University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is a public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Sheffield is formed from 21 academic schools which are organised into five faculties. The annual income of the institution for 2024–25 was £845.2 million, of which £355.8 million was from tuition fees and education contracts, £204.2 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £847.7 million.
The university is one of the original red brick universities and a founding member of the Russell Group. It is also part of the Worldwide Universities Network, the N8 Group of the eight most research intensive universities in Northern England and the White Rose University Consortium. There are six Nobel laureates affiliated with Sheffield, as either the alumni or former long-term staff of the university.
In recent years, the University has faced criticism over several issues. The institution has been subject to industrial action due to disputes over proposed job cuts and management decisions. In 2022-2023, student protests led to controversy when it was reported that the University had hired a private investigator to monitor participants. Additionally, staff members have reported experiencing a culture of racism, particularly affecting individuals of African and South Asian origin.
In 2016, the University used a student's Facebook posts expressing Christian views on homosexuality as grounds for expulsion from his social work course, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision in 2019
.The Court ruled the University's disciplinary process was inappropriate calling it an "extreme penalty" and found that the University's disciplinary procedures were flawed and unfair to
the student.
History
Origins
Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Firth College in 1879 and Sheffield Technical School in 1884. The University College of Sheffield was subsequently formed by the amalgamation of the three institutions in 1897 and was granted a royal charter as the University of Sheffield in 1905 by King Edward VII.The University of Sheffield was originally formed by the merger of three local institutions: the Sheffield School of Medicine, Firth College, and the Sheffield Technical School. With a history dating back to as early as the 1810s, the Sheffield School of Medicine is the university's oldest predecessor institution, which is also the oldest higher education establishment in Sheffield. In 1795, the General Infirmary was opened, becoming the first hospital in the city. Because of the apprenticeship-type training, the medical education at that time was largely unstructured. Regarded as the father of Sheffield's medical education, surgeon apothecary Hall Overend began to train medical students in 1811. His school of anatomy and medicine was externally recognised in 1828, and he conducted and taught human dissection in an anatomy museum at his home in Church Street. Overend, however, was not officially registered as a lecturer with the Society of Apothecaries, a recognised body for medical education. Physicians and surgeons of the General Infirmary suggested that a school associated with the hospital would be highly eligible for recognition by the society. As a result, in 1828, a public meeting was called by physician Sir Arnold Knight, and supported by Overend, to establish a new medical school. The Sheffield Medical Institution was formally opened a year later in 1829 on Surrey Street, with the Latin motto Ars longa vita brevis, which refers to the difficulty to acquire and practice the art of Medicine. Knight laid the foundation stone and delivered the opening lecture.
The University Extension Movement emerged in the 1870s with the aim of providing education in the city which lacked any tertiary institutions. During the period, the steel industry in Sheffield was prospering and the city's population was doubled to around 240,000 from the 1840s. In 1871, the university extension scheme arrived in Sheffield, and a group of lecturers from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge travelled to the city giving lectures and educating people about the benefits of tertiary education. Steel manufacturer and former mayor of Sheffield Mark Firth and clergyman Samuel Earnshaw therefore organised courses in English literature and political economy. The courses became popular so Firth decided to donate £20,000 and purchase a site in the city centre in 1877 to build a new institution for the classes. Firth College was founded during Firth's late year in 1879 and developed out of the Extension Movement scheme to teach arts and pure science subjects. The college saved the medical school, which had an insecure early history, from collapse and took over the teaching of all background subjects to medical students. In 1888 the medical school was relocated, opposite Firth College, to a new building on Leopold Street.
Firth College also helped to fund the opening of the Sheffield Technical School in 1884 to teach applied science, the only major faculty the existing colleges did not cover. The Sheffield Technical School was created by collecting funds within Firth College because of local concern about the need for technical training, particularly steelmaking in Sheffield. Former mayor of Sheffield Sir Frederick Mappin started to fundraise for the school and £10,240 was raised. A grant was secured in 1883 to fund a professor of Metallurgy and Mechanical Engineering. Many of the steel-making firms in Sheffield contributed to funding the Technical School, and research from the school in turn helped develop new processes and products for the companies. The Technical School was originally founded as a new technical department in Firth College, and in 1886, the school moved to St George's Square on the site of the old Grammar School. William Ripper was appointed as Head of Mechanical Engineering at Firth College from 1889, then Principal of Sheffield Technical School.
