The University of Manchester
UniOfManchesterLogo.svg
Motto Latin: Cognitio, sapientia, humanitas
Motto in English
"Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity"
Established 2004 (predecessors UMIST est. 1824; Victoria University of Manchester est. 1851)
Endowment £174.3 million (as of 31 July 2014)[1]
Chancellor Tom Bloxham MBE
President Dame Nancy Rothwell[2]
Academic staff
3849[3]
Students 38,430[4]
Undergraduates 27,080[4]
Postgraduates 11,350[4]
Location Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Campus Urban and Suburban
Nobel Laureates 25[5]
Colours
Blue, gold, purple
Affiliations Universities Research Association
Russell Group
EUA
N8 Group
NWUA
ACU
EASN
Website manchester.ac.uk
The University of Manchester (UoM) is a large research university situated in the city of Manchester, England. Manchester University, as it is commonly known, is a public university formed in 2004 by the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (est. 1824) and the Victoria University of Manchester (est. 1851). Manchester is a member of the worldwide Universities Research Association group, the Russell Group of British research universities and the N8 Group. The University of Manchester is regarded as a "red brick university", and was a product of the civic university movement of the late 19th century. It formed a constituent part of the federal Victoria University between 1880, when it received its royal charter, and 1903–1904, when it was dissolved.
The main campus is south of Manchester city centre on Oxford Road. In 2012, the university had around 39,000 students and 10,400 staff, making it the largest single-site university in the United Kingdom.[6] The University of Manchester had an income of £827 million in 2012–13, of which £200 million was from research grants and contracts.[7]
The University of Manchester is ranked 30th in the world by QS World University Rankings.[8] In the 2014 Academic Ranking of World Universities, Manchester is ranked 38th in the world and 5th in the UK.[9] It is ranked 52nd in the world and 12th in Europe in the 2014 Times Higher Education World University Rankings.[10] The university owns and operates major cultural assets such as the Manchester Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, John Rylands Library and Jodrell Bank Observatory which includes the Grade I listed Lovell Telescope.[11] In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise,[12] Manchester came third in terms of research power and eighth for grade point average quality when including specialist institutions.[13] More students try to gain entry to the University of Manchester than to any other university in the country, with more than 60,000 applications for undergraduate courses.[14] According to the 2012 Highfliers Report, Manchester is the most targeted university by the Top 100 Graduate Employers.[15][16]
The University of Manchester has 25 Nobel laureates among its past and present students and staff, the fourth-highest number of any single university in the United Kingdom. Four Nobel laureates are currently among its staff – more than any other British university.[17]
Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 Origins
1.2 2004 to present
2 Campus
2.1 Major projects
2.2 The Old Quadrangle
2.3 Contact
2.4 Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre
2.5 Other notable buildings
3 Organisation and administration
3.1 Faculties and schools
3.2 Finances
4 Academic profile
4.1 Research
4.2 University of Manchester Library
4.3 Collections
4.4 Rankings and reputation
5 Manchester University Press
6 Student life
6.1 Students' Union
6.2 Sport
6.3 University Challenge
6.4 Overseas Students
6.5 Student housing
7 Notable people
7.1 Nobel prize winners
8 See also
9 References
10 External links
History[edit]
Origins[edit]
Main articles: UMIST and Victoria University of Manchester
The Old Quadrangle at the University of Manchester's main campus on Oxford Road.
The University of Manchester traces its roots to the formation of the Mechanics' Institute (later to become UMIST) in 1824, and its heritage is linked to Manchester's pride in being the world's first industrial city.[18] The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, established the Mechanics' Institute to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science.
Similarly, John Owens, a textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 (around £5.6 million in 2005 prices)[19] to found a college to educate men on non-sectarian lines. His trustees established Owens College in 1851 in a house on the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street which had been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden, and subsequently housed Manchester County Court. In 1873 the college moved to new premises on Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. The university was established and granted a Royal Charter in 1880 becoming England's first civic university; it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and absorbed Owens College the following year.[20]
By 1905, the institutions were large and active forces. The Municipal College of Technology, forerunner of UMIST, was the Victoria University of Manchester's Faculty of Technology while continuing in parallel as a technical college offering advanced courses of study. Although UMIST achieved independent university status in 1955, the universities continued to work together.[21] The Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology agreed to merge into a single institution in March 2003.[22][23]
Before the merger, Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST counted 23 Nobel Prize winners amongst their former staff and students. Manchester has traditionally been strong in the sciences, it is where the nuclear nature of the atom was discovered by Rutherford, and the world's first stored-program computer was built at the university. Famous scientists associated with the university include physicists Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. The university has contributed in other fields, such as by the work of mathematicians Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing; author Anthony Burgess; philosophers Samuel Alexander, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre; the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect Norman Foster and composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked in, Manchester.
