University of London

The University of London (in English: University of London) is a renowned institution of higher education based in the British capital. It is not a traditional university, but a voluntary federation of 19 totally independent university colleges in the academic and administrative fields, which in turn collaborate proportionally in the system's budget and in the support of eleven institutes.

The university is the third oldest in England and was born to provide education to those English people who for religious reasons could not attend the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge, which only admitted Anglican students at the beginning of the century XIX. With the union of several London colleges and after several collections, the university was officially established in 1836. In 1878 it became the first university in the United Kingdom to admit women and by 1908 it had become the largest university in the country.

It currently has more than 116,000 students.

History

19th century

All universities are different, but some are more than others. The University of London is the most different of all. Negley Harte, Historian

University College London (UCL) was founded as the "University of London" (but without state recognition) in 1826 as a secular alternative to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which limited their titles to members of the established. Church of England. As a result of the controversy surrounding the creation of UCL, King's College London was founded as an Anglican college by royal charter in 1829.

In 1830, UCL applied for a royal charter as a university allowing it to award degrees. The request was rejected, but it was renewed in 1834. In response to this, opposition to "exclusive" he grew up among London medical schools. The idea of a general degree-awarding body for faculties was debated in the medical press and in evidence taken by the Select Committee on Medical Education. However, the blocking of a bill to open up Oxford and Cambridge degrees to dissenters led to renewed pressure on the government to concede degree-awarding powers to an institution that did not administer tests. religious, not least as degrees at the new Durham University were also to be closed to non-Anglicans.

In 1835, the government announced the response to UCL's request for a letter. Two charters were to be issued, one to UCL incorporating it as a college rather than a university, with no degree-awarding powers, and a second 'establishing a Metropolitan University, with power to award degrees to those studying at the London University College, or such similar institution as Her Majesty may hereafter name".

Following the issuance of its charter on 28 November 1836, the new University of London began drawing up regulations for degrees in March 1837. The death of William IV in June, however, led to a problem - the charter had been granted 'during our royal will and pleasure', meaning it was annulled by the king's death. Queen Victoria issued a second charter on 5 December 1837, reinstating the charter. university. The university awarded its first degrees in 1839, all of them to students from UCL and King's College.

The university established by charters of 1836 and 1837 was essentially an examining board with the right to award degrees in arts, law, and medicine. However, the university was not empowered to award degrees in theology, considered the main faculty in the other three English universities. In medicine, the university had the right to determine which medical schools offered sufficient medical training. Instead, in arts and law, it would examine students from UCL, King's College, or any other institution granted a royal warrant, giving the government control of which institutions could subject students to the university exam. Beyond this right to submit students for examination, there was no other connection between the colleges and the university.

In 1849 the university held its first graduation ceremony at Somerset House following a petition to the senate by graduates, who had previously received their degrees without ceremony. About 250 students graduated at this ceremony. London Academic Suits of this era were distinguished by their "rich velvet linings".

The list of institutions whose students could sit the University of London examinations grew rapidly in 1858, including all other British universities, as well as more than 30 schools and colleges outside London. In that year, a new charter opened the examinations to everyone, effectively abolishing the tenuous link between the university and the colleges. This caused the Earl of Kimberley, a member of the university's senate, to tell the House of the Lords in 1888 "that there were no Colleges affiliated with the University of London, though there had been many years ago". The 1858 reforms also brought graduates of the university into a convocation, similar to the from Oxford, Cambridge and Durham, and authorized the award of science degrees, with the first BSc being awarded in 1860.

The expansion of its functions meant that the university needed more space, especially due to the increasing number of students in the provincial university colleges. Between 1867 and 1870 a new headquarters was built at 6 Burlington Gardens, providing the university with examination rooms and offices.

In 1863, through a fourth charter, the university obtained the right to grant degrees in surgery. This 1863 charter remains the authority under which the university is incorporated, although all its other provisions were abolished under the London University Act of 1898.

General review for certified women of 1878. These were issued between 1869 and 1878, before women were admitted to university degrees.

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In 1878, the university set another first when it became the first university in the UK to admit women to degrees, through the award of a supplementary charter. Four female students earned Bachelor of Arts in 1880 and two earned Bachelor of Science in 1881, again the first in the country.

At the end of the 19th century, the university was criticized for merely serving as an examination administration centre, and calls for a & #34;teaching university" for London. UCL and KCL considered separating from the university to form an independent university, known as Albert University, Gresham University and Westminster University. After two royal commissions, the University of London Act of 1898 was approved, which reformed the university and gave it a federal structure with the responsibility of supervising the content of the courses and the academic standards of its institutions. This was implemented in 1900 with the approval of new statutes for the university.

