Manchester University

, mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity
, established = 2004 – University of Manchester
Predecessor institutions:
1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994)
1904 – Victoria University of Manchester
1880 – Victoria University
1851 – Owens College
1824 – Manchester Mechanics' Institute
, endowment = £242.2 million (2021)
, budget = £1.10 billion (2020–21)
, chancellor = Nazir Afzal (from August 2022)
, head_label = President and vice-chancellor
, head = Nancy Rothwell
, academic_staff = 5,150 (2020)
, total_staff = 12,920 (2021)
, students = 40,485 (2021)
, undergrad = ()
, postgrad = ()
, city = Manchester
, country = England, United Kingdom
, campus = Urban and suburban
, colours = Manchester Purple
Manchester Yellow

, free_label = Scarf
, free =
, website =
, logo = UniOfManchesterLogo.svg
, affiliations = Universities Research Association
Sutton 30
Russell Group
EUA
N8 Group
NWUA
ACU
Universities UK

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 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 of Manchester 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 (UMIST) and the Victoria University of Manchester. This followed a century of the two institutions working closely with one another.

The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology was founded in 1824 as the Mechanics' Institute. The founders believed that all professions somewhat relied on scientific principles. As such, the institute taught working individuals branches of science applicable to their existing occupations. They believed that the practical application of science would encourage innovation and advancements within those trades and professions. The Victoria University of Manchester was founded in 1851, as Owens College. Academic research undertaken by the university would be published via the Manchester University Press from 1904.

The University of Manchester is a member of the Russell Group, the N8 Group, and the worldwide Universities Research Association. The University of Manchester, inclusive of its predecessor institutions, has had 25 Nobel laureates amongst its past and present students and staff, the fourth-highest number of any single university in the United Kingdom. In 2020/21, the university had a consolidated income of £1.1 billion, of which £237.0 million was from research grants and contracts (6th place nationally behind Oxford, University College London (UCL), Cambridge, Imperial and Edinburgh). It has the fifth-largest endowment of any university in the UK, after the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh and King's College London.

History

Origins (1824 to 2004)

The University of Manchester traces its roots to the formation of the Mechanics' Institute (later UMIST) 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' Institute to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science.

John Owens, a textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 (around £5.6 million in 2005 prices) 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. He left the college the equivalent of £10 million in his will 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 their 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 chapel on the campus.

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 an autonomous 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 counted 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 other fields such as mathematics were made by Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing and in philosophy by Samuel Alexander, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre. The author Anthony Burgess, Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Norman Foster and 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'' University of the Year prize 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. 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 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). 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.

Campus

The university's main site contains most of its facilities and is often referred to as the ''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; it comprises two parts:
*''North campus'' or ''Sackville Street Campus'', centred on Sackville Street in Manchester
*''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 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,

Major projects

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.Manchester Evening News 31 July 2007 These include:
* £60 m Flagship ''University Place'' building (new build)
* £56 m Alan Turing Building houses Mathematics, replaced Mathematics Tower. Home to the Photon Sciences Institute and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (new build)
* £50 m Life Sciences Research Building (A. V. Hill Building) (new build)
* £38 m Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) (new build)
* £33 m Life Sciences and Medical and Human Sciences Building (Michael Smith Building) (new build)
* £31 m Humanities Building – now officially called the " Arthur Lewis Building" (new build)
* £20 m Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre (WMIC) (new build)
* £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
* £350 m Manchester Engineering Campus Development (will be formally opened to students in September 2022, new build)

Old Quadrangle

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

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. 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.

Other notable buildings

Other notable buildings in the Oxford Road Campus include the Stephen Joseph Studio, a former German Protestant church and the Samuel Alexander Building, a grade II listed building erected in 1919 and home of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures.

In the Sackville Street Campus is the Sackville Street Building which was formerly UMIST's "Main Building". It was opened in 1902 by the then Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. Built using Burmantofts terracotta, the building is now Grade II listed. It was extended along Whitworth Street, towards London Road, between 1927 and 1957 by the architects Bradshaw Gass & Hope, completion being delayed due to the depression in the 1930s and the Second World War.

Organisation and administration

Faculties and schools

The University of Manchester was divided into four faculties, but from 1 August 2016 it was restructured into three faculties, each sub-divided into schools.

On 25 June 2015, the University of Manchester announced the results of a review of the position of life sciences as a separate faculty. As a result of this review the Faculty of Life Sciences was to be dismantled, most of its personnel to be incorporated into a single medical/biological faculty, with a substantial minority being incorporated into a science and engineering faculty.

Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health

The faculty is divided into the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Medical Sciences and the School of Health Sciences.

Biological Sciences have been taught at Manchester as far back as the foundation of Owens College in 1851. At UMIST, biological teaching and research began in 1959, with the creation of a Biochemistry department. The present school, though unitary for teaching, is divided into a number of sections for research purposes.

The medical college was established in 1874 and is one of the largest in the country, with more than 400 medical students trained in each clinical year and more than 350 students in the pre-clinical/phase 1 years. The university is a founding partner of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, established to focus high-end healthcare research in Greater Manchester. In November 2018, Expertscape recognized it as one of the top ten institutions worldwide in COPD research and treatment.

In 1883, a department of pharmacy was established at the university and, in 1904, Manchester became the first British university to offer an honours degree in the subject. The School of Pharmacy benefits from links with Manchester Royal Infirmary and Wythenshawe and Hope hospitals providing its undergraduate students with hospital experience.

Manchester Dental School was rated the country's best dental school by ''Times Higher Education'' in 2010 and 2011 and it is one of the best funded because of its emphasis on research and enquiry-based learning approach. The university has obtained multimillion-pound backing to maintain its high standard of dental education.

Faculty of Science and Engineering

The Faculty of Science and Engineering is divided into two schools. The School of Engineering comprises the departments of: Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering. The School of Natural Sciences comprises the departments of: Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Physics and Astronomy, Materials and Mathematics.

The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics comprises the university's astronomical academic staff in Manchester and Jodrell Bank Observatory on rural land near Goostrey, about west of Macclesfield. The observatory's Lovell Telescope is named after Sir Bernard Lovell, a professor at the Victoria University of Manchester who first proposed the telescope. Constructed in the 1950s, it is the third largest fully movable radio telescope in the world. It has played an important role in the research of quasars, pulsars and gravitational lenses, and in confirming Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Faculty of Humanities

The Faculty of Humanities includes the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (incorporating Archaeology; Art History & Visual Studies; Classics and Ancient History; Drama; English and American Studies; History; Linguistics; Modern Languages; Museology; Music; Religions and Theology and the University Language Centre) and the Schools of Combined Studies; Education; Environment and Development; Architecture; Law; Social Sciences and the Manchester Business School. The Faculty of Humanities also jointly administers the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) in conjunction with Manchester Metropolitan University and MSA students are classified as students of both universities.

Additionally, the faculty comprises a number of research institutes: the Centre for New Writing, the Institute for Social Change, the Brooks World Poverty Institute, Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, the Manchester Institute for Innovation Research, the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures