20th+: Higher Education

Monday, October 21, 2013

Higher Education - UK

The Victorian era had seen the establishment not only of schools open to women, but also of universities, and colleges within Oxford and Cambridge. Many of the universities founded in the Victorian era were co-educational from the start, and the red-brick universities of the early 20th century followed suit. The University of London was the first in the UK to award degrees to women, which it did in 1878. This progress moved alongside the campaign to give women the vote. Many women campaigned for both, while others, such as the writer Gertrude Bell, felt that education had to come first, so that when granted the vote, women would be well enough educated to use enfranchisement wisely.

In 1918, women in the UK were finally given the vote, if not quite on equal terms with men (that came in 1928). In 1920, Oxford became the second-to-last university in the UK to allow women to become full members and take degrees; previously, they had been allowed to study there, but not been given an equivalent award to men. Only in 1948 did Cambridge follow suit; when the idea had first been voted on in 1897, there had been a near-riot in the city, with male undergraduates burning effigies of female scholars, and throwing fireworks at the windows of women’s colleges. Even then, the university was allowed to limit the numbers of female students relative to men, and used that power to the full.

Higher Education in the UK: The new University of London achieved one of the principal goals of the founders of UCL: it was the first university in England to award degrees without any religious test. The first degrees were conferred in 1839 to students from UCL and King's College London. But from 1840 it affiliated other colleges and schools, opening up the possibility of degrees for many students who would not previously have attended a university. Another big step came in 1858 when the system of affiliated colleges was abandoned and London degrees were opened to any man who passed the examination. From 1878, University of London degrees were opened to women - the first in the United Kingdom.

In 1845, Queen's Colleges were established across Ireland: in Belfast, Cork and Galway, followed by the establishment of the Queen's University of Ireland in 1850 as a federal university encompassing the three colleges. In response, the Catholic University of Ireland (never recognised as a University by the British state, although granted degree awarding power by the Pope) was established in Dublin by the Catholic Church. This eventually led to the dissolution of the Queen's University in 1879 and its replacement by the Royal University of Ireland, an examining board after the pattern of the University of London.

The first women's college was Bedford College in London, which opened in 1849. It was followed by Royal Holloway (with which it merged in the 1980s) and the London School of Medicine for Women in London and colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. After London opened its degrees to women in 1878, UCL opened its courses in Arts, Law and Science to women, although it took the First World War to open up the London medical schools. By the end of the 19th century, the only British universities not granting degrees to women were Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin.

Non-Anglicans were admitted to degrees at Oxford in 1854, Cambridge in 1856 and Durham in 1865. The remaining tests were (except in theology) removed by the University Tests Act 1871, allowing non-Anglicans to become full members of the University (membership of Convocation at Oxford and Durham or the Senate at Cambridge) and to hold teaching positions.

An Act of Parliament was passed in 1858 that modernised the constitutions of all of the Scottish universities. Under this Act, the two universities in Aberdeen were united into the University of Aberdeen (explicitly preserving the foundation date of King's College) and the University of Edinburgh was made independent from the town corporation.

Civic universities were distinguished by being non-collegiate (and thus, at the time, non-residential) institutions founded as university colleges that admitted men without reference to religion and concentrated on imparting to their students "real-world" skills, often linked to engineering. All were established as universities by royal charter, with an accompanying act of parliament to transfer the property and assets of the university college to the newly incorporated university. Most gained their status in the period 1900–1959. However, some institutions generally regarded as civic universities and sharing many elements of common history with these universities gained university status later than 1959 (e.g. Newcastle in 1963 or Cardiff in 2005).

The first of the civic university colleges was the Anglican Queen's College, Birmingham, built on the nucleus of the Birmingham Medical School, which gained its royal charter in 1843 but did not ultimately prove a success. This was followed in 1851 by Owens College, Manchester. Further university colleges followed in Newcastle (1871), notable for admitting women to its courses from the start, Aberystwyth (1872), Leeds (1874), Bristol (1876), Sheffield (1879), Mason College, Birmingham (1880), Dundee (1881), Liverpool (1881), Nottingham (1881), Cardiff (1883), and Bangor (1884). With the exceptions of Newcastle (associated with Durham) and Dundee (associated with St Andrews), all of the university colleges prepared their students for London degrees.