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  Somerset House in 1836. The university had its offices here from 1837 to 1870.

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  King William IV, who granted to the University of London his original royal letter in 1836.

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  An illustration of 6 Burlington Gardens, headquarters of the university administration from 1870 to 1900.

20th century

The University of London should represent for the British empire what the great technological institution of Berlin, the Charlottenburg, represented for the German empire.

Lord Rosebery in 1903'

Reforms initiated by the 1898 Act came into effect with the passage of new federal statutes in 1900. Many of London's colleges became schools of the university, such as UCL, King's College, Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics. Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841, became an official divinity school of the university in 1901 (new statutes gave London the right to award divinity degrees) and Richmond (Theological) College became a university divinity school in 1902; Goldsmiths College was incorporated in 1904; Imperial College was founded in 1907; Queen Mary College was incorporated in 1915; the School of Oriental and African Studies was founded in 1916; and Birkbeck College, founded in 1823, was incorporated in 1920.

With the federation, the previous arrangement of schools outside London was not abandoned, but London offered two routes of access to qualifications: "internal" offered by the colleges of the university and "external" offered at other colleges (now the University of London Flexible Distance Learning Programmes).

UCL and King's College, whose campaign for a teaching college in London had led to the reconstitution of the university as a federal institution, went even further than becoming schools of the university and they merged into it. The merger of UCL, under the University College London Transfer Act 1905, occurred in 1907. The 1836 charter was renounced and all ownership of UCL became the University of London. King's College followed in 1910 with the King's College London Transfer Act of 1908. This was a slightly more complicated case, as the college's theology department (founded in 1846) did not merged with the university, but instead maintained a separate legal existence under the King's College Charter of 1829.

The university's expanding role meant that Burlington Garden's premises were insufficient, and in March 1900 it moved to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington. Its continued rapid expansion, however, meant that its new premises remained small in the 1920s, forcing a new move. A large plot of land in Bloomsbury near the British Museum was purchased from the Duke of Bedford and Charles Holden appointed as architect with instructions to create a building "not to suggest a passing fad unbecoming of buildings that will house a institution of a character as permanent as a University". This unusual undertaking may have been inspired by the fact that William Beveridge, newly appointed director of the LSE, when asking a taxi driver to take him to the University of London was met with the reply 'Oh, you mean the place nearby'. to the Royal School of Needlework". Holden responded by designing Senate House, the current home of the university, and at the time of its completion the second largest building in London.

Yeomanry House on Handel Street is the headquarters of the UOTC in London. The flag you see waving is the shield of the University of London

The Officer Training Corps (OTC) University of London contingent was formed in 1908 and had enrolled 950 students by the autumn of 1914. During World War I, the OTC supplied 500 officers to the British Army between August 1914 and March 1915. Some 665 officers associated with the university were killed during World War I and 245 officers in World War II. Staff: As of the University of London Officers' Training Corps (UOTC), drawn from 52 London area universities and colleges (not just the University of London), was the largest UOTC in the country, with some 400 officer cadets. Since 1992 it has been based at Yeomanry House in Handel Street, London. In 2011, the Canterbury Company was founded to recruit officer cadets for Kent's universities.

During World War II, the university's halls of residence (with the exception of Birkbeck) and their students left London for safer parts of the UK, while Senate House was used by the Ministry of Information, turning its roof into an observation point for the Royal Corps of Observers. Although the building was hit by bombs on several occasions, it emerged from the war virtually unscathed; it was rumored at the time that the reason the building had turned out so well was that Adolf Hitler had planned to use it as his London headquarters.

The last half of the last century was less eventful. In 1948 Athlone Press was founded as a university press, and was sold to the Bemrose Corporation in 1979, after which it was acquired by Continuum publishing. However, the post-Second World War period was marked above all by expansion and consolidation within the university, such as the acquisition as a constituent body of the Jesuit theological institution Heythrop College on its move from Oxfordshire in 1969.

The University of London Act of 1978 defined the university as a federation of autonomous colleges, initiating the process of decentralization that would lead to a marked transfer of academic and financial power in this period from central authorities in Senate House to individual schools. In the same period, UCL and King's College regained their legal independence through Acts of Parliament and the issuance of new Royal Charters. UCL reincorporated in 1977, while King's College's new charter in 1980 reunited the main body of the college with the corporation formed in 1829. In 1992, centralized graduation ceremonies at Royal Albert Hall were replaced by individual ceremonies in colleges. One of the biggest power shifts of this period occurred in 1993, when HEFCE (now the Students' Office, OfS) switched funding to the University of London, which in turn allocated money to colleges. colleges, to directly finance the colleges and that they pay a contribution to the university.

