham from August 2020 until January 2026, the UK’s premier private university, where he was known as a staunch advocate of free speech and academic freedom. He has previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Oxford, Manchester and Newcastle.
His groundbreaking research on low-cost private education has won numerous awards, including gold prize in the first International Finance Corporation/Financial Times Private Sector Development Competition and a Templeton Prize for Free Market Solutions to Poverty. His book based on this research, The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest are educating themselves”, (Penguin), was a best-seller in India and won the Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Prize. He is currently working on a book The Beautiful Tree in America, about the parallel movement of low-tuition alternatives to public schooling in the US.
Tooley’s work has featured in documentaries on American PBS television and the BBC. He has been described in the pages of Philanthropy magazine as “a 21st century Indiana Jones” travelling to “the remotest regions on Earth researching something that many regard as mythical: private, parent-funded schools serving the Third World poor.”