Foundation
Sheffield was at that time the only large city in England without a university. William Mitchinson Hicks, who was Principal of Firth College from 1892 to 1897, had an ambition to establish a university in the city. As a first stage of his ideal, Hicks was devoted to the union of the three higher education institutions in Sheffield and to transform Firth College into a university college. He also extended the college by creating new departments and adding new buildings. In 1897, Firth College merged with the Medical School and the Technical School to form the University College of Sheffield, and Hicks served as its first principal. Six years since the foundation of the university college, on 18 May 1903, the resolution to apply for a royal charter was passed. The university college started to develop its estate soon after: Western House by Weston Park on Western Bank was bought and demolished in 1903 for building a new university property. A building with a traditional collegiate quadrangle was planned on the site. Sir Frederick Mappin later successfully sought financial support from the Sheffield City Council and appealed for public donations. In 1904, steelworkers, coal miners, factory workers and the people of Sheffield donated over £50,000 via penny donations to help found the University of Sheffield.It was originally envisaged that the university college would join Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as the fourth member of the federal Victoria University. The new university was proposed to be named "Victoria University of Yorkshire" by Leeds but was rejected by the Privy Council. The Victoria University, however, began to split up as independent universities before this could happen, when Liverpool gained a charter of its own in 1903. Rather than joining a Yorkshire university with Leeds, the University College of Sheffield was driven by civic pride to pursue independent university status, to bring higher education, give support to industries and serve as a centre for disease study. Hicks also advocated the independent degree awarding power would attract talented staff. The University College of Sheffield's charter was sealed on 31 May 1905 and became the University of Sheffield. On 12 July 1905, Firth Court on Western Bank was opened by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. St George's Square remained the centre of departments of Applied Science, and the departments of Arts, Medicine and Science moved to Western Bank. Sheffield is one of the six pre-World War One red brick universities, the civic universities founded in the major industrial cities of England.
20th century
In 1905, when the university first opened, there were 363 students and 114 of them were enrolled full-time. Sheffield at the time had 71 members of staff. By then, the first Hall of Residence and library had been established. The number of students increased to a short-lived peak of 1,000 in 1919 when returning ex-servicemen were admitted to the university. During the First World War, some of the academic subjects and courses were replaced by teaching of munitions making and medical appliances production. The university has expanded since the 1920s from two ends on Western Bank and on the St George's site. The number of full-time students was stabilized at about 750 between the two world wars. In 1943, the University Grants Committee announced that universities in the UK should look forward to expansion in the years after the Second World War. Sheffield predicted a 50% increase in student population but the university was unprepared for such growth. There was pressure on the university to expand since the student numbers had increased from around 1,000 to 3,000 by 1946. The university announced proposals for development in 1947, which emphasised the need for new departments, medical school, library, administration building, halls of residence, as well as the completion of the Western Bank quadrangle and the extension of the Students' Union.The university then grew slowly until the 1950s and 1960s when it began to expand rapidly. Many new buildings were built and older houses were brought into academic use. Student numbers increased to their present levels of just under 26,000. At the same time in the 1950s, the university was expanding at other sites, including the St Georges area. From the 1960s, many more buildings have been constructed or extended, including the Union of Students and St George's Library. The campus master plan proposed in the 1940s was completed by the 1970s, and the university required a new development plan.
The 1980s saw the opening of many new buildings and centres, such as the multi-purpose Octagon Centre and the Sir Henry Stephenson Building. The university's teaching hospital, Northern General Hospital, was also extended. In 1987 the university began to collaborate with its once would-be partners of the Victoria University by co-founding the Northern Consortium; a coalition for the education and recruitment of international students. The university continued to expand in the 1990s. New premises were opened for School of the Clinical Dentistry, the Division of Education, and the Management School. In 1995, the university took over the Sheffield and North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery, forming a new School of Nursing and Midwifery. The St George's Hospital was extended and a new building at the Northern General Hospital has been constructed, which greatly increased the size of the medical faculty.
Hans Adolf Krebs was appointed as lecturer in pharmacology in 1935. At Sheffield Krebs and his postgraduate student discovered the citric acid cycle in 1937, which earned him a Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for 1953. In 1938, the university opened the Department of Biochemistry and Krebs became its first Head. Krebs Institute, a research centre for mechanistic biology, was founded in 1988 within the Department of Biochemistry. George Porter joined the university as Professor of Physical Chemistry in 1955 and he further developed his later Nobel Prize-winning work flash photolysis at Sheffield. Porter was appointed Firth Professor of Chemistry and became Head of the Department of Chemistry in 1963.