At the end of the 20th century there was also a trend to merge smaller schools into "super schools" 3. 4; bigger. Some of the larger colleges (notably UCL, King's College, LSE and Imperial) periodically raised the possibility of seceding from the university, although no steps were taken to put this into practice until the early 1990s. 21st century.

The building of the Imperial Institute Building in South Kensington, university headquarters from 1900 to 1937

21st century

In 2002, Imperial College and UCL raised the possibility of a merger, raising the question of the future of the University of London and the smaller colleges that comprise it. Subsequently, considerable opposition from academic staff at both UCL and Imperial led to the merger being rejected.

Despite this failure, the trend towards decentralization of power continued. An important event in this process was the closing of the Call for all alumni of the university in October 2003; this was in recognition that the alumni associations of individual universities were now increasingly the focus of alumni attention. However, the university continued to grow even as it moved to a more loose federation, and in 2005 admitted the Central School of Speech and Drama.

On 9 December 2005, Imperial College became the second charter body (after Regent's Park College) to make the formal decision to leave the university. His council announced that it was beginning negotiations to withdraw from the university in time for its own centenary celebrations and to be able to award its own degrees. On October 5, 2006, the University of London accepted Imperial's formal request to withdraw from it. Imperial became fully independent on July 9, 2007, as part of the university's centenary celebrations.

The Times Higher Education Supplement announced in February 2007 that the London School of Economics, University College London and King's College London planned to start awarding their own degrees, instead of those at the Federal University of London, as they had done previously, since the start of the academic year beginning in autumn 2007. Although this plan to award their own degrees did not amount to a decision to leave the University of London, the THES suggested that this "raised new doubts about the future of the Federal University of London".

The University of London School of Pharmacy merged with UCL on 1 January 2012, becoming the UCL School of Pharmacy within the Faculty of Life Sciences. This was followed by, on 2 December 2014, the Institute of Education merged with UCL as well, becoming the UCL Institute of Education.

Since 2010, the university has outsourced support services such as cleaning and portering. This has provoked industrial action by the workforce, mostly Latin American, within the framework of the "3Cosas" (The 3Things - 3 Causes - are sick pay, holiday pay and pensions for contract workers at parity with staff employed directly by the university). The 3Things activists were members of the UNISON union. However, documents leaked in 2014 revealed that UNISON representatives attempted to counter 3Things' campaign in meetings with university management. 3Things workers later switched to the Freelancers Union of Great Britain.

Following strong results in the Research Excellence Framework in December 2014, City University London said it was exploring the possibility of joining the University of London. This was later announced in July 2015 that the City would join the University of London in August 2016. It will cease to be an independent university and become a college as "City, University of London".

In 2016 reforms were proposed that would make colleges member institutions and allow them to legally become universities in their own right. At the end of 2016, a bill to amend the statutes of the university was introduced in the House of Lords. The bill was delayed due to procedural issues in the House of Commons, as Christopher Chope MP objected to it receiving a second reading without debate and without a time having been scheduled for such debate. Twelve of the colleges, including UCL and King's, said they would apply for university status once the bill passed. The bill was debated and passed its second reading on 16 November. October 2018. It received royal assent on 20 December 2018. All twelve colleges (i.e. all except The Courtauld, ICR, LBS, RAM and RCSSD) subsequently applied for university status, although they stated they had no intention to change their names, with a notice in the London Gazette on 4 February 2019.

In 2018, Heythrop College became the first major British higher education institution to close since the medieval University of Northampton in 1265. Its library of over 250,000 volumes was moved to the Senate Library.

In 2019, the University of London Press, founded in 1910, was relaunched as a fully open access publisher specializing in "distinctive scholarship at the cutting edge of the Humanities".

Constituent and Affiliate Organizations

• Birkbeck (BBK)
• The Central School of Speech and Drama (CSSD)
• Courtauld Institute of Art
• Goldsmiths (GUL)
• Heythrop College
• Institute of Cancer Research (ICR)
• Institute of Education (IoE)
• King's College London (KCL)
• London Business School (LBS)
• London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
• London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
• Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL)
• Real Academia de Música (RAM)
• Royal Holloway (RHUL)
• Royal Veterinary College (RVC)
• School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
• The School of Pharmacy, University of London
• University College London (UCL)
• St George's, officially St George's Hospital Medical School (SGUL)