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Durham University

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Durham University
Logo of Durham University
MottoFundamenta eius super montibus sanctis
her foundations are set upon the holy hills (from Psalm 86 in the Latin Psalter)
TypePublic
Established1832
Endowment£ 43.2M (2004/5)
ChancellorBill Bryson
Vice-ChancellorSir Kenneth Calman
Undergraduates11,660
Postgraduates3,654
Location
Durham City and Stockton-On-Tees
,
England
ColoursPalatinate
Affiliations1994 Group, EUA, AMBA, EQUIS, Universities UK, N8 Group, Association of Commonwealth Universities
Websitewww.dur.ac.uk

Durham University is a university in England. It was founded as the University of Durham (which remains its official name) by Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837, making it England's third oldest University after Oxford and Cambridge (though other higher education institutions, such as University College London and King's College London, had existed previously without formal university status). Co-located in Durham City, on the River Wear, and in Stockton-On-Tees, it is one of the UK's leading research universities. The Chancellor of the University is Bill Bryson, appointed by the University's Convocation on 4 April 2005. The University was named Sunday Times University of the Year in 2005, having previously been shortlisted for the award in 2004.

History

University College.

Origins

The strong tradition of theological teaching in Durham gave rise to various attempts to form a university there, notably under King Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell, who actually issued letters patent for the establishment of a college in 1657. However it was not until 1832, when Parliament passed an act allowing the Dean and Chapter of Durham to fund a new university, that the University actually came into being. The Act received Royal Assent and became law on 4 July, 1832. The University's Royal Charter was granted on 1 June, 1837 by William IV, with the first students graduating a few days later.

It was founded with one 'college' named University College, which moved into Durham Castle (previously the Bishop's palace) in 1837.

19th century

In 1846, Bishop Hatfield's Hall (later to become Hatfield College) was founded, providing for the first time in any British university the opportunity for students to obtain affordable lodgings with fully-catered communal eating. Those attending University College were expected to bring a servant with them to deal with cooking, cleaning and so on. Elsewhere, the University expanded from Durham into Newcastle in 1852 when the medical school there (established in 1834) became a college of the University. This was joined in 1871 by the College of Physical Sciences (renamed as the College of Science in 1884 and again as Armstrong College in 1904). St Cuthbert's Society was founded in 1888 to cater for non-resident students in Durham, while two teacher-training colleges — St Hild's for women, established in 1858, and The College of the Venerable Bede for men, established in 1839. These merged to form a mixed college (the College of St Hild and St Bede) in 1975. From 1896 these were associated with the University and graduates of St Hild were the first female graduates from Durham in 1898.

In 1842 the Durham Union Society was set up as a forum for debates, the first of which took place in the reading rooms in Hatfield Hall. It also served as the students' union (hence the name) until Durham Colleges Students' Representative Council was founded in 1899 (it was later renamed Durham Students' Union).

For most of the 19th century, University of Durham degrees were subject to a religion test and could only be taken by members of the established church. This situation lasted until the University Test Act of 1871. However, 'dissenters' were able to attend Durham and then receive degrees of the University of London, which were not subject to any religious test, on completing their course.

Following the grant of a supplemental charter in 1895 allowing women to receive degrees of the University, the Women's Hostel (St Mary's College from 1919) was founded in 1899. Also in 1899 the Durham Colleges Students' Representative Council (DCSRC) was founded to represent students at the Durham colleges (the Newcastle division having its own SRC). This was renamed as the Durham Students' Union in 1963.

20th century

The Newcastle division of the University, in particular Armstrong College, quickly grew to outnumber the Durham colleges, despite the addition of two Anglican foundations: St Chad's College (1904) and St John's College (1909). A parliamentary bill proposed in 1907 would have fixed the seat of the University in Durham for only ten years, allowing the Senate to choose to move to Newcastle after this. This was blocked by a local MP, with the support of graduates of the Durham colleges, until the bill was modified to establish a federal university with its seat fixed in Durham. This reform also removed the University from the authority of the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral, who had nominally been in charge of the University since its foundation. Thirty years after this, the Royal Commission of 1937 recommended changes in the constitution of the federal University, resulting in the merger of the two Newcastle colleges to form King's College.

After the Second World War, the Durham division began expanding rapidly. St Aidan's Society (St Aidan's College from 1965) was founded in 1947 to cater for non-resident women and the decision was made to expand onto Elvet Hill, vastly expanding the existing pure science provision in Durham, and adding applied science and engineering.

In 1947 the foundation stones for the new St Mary's College building on Elvet Hill were laid by Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II). The new building opened in 1952. In the same year, tensions surfaced again over the Durham-Newcastle divide, with a proposal to change the name of the University to the University of Durham and Newcastle. This motion was defeated in Convocation (the assembly of members of the University) by 135 votes to 129. Eleven years later, with the Universities of Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne Act, King's College became the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, leaving Durham based solely in its home city.