2004 to present[edit]
The Sackville Street Building, formerly the UMIST Main Building
The current University of Manchester was officially launched on 1 October 2004 when Queen Elizabeth handed over its Royal Charter.[24] The university was named the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006 after winning the inaugural Times Higher Education Supplement University of the Year prize in 2005.[25]
The founding president and vice-chancellor of the new university was Alan Gilbert, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, who retired at the end of the 2009–2010 academic year.[26] His successor was Dame Nancy Rothwell,[2] who had held a chair in physiology at the university since 1994. One of the university's aims stated in the Manchester 2015 Agenda is to be one of the top 25 universities in the world, following on from Alan Gilbert's aim to "establish it by 2015 among the 25 strongest research universities in the world on commonly accepted criteria of research excellence and performance".[27] In 2011, four Nobel laureates were on its staff: Andre Geim,[28] Konstantin Novoselov,[29] Sir John Sulston and Joseph E. Stiglitz.
The EPSRC announced in February 2012 the formation of the National Graphene Institute. The University of Manchester is the "single supplier invited to submit a proposal for funding the new £45m institute, £38m of which will be provided by the government" – (EPSRC & Technology Strategy Board).[30] In 2013, an additional £23 million of funding from European Regional Development Fund was awarded to the institute taking investment to £61 million.[31]
In August 2012, it was announced that the university's Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences had been chosen to be the "hub" location for a new BP International Centre for Advanced Materials, as part of a $100 million initiative to create industry-changing materials.[32][33] The centre will be aimed at advancing fundamental understanding and use of materials across a variety of oil and gas industrial applications and will be modelled on a hub and spoke structure, with the hub located at Manchester, and the spokes based at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[34]
Campus[edit]
The university's main site contains most of its facilities and is often referred to as campus, however Manchester is not a campus university as the concept is commonly understood. It is centrally located in the city and its buildings are integrated into the fabric of Manchester, with non-university buildings and major roads between.
The campus occupies an area shaped roughly like a boot: the foot of which is aligned roughly south-west to north-east and is joined to the broader southern part of the boot by an area of overlap between former UMIST and former VUM buildings;[35] it comprises two parts:
North campus or Sackville Street Campus, centred on Sackville Street
South campus or Oxford Road Campus, centred on Oxford Road.
The names are not officially recognised by the university, but are commonly used, including in parts of its website and roughly correspond to the campuses of the old UMIST and Victoria University respectively.
Fallowfield Campus is the main residential campus in Fallowfield, approximately 2 miles (3 km) south of the main site.
There are other university buildings across the city and the wider region, such as Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire and One Central Park in Moston, a collaboration between the university and other partners which offers office space for start-up firms and venues for conferences and workshops,[36]
Major projects[edit]
The atrium inside the £38m Manchester Institute of Biotechnology
Following the merger, the university embarked on a £600 million programme of capital investment, to deliver eight new buildings and 15 major refurbishment projects by 2010, partly financed by a sale of unused assets.[37] These include:
£60 m Flagship University Place building (new)
£56 m Alan Turing Building houses Mathematics, replaced Mathematics Tower. Home to the Photon Sciences Institute and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (new)
£50 m Life Sciences Research Building (A. V. Hill Building) (new)
£38 m Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) (new)
£33 m Life Sciences and Medical and Human Sciences Building (Michael Smith Building) (new)
£31 m Humanities Building – now officially called the "Arthur Lewis Building" (new)
£20 m Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre (WMIC) (new)
£18 m Re-location of School of Pharmacy
£17 m John Rylands Library, Deansgate (extension & refurbishment of existing building)
£13 m Chemistry Building
£10 m Functional Biology Building
The Old Quadrangle[edit]
The buildings around the Old Quadrangle date from the time of Owens College, and were designed in a Gothic style by Alfred Waterhouse and his son Paul Waterhouse. The first to be built was the John Owens Building (1873), formerly the Main Building; the others were added over the next thirty years. Today, the museum continues to occupy part of one side, including the tower. The grand setting of the Whitworth Hall is used for the conferment of degrees, and part of the old Christie Library (1898) now houses Christie's Bistro. The remainder of the buildings house administrative departments. The less easily accessed Rear Quadrangle, dating mostly from 1873, is older in its completed form than the Old Quadrangle.
Contact[edit]
The Contact Theatre
Main article: Contact Theatre
Contact stages modern live performance for all ages, and participatory workshops primarily for young people aged 13 to 30. The building on Devas Street was completed in 1999 incorporating parts of its 1960s predecessor.[38] It has a unique energy-efficient ventilation system, using its high towers to naturally ventilate the building without the use of air conditioning. The colourful and curvaceous interior houses three performance spaces, a lounge bar and Hot Air, a reactive public artwork in the foyer.
Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre[edit]
Main articles: Manchester Conference Centre and Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre
Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre
The Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre was built around The Firs, a house built in 1850 for Sir Joseph Whitworth by Edward Walters, who also designed Manchester's Free Trade Hall. Whitworth used the house as a social, political and business base, entertaining radicals such as John Bright, Richard Cobden, William Forster and T.H. Huxley at the time of the Reform Bill of 1867. Whitworth, credited with raising the art of machine-tool building to a previously unknown level, supported the Mechanics Institute – the birthplace of UMIST – and was a founder the Manchester School of Design. Whilst living there, Whitworth used land at the rear (now the site of the University's botanical glasshouses) for testing his "Whitworth rifle". In 1882, The Firs was leased to C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian and after Scott's death became the property of Owens College. It was the Vice-Chancellor's residence until 1991.
The house now forms the western wing of the Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre. The eastern wing houses the circular Flowers Theatre, six conference rooms and most of the hotel's bedrooms
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