GREG DYKE, the new chancellor of the University of York, said he was looking forward to his next five years in office, despite potential controversy over plans to expand the campus.

The former director general of the BBC, who was officially installed as the new chancellor at a ceremony yesterday, said there was controversy when the university was first built, but it now represented a fantastic success story.

Mr Dyke, who graduated from the University of York in 1974, said: "It is one of the big success stories of the universities created in the 1960s.

"I will be fully supportive of the plan to expand the university.

"When the university was first built here it was controversial. All change is controversial.

"But the plan to expand is the right one, as long as the university can do it and keep the academic standards high."

Mr Dyke succeeds opera singer Dame Janet Baker in the role of chancellor, which will involve him in chairing the university's court and its development board.

Mr Dyke said he was so happy to be back at the university that he might consider living in York again.

He joked that he might even try to buy his former house in the Haxby Road area, which he bought in the early-1970s for £1,200, and was now worth one hundred times as much.

He said: "York has changed. York 30 years ago was still a very working-class city based around the chocolate factories and the railways.

"I bought a house here for £1,200 and now it's worth £120,000 - the world has changed.

"But as a city, I always had fond memories of York. In fact I would like to live here again.

"I will be up here quite a lot, at least every month."

During yesterday's ceremony Mr Dyke conferred honorary degrees on former colleagues - writer and broadcaster Lord Melvyn Bragg, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission For Racial Equality, and Helen Boaden, director of news at the BBC.

Mr Dyke said: "I've spent my life in broadcasting. The people I chose to give honorary degrees to are all people I've known for a long time and people I respect.

"And all of them come from ordinary backgrounds. They have worked hard and they have talent."

This year Mr Dyke has written a book and is now considering whether to take early retirement or go back to work.

Updated: 11:13 Saturday, December 04, 2004