By this time, the Elvet Hill site was well established, with the first of the new colleges, Grey College (named after the second Earl Grey, who was the Prime Minister when the University was founded) being founded in 1959. Expansion up Elvet Hill continued, with Van Mildert College (1965), Trevelyan College (1966) and Collingwood College (1972) all being added to the University.

These were not the only developments in the University, however. The Graduate Society, catering for postgraduate students, was founded in 1965 (renamed Ustinov College in 2003) and the Roman Catholic seminary of Ushaw College, which had been in Durham since 1808, was licensed as a hall of residence in 1968. By 1990 the last male-only college became mixed, leaving St Mary's as the last single-sex college. In 2005, St. Mary's College had its first mixed undergraduate intake.

October 2006 will see the first student intake at a new college, Josephine Butler.

Queen's Campus, Stockton

In 1992 a joint venture between the University and the University of Teesside saw the Joint University College on Teesside of the Universities of Durham and Teesside (JUCOT) established at Stockton-on-Tees, 23 miles south of Durham.

This was initially intended to grant joint degrees validated by both institutions (BAs and BScs). However, Teesside, which had only become a university in 1992, had difficulties in taking on its responsibilities for the college and Durham took full control of the new college in 1994.

A programme of integration with Durham began, leading to the college becoming University College, Stockton (UCS) in 1996 — a college of the University of Durham and the only college with teaching responsibilities.

Further integration lead to the campus being renamed the University of Durham, Stockton Campus (UDSC) in 1998, removing teaching responsibilities from the College. In 2001, two new colleges, John Snow and George Stephenson (after the physician and the engineer) were established at Stockton, replacing UCS, and the new medical school (which operates in association with the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) took in its first students — the first medics to join Durham since 1963. In 2002, her golden jubilee year, the Queen granted the title "Queen's Campus" to the Stockton site.

As of 2005 Queen's Campus, Stockton accounts for around 18% of the total university student population. This is likely to increase in coming years thanks to future expansion plans.

A curious fact about Queen's Campus, Stockton, is that it is located on the south bank of the River Tees within Thornaby-on-Tees. For centuries the Tees formed the historical division between the traditional counties of Yorkshire and Durham, with Thornaby-On-Tees being one of the most northern towns in Yorkshire. With the creation of the county borough of Teesside in 1968 areas both north and south of the river were removed from their traditional counties. Teesside itself was engulfed into the County of Cleveland in 1974. Yet another local government change in 1996 saw the breakup of the county of Cleveland into the current four unitary authorities of Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Redcar and Cleveland & Stockton-On-Tees. With this latest reorganisation Thornaby-On-Tees became part of the borough of Stockton-On-Tees, however the town of Stockton-On-Tees itself is located on the north ('County Durham') side of the river. The upshot of all this is that a significant proportion of Durham University is actually located within the ceremonial county of Yorkshire, not Durham! Just to complicate matters there are currently plans for an expansion of the campus onto the north bank of the River Tees as part of the current re-development site there and this would split the campus between the two traditional counties.

Durham today

In recent years, the University has maintained its strength. One study even ranked it 7th in the English-speaking world (only behind Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, and ahead of institutions such as Yale) in a study of scientific citations carried out by the University of Hong Kong in 2000, while the UK Research Assessment Exercise in 2001 rated Durham research as averaging a 5 rating — "international excellence in more than half of the research activity submitted and attainable levels of national excellence in the remainder".

However, The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2005, published by the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ranked Durham only with an estimate of 203-300th in the world, with Cambridge 2nd and Oxford 10th. Moreover, it was only ranked with an estimate of 20-30th in the United Kingdom - Cambridge 1st and Oxford 2nd. The result rested partly on the lack of any Nobel prize or Fields medal winners from Durham. For its position, Durham's "number of highly cited researchers in broad subject categories in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering and social sciences" was relatively high - even marginally beating higher ranked UK Universities who made the top world 100 (e.g. Bristol and Edinburgh), though still significantly less than the top flight universities (including (in the UK) Imperial College, London; University College, London; Oxford; and Cambridge). In the other categories of "number of articles published in Nature and Science between 2000 and 2004", and "total number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index-expanded, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 2004" Durham faired more poorly.

Moreover, in 2005 the Guardian ranked Durham 24th in the United Kingdom, concording with the ARWU study, although in other rankings Durham faired better (see below).

