John Nicholson Black FRSE (28 June 1922 – 6 October 2018)[1] was Principal of Bedford College, London from 1971-81.
[2] John Nicholson Black was educated at Rugby School and Exeter College, Oxford.
[1] He did war service with the RAF from 1942–46 and then obtained a BA in agriculture at Exeter College, Oxford in 1949 followed by an MA and DPhil both in 1952.
[1] Bedford came under considerable financial pressure in the 1970s from cuts in grants and the limitations of the college site in Regent's Park.
[2] Black came from one of the largest universities in the United Kingdom and: "...was well aware that a college of only eleven hundred students with grant/fee income to match could not be expected to support as many as twenty academic departments in a wide spread of disciplines, especially at a time when public funding was seriously reduced."