Liverpool Hope - Europe's only ecumenical university - is resisting the urge to expand

On Tuesday this week Archbishop Desmond Tutu donned his robes for a grand ceremony at Liverpool Hope University. The South African cleric was in Britain to give his name to a new centre for peace and war studies and to open a new building dedicated to supporting students at the university.

It was fitting that the first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape town should be adding lustre to Liverpool Hope, one of the newest of the new universities and the only university in the UK with a non-white vice-chancellor who has spent most of his career in South Africa.

Professor Gerald Pillay is thought to be only the second ethnic minority vice- chancellor to be appointed in Britain. The first was Roy Marshall from the West Indies at the University of Hull in the 1980s. Like Tutu, Pillay fought for justice and democracy in South Africa, both personally for himself (he took legal action against the government for the right to live in a white area) and for the University of South Africa in Pretoria.

The first Indian to be made a professor at that university, Pillay was a key player in the transition to democracy. "By going there I got drawn in to being a peacemaker between impatient, angry African nationalists and Conservative white men," he says. "I headed up the university's campaign to promote equity and excellence in the 1990s, helping to shape the university for the new democracy."

Like Tutu, Pillay is a committed Christian, a necessary requirement for the post at Liverpool Hope, which is the only ecumenical university in the whole of Europe, educating Catholics and Protestants on a green and safe campus on the outskirts of the city. "Nowhere else has the Catholic church pooled its resources with any other denomination," he says. He got the job after being headhunted from the University of Otago, New Zealand's oldest university, where he was foundation professor and head of the department of theology before being made head of liberal arts.

"These were pretty formative years," he says of his six years in South Island. For Pillay and his family they also seem to have been in the nature of a restorative after his struggles in South Africa, first to gain a professorship in open competition with whites and then to make the University of South Africa into a multiracial community. His children, two boys, aged 12 and 15, are young enough to be proudly Kiwi, he says.

You sense that New Zealand is where he feels his family belongs. It is significant that he took New Zealand citizenship. "South Africa was formative and irreplaceable in shaping my life," he says. "But New Zealand was most welcoming, utterly healing. Race simply didn't matter."

Pillay hastens to add that Liverpool has been very welcoming too. But you can assume that the move from the remote shores of South Island to one of Britain's grittiest cities has been a tough one. The new vice- chancellor took over Liverpool Hope in 2005, the year it became a university, inheriting a small institution that had been run by the maverick Simon Lee, now vice-chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University. Lee had not only opposed university status for Liverpool Hope but also had been a big spender, particularly on an outreach campus in the centre of the city.

Pillay, a modest, mild-mannered character, has been careful to husband the university's resources and it is now in the black again. He faced the bigger problem of how to position Liverpool Hope in a marketplace of ferocious competition, where top-up fees were being introduced and his own institution was seen as second class by virtue of having been a university college with its degrees validated by the University of Liverpool. He decided the university should remain a small liberal arts college, build up its research strength but maintain a big emphasis on teaching.

To burnish its research reputation the university will be making a larger, wider entry in the Research Assessment Exercise next year. It has just made 15 key academic appointments, many from outside Britain.

"We are developing an international scholarly community, all research leaders in their own right," he says.

With its two research institutes in India, the university is reaching out to the other side of the world. One, in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, is concentrating on business management and leadership; the other in south India, on social sciences and social work.

But all this research is not being done at the expense of teaching. For Pillay, the university must be true to its origins. An ecclesiastical historian, he has been reading up on the roots of Liverpool Hope. These roots were in a number of teacher training colleges (both Church of England and Roman Catholic) and go back to 1844. First an Anglican college was established to give opportunities to women when Oxford and Cambridge would not have them. A few years later the Catholics followed.

"They were set up to make a difference to those excluded from higher education," he says. "Widening participation may be a mantra today but for Catholics and Protestants in the 19th century it was part of their natures to want to make a difference. Hope has maintained that tradition for 163 years."

To keep faith with the past, he is maintaining student numbers at about 7,500. If it grew any bigger, it would become like any other inner-city university, says Pillay. He wants to have an ethos that makes it a real alternative voice for British and international students. "We want to ensure that anybody who comes here gets the best possible support," he says. "We take a strong line against teaching being secondary to research. We want our best professors to be meeting first-year students. We want Hope to be a place where you're a name, not a number." One way the university makes sure that students get the attention they need is by housing them in their own halls of residence in what Pillay calls " homes away from home". These halls have tutors who live with their charges.

In addition, the halls of residence have "dining-in" nights where students and staff come together once a month. And the new centre opened by Tutu is dedicated to students' well-being, according to Pillay. It brings together facilities such as student finance, accommodation and subject advice into one building.

You might think that someone who came through the struggle to defeat apartheid might be full of politically correct talk about the need to find more ethnic minority students for Liverpool Hope – but not Pillay. He says that the university wants to be "radically inclusive" but it doesn't want quotas. What matters is to take students who are oppressed, who come from the poorest sections of society.

"We need to target low aspirations among people who have been alienated for a long time," he says. The same applies to staff. Liverpool Hope has three leading people in computer science: they come from Iraq, India and Africa. Personally, he does not care for the "black" label and does not describe himself as such. He says: "I was black politically in South Africa. But I'm not Indian. I'm not British. I'm a New Zealander."

His plans for the university are meeting with approval. Mike Brown, vice-chancellor of the neighbouring Liverpool John Moores University, says it makes sense to create a small liberal arts university with a little underpinning research. "He wants to make it small and beautiful," he says. "It's a very good strategy."

Applications are up 14.5 per cent this year, double the national average, at a time when the university has raised its entry standards. The approach seems to be paying off.

The CV

Born: in the former British colony of Natal in South Africa

Age: 53

Family: wife and two sons, aged 12 and 15, who attend a Jewish school in Liverpool

Career: lecturer, University of Durban; 1988 appointed professor of ecclesiastical history at University of South Africa in Pretoria; 1997-2003 foundation professor and head of theology department at Otago University, New Zealand; 2003 vice chancellor, Liverpool Hope University.

Interests: Reading, music and gardening. He reads anything from P G Wodehouse to German theology and is especially interested in jazz, in particular Oscar Peterson. On campus he takes a pride in the roses. He says: "I take a personal interest in three things at the university: the budget; every academic appointment and every tree planted." LH

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