The Teaching Quality Assessments carried out by the Quality Assurance Agency have rated Durham at an average of 22.2/24 in 2003, above the UK average of 21.6. Durham University Business School's MBA was ranked 62nd in the world by the Economist in 2005 (84th in 2004) and 82nd in the Financial Times in 2004. In the 2005 (2004) university league tables, Durham was ranked 10th (8th) (The Times), 9th (11th) (The Sunday Times) and 24th (12th) (The Guardian). Also in 2005 Durham was ranked 10th in the first National Student Survey and climbed from 128th to 83rd in the THES world university rankings (11th in the UK). The rankings also placed Durham as the number 1 university in the UK for its impact of scientific research. In terms of individual academic departments, the Department of Geography is considered one of the best in the United Kingdom and a world leader in many research areas [1]. Physics, [2], Engineering, [3] and Law, [4] are among the university's other core strengths.

Teams from Durham won University Challenge in both 1977 and 2000. The Durham University Centre of Cricketing Excellence is one of only four (the others being Oxford, Cambridge and Loughborough) to play first-class matches. Durham was ranked 5th across all sports by the British Universities Sports Association (BUSA) in 2005. It is also the current BUSA rowing champion, keeping the title won in 2004. Since 1975 the university has played host to the Durham Drama Festival. Music is also a high-ranking activity in Durham, particularly marked by the highly acclaimed Durham University Chamber Choir.

The presence of Durham Cathedral is still felt strongly within the university and city. It provides opportunities for worship, and first class music making, the Cathedral Choir offering seven scholarships to students of the university. As a result of the historic choral tradition in Durham, choral singing today in Durham is one of the University's most notable areas of excellence. The Durham University Chamber Choir is a small student run choir which performs to a consistently high standard.

In 2002 the University announced that a new college, Josephine Butler College, will open in 2006 on the Howlands Farm site on Elvet Hill.

In 2005 the University unveiled a rebranded logotype and renamed itself as 'Durham University', arguing that this reflected a more contemporary and less elitist outlook, and that it recognised that many people already referred to the University in this way. The news was poorly received among many academic and student members of the university, with Van Mildert JCR going as far as boycotting the new name and logo. However, the official name of the institution remains the University of Durham and the official coat of arms is unchanged.

Also in 2005 the University's Estates and Buildings Department became subject to a hoax letter which spread across the Internet by viral methods. The letter appeared to be a genuine memo from Estates and Buildings advising students against masturbating within showers in university managed accommodation. A student from Van Mildert College admitted to creating the letter in early 2006 claiming that it was originally intended as publicity for the college’s JCR website. He said in an interview for Palatinate, the University's student newspaper, that he used the Durham University logo from Wikipedia as it was of higher resolution than any other logo publicly available.

The University's Strategic Plan through to 2010 is at the University's web site

In 1989 the University started its fundraising and alumni office, with a virtual community for alumni at dunelm.org.uk and several large gifts made to the University, including for the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, the department of Physics and the Wolfson Research Institute.

Chancellors of the University

Until 1909, the University was nominally governed by the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral. Following the University of Durham Act, 1908 the University has, like most other British universities, been headed by a Chancellor.

Colleges

Durham is the only British university apart from Oxford, Cambridge and London to operate a collegiate structure in that all the colleges at Durham are "listed bodies" under the Education Reform Act, 1988, "recognised by the UK authorities as being able to offer courses leading to a degree of a recognised body". This is same legal status as the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and the constituent institutions of the University of Wales, and sets Durham colleges apart from those at the universities of Kent, Lancaster, and York, which have no legal standing. However, unlike at Oxford and Cambridge, there is no formal teaching at Durham colleges. The colleges dominate the residential, social, sporting, and pastoral functions within the university, and there is heavy student involvement in their operation.

Formal dinners (known as "formals") are held at many colleges; gowns are often worn to these events. There is a great deal of intercollegiate rivalry, particularly in rowing and other sporting activities. There is also rivalry between the older colleges of the Bailey and the newer colleges of the Hill.

List of colleges

Most of the colleges located in Durham itself can be grouped into two areas of the city. Bailey colleges are those located on the "peninsula" formed by a meander of the River Wear, and Hill colleges are on Elvet Hill on the other side of the river. Queen's Campus, Stockton, is 23 miles south of Durham, in the town of Stockton-on-Tees.

Queen's Campus, Stockton

Bailey colleges

  • Hatfield College (1846) — The second oldest college, named after Thomas Hatfield, Prince-Bishop of Durham (1345–1381).
  • St Chad's College (1904) — Founded as an Anglican theological college in 1904, St Chad's, like St John's, remains an independent college and is self-financed and self-governed. It includes the North East Institute for Theological Education (an ecumenical institution of the Church of England, Methodist and United Reformed Churches.)
  • St Cuthbert's Society (1888) — Founded to cater for those students who were not members of either of the two existing colleges (University and Hatfield).
  • St John's College (1919) — Founded as an Anglican theological college in 1909, St John's is still administratively and financially independent of the University. It includes the Cranmer Hall Anglican theological college, named after Thomas Cranmer, and the Methodist Wesley Study Centre, named after John Wesley.
  • University College (1832) — The oldest college, informally known as "Castle".

