The University of Auckland has turned to industry for its new vice-chancellor. John Hood, a senior executive of Fletcher Challenge for 17 years and a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, will start next February, replacing Kit Carson, who returned to Australia because of a family illness. The national students' association has not welcomed the appointment, describing Dr Hood, a former civil engineer, as an "extreme ideologue" and one of a series of appointments of vice-chancellors with "new right ideas and managerialist instead of public accountability approaches".