University of Manchester
The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester City Centre on Oxford Road. The university is considered a red brick university, a product of the civic university movement of the late 19th century. The current University of Manchester was formed in 2004 following the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and the Victoria University of Manchester. This followed a century of the two institutions working closely with one another.
UMIST had its origins in the Manchester Mechanics' Institution, which was founded in 1824. The present University of Manchester considers this date, which is also the date of foundation of the ancestor of the Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, one of the predecessor institutions of the Victoria University of Manchester, as its official foundation year. The founders of the Mechanics' Institution believed that all professions, to some extent, depended on science. As such, the institute taught working individuals branches of science relevant to their existing occupations, believing its practical application would encourage innovation and advancements within those fields. The Victoria University of Manchester was founded in 1851, as Owens College. Academic research undertaken by the university was published via the Manchester University Press from 1904.
Manchester is the third-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and receives over 92,000 undergraduate applications per year, making it the most popular university in the UK by volume of applications. The University of Manchester is a member of the Russell Group, the N8 Group, and the US-based Universities Research Association. Additionally, the university owns and operates major cultural assets such as the Manchester Museum, the Whitworth art gallery, the John Rylands Library, the Tabley House Collection and the Jodrell Bank Observatory – a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university and its predecessor institutions have had 26 Nobel laureates amongst their past and present students and staff.
History
Origins (1824 to 2004)
The University of Manchester traces its roots to the formation of the Mechanics' Institution in 1824, and its heritage is linked to Manchester's pride in being the world's first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, established the Mechanics' Institution to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science.John Owens, a textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 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. The locomotive designer Charles Beyer became a governor of the college and was the largest single donor to the college extension fund, which raised the money to move to a new site and construct the main building now known as the John Owens building. He also campaigned and helped fund the engineering chair, the first applied science department in the north of England. His bequest to the college was the equivalent of £10 million in 1876, at a time when it was in great financial difficulty. Beyer funded the total cost of construction of the Beyer Building to house the biology and geology departments. His will also funded Engineering chairs and the Beyer Professor of Applied mathematics.
The university has a rich German heritage. The Owens College Extension Movement formed its plans after a tour of mainly German universities and polytechnics. A Manchester mill owner, Thomas Ashton, chairman of the extension movement, had studied at Heidelberg University. Sir Henry Roscoe also studied at Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen and they collaborated for many years on research projects. Roscoe promoted the German style of research-led teaching that became the role model for the red-brick universities. Charles Beyer studied at Dresden Academy Polytechnic. There were many Germans on the staff, including Carl Schorlemmer, Britain's first chair in organic chemistry, and Arthur Schuster, professor of physics. There was even a German church nearby.
In 1873, Owens College moved to new premises on Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. This university was established and granted a royal charter in 1880, becoming England's first civic university; following Liverpool and Leeds becoming independent, it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and absorbed Owens College the following year.
By 1905, the two 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. However, in the late-20th century, formal connections between the university and UMIST diminished and in 1994 most of the remaining institutional ties were severed as new legislation allowed UMIST to become a separate university with powers to award its own degrees. A decade later the development was reversed. 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.
Before the merger, Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST had a combined total of 23 Nobel Prize winners amongst their former staff and students, with two further Nobel laureates being subsequently added. Manchester has traditionally been strong in the sciences; it is where the nuclear nature of the atom was discovered by Ernest Rutherford, and the world's first electronic stored-program computer was built at the university. Notable scientists associated with the university include physicists Ernest Rutherford, Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. Contributions in mathematics were made by Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing. The university has at least as strong a heritage in the humanities and social sciences: major names include William Stanley Jevons and Sir Arthur Lewis in economics; Samuel Alexander, Dorothy Emmet and Alasdair MacIntyre in philosophy, Thomas Tout, Sir Lewis Namier, and A.J.P. Taylor in history; Eugène Vinaver in French, and James Noel Adams in Latin. One of the great polymaths of the twentieth century, Michael Polanyi, was professor of physical chemistry for fifteen years before transferring to a specially created chair of social studies. In addition, the author Anthony Burgess, the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Norman Foster, and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked at, Manchester.
Post-merger (2004 to present)
The current University of Manchester was officially launched on 1 October 2004 when Queen Elizabeth II bestowed its royal charter. The university was named the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006 after winning the inaugural Times Higher Education Supplement award for University of the Year in 2005.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. His successor was Dame Nancy Rothwell, who had held a chair in physiology at the university since 1994. Rothwell served as Vice Chancellor from 2010 to 2024 before handing over to Duncan Ivison. The Nancy Rothwell Building was named in her honour. 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". In 2011, four Nobel laureates were on its staff: Andre Geim, Konstantin Novoselov, Sir John Sulston and Joseph E. Stiglitz.
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council 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" –. In 2013, an additional £23 million of funding from European Regional Development Fund was awarded to the institute taking investment to £61 million.
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. 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.
In 2020 the university saw a series of student rent strikes and protests in opposition to the university's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, rent levels and living conditions in the university's halls of residence. The protests ended with a negotiated rent reduction.
In 2023, a second rent strike and student protest in opposition to the university's rent price and living conditions in the halls of residence started. The protests included occupations, marches and student's withholding their rent in University accommodation. The university's response to the protests included using bailiffs to evict occupiers and taking disciplinary action against some occupiers. Despite outcry from the students, which included a referendum where 97% of students voted for the university to reduce rent prices, the following year the university continued to increase rent prices for its students. Some of the university-owned accommodation increased by up to 10% in rent price, compared to the previous year.