Hill colleges

Elsewhere in Durham

  • College of St Hild and St Bede (1975) — Geographically speaking, neither Bailey nor Hill (though closer to the former); the name arises from the merger of two single-sex teacher-training colleges, St Hild's College (female, founded 1858) and The College of the Venerable Bede (male, founded 1839). The college traditionally claims to be the second oldest college in Durham, by virtue of continuity with The College of the Venerable Bede, and this is a cause of rivalry with Hatfield College.

Ushaw

Constitution

The coat of arms of the University of Durham

The University holds the powers to award degrees under the Royal Charter of 1837, extended to include the power to award degrees to women under the Supplementary Charter of 1895. However, the rules governing how the University is consituted are to be found in the Statutes put in place by the Universities of Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne Act, 1963, and subsequently amended by the Privy Council. The Statutes provide that: "The University shall be governed by a Visitor, Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Convocation, Council, Senate, and Boards of Studies."

Visitor

The Visitor for the University of Durham is the Bishop of Durham. The Visitor is the final arbiter of any dispute within the University, except in those areas where legislation has removed this to the law courts or other ombudsmen.

Chancellor

The Chancellor is the nominal head of the University. He or she is nominated by the Council and Senate and appointed by Convocation.

Vice-Chancellor

The Vice-Chancellor is the chief executive of the University. He or she also holds the positions of 'Warden of the Durham Colleges' and is appointed by the Council. The deputy to the Vice Chancellor is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor who also holds the position of 'Sub-Warden of the Durham Colleges' and deputises for the Vice-Chancellor. There may also be additional Pro-Vice-Chancellors. The current Vice-Chancellor, Sir Kenneth Calman, is leaving the University in September 2007.

Convocation

Convocation is the assembly of members of the University. It consists of the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, and Pro-Vice-Chancellors, all graduates, the teaching staff (lecturers, senior lecturers, readers, and professors), and the heads of colleges and licensed halls of residence. It meets once a year in order to hear the Vice-Chancellor's Address and to debate any business relating to the University. Its powers are limited to appointing the Chancellor (and even then, only on the nomination of Council and Senate) and the making of representations to the University on any business debated.

Council

Council is the executive body of the University. In addition to representatives from the University it includes the Dean of Durham Cathedral and representatives of the alumni, the Students' Union and the local councils. Its powers include establishing and maintaining colleges, and recognising non-maintained colleges and licensed halls of residence.

Senate

Senate is the supreme governing body of the University in academic matters. It nominates the Vice-Chancellor and Pro-Vice-Chancellors to Council, and recommends the establishment of Faculties and Boards of Studies. It is Senate that grants degrees, and has the authority to revoke them. It also regulates the use of academic dress of the University.

Colleges

The University is collegiate in structure. There are four different sorts of college: Maintained Colleges and Societies, Recognised Colleges, Licensed Halls of Residence, and Affiliated Colleges. Maintained Colleges are not financially independent of the University and their principals are appointed by Council. The colleges are represented on Council by the Dean of Colleges, chosen from among the principals.

The Recognised Colleges (St John's and St Chad's) and Licensed Halls (Ushaw) are financially independent of the University and have a far greater degree of administrative independence than the Maintained Colleges. However, Council must approve the appointment of their principal and be notified of changes to their constitutions. There is also a requirement that they must be within County Durham.

Affiliated Colleges (Codrington College, Barbados (and, until 1967, Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone) is an overseas institutes that presents its students for University of Durham examinations. It not generally considered part of the collegiate structure of the University and is listed as an 'Affiliated College' in the University Statutes rather than as one of the 'Colleges and Societies'.

Faculties

The teaching departments of the University are divided into three faculties: Science, Arts and Humanities, and Social Sciences and Health. Each faculty has a Dean, a Deputy Dean and an Associate Dean. These, along with the heads of the departments in the faculty, the Vice-Chancellor, and the Pro-Vice-Chancellors, make up the Faculty Board for that faculty. Each department also has a Board of Studies consisting of the Dean and Deputy Dean of their faculty, the teaching staff of the department, and student representatives.

Notable alumni

See List of Durham University people

References

  1. ^ Times Good University Guide Subject Tables 2005: Geography- http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/gooduniversityguide2005/20geography.pdf
  2. ^ Times Good University Guide Subject Tables 2005: Physics and Astronomy-http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/gooduniversityguide2005/20physics.pdf
  3. ^ Times Good University Guide Subject Tables 2005: Engineering- http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/gooduniversityguide2005/20generaleng.pdf
  4. ^ Times Good University Guide Subject Tables 2005: Law-http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/gooduniversityguide2005/20law.pdf
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