The 10th anniversary of the University of the Highlands and Islands is a poignant milestone for Val MacIver, who was instrumental in its establishment.
Mrs MacIver, a former councillor and education chairman, headed the Highland Council steering group set up to examine the case for creating a university in 1991.
She became the first president of the organisation’s community body in 1994, joined its board of governors in 1997 and became the institution’s third rector in 2004.
Her efforts were recognised with an honorary fellowship and she attended the celebrations that marked the organisation formally achieving university status in 2011.
In 2018 she saw her granddaughter graduate with a first class honours degree from Orkney College UHI, one of the 13 colleges that make up the university partnership she envisaged nearly 30 years earlier.
During her four-year course Niamh Mackenzie, from Evanton, studied at Inverness Campus and Orkney College and also online while living in Edinburgh.
Mrs MacIver said that having helped get the university off the ground, she has taken a great deal of pleasure in seeing it go from strength to strength.
She said: “Seeing Niamh graduate was, for me, the culmination of everything my colleagues and I had worked for in establishing a university.
“The object was to bring choice, opportunity and inward investment, to attract or retain people to work in the Highlands and Islands. The idea was met with some scepticism at the time, but its success is a great source of pride.
“But we would not be celebrating 10 years of university status now if it wasn’t for the hard work of the staff of all the partners towards that goal.”
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