The University of Leicester is a research led university based in Leicester, England, with approximately 20,000 registered students - about 13,000 of them full-time students and 7,000 part-time and/or distance learning. The main campus is a mile south of the city centre, adjacent to Victoria Park and Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College.
On 23 October 2008 the University was named University of the Year by the Times Higher Education at their annual awards celebration.
History
The University was founded as Leicestershire and Rutland College in 1918. The site for the University was donated by a local textile manufacturer, Thomas Fielding Johnson, in order to create a living memorial for those who lost their lives in World War I. This is reflected in the University's motto Ut Vitam Habeant — 'so that they may have life'. The central building, now known as the Fielding Johnson Building and housing the University's administration offices and Faculty of Law, dates from 1837 and was formerly the Leicestershire and Rutland Lunatic Asylum.
Students were first admitted to the college in 1921. In 1927, after it became University College, Leicester, students sat the examinations for external degrees of the University of London. In 1957 the college was granted its Royal Charter, and has since then had the status of a University with the right to award its own degrees. The University won the first ever series of University Challenge, in 1963.
Library
Christine and Paul Hatton were able to view examples from the rare books from the Hatton Topographical Library that their grandfather had donated to the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland College in 1920. This generous gift formed the nucleus of the University Library’s exceptional English local history collections.
- Local history collections (for the Centre for English Local History), including:
Thomas Hatton (1876 – 1943)'s collection. Born in Manchester, he began work as a junior clerk in a corset factory in Market Harborough and later moved to Leicester to set up his own boot manufacturing business. He also had interests in crossword promotion, greyhound racing and boxing (and on one trip to America was photographed with Laurel and Hardy, with all three of them wearing the trademark bowler hat), but his forté however was book collecting. A discriminating collector who applied his professional knowledge as a boot manufacturer to his book collecting by pioneering the use of glazed goat skin as a binding material, over a period of ten years he gathered one of the finest private collections of topographical and local history books. When his interests moved from topographical to Dickensian material, he agreed to donate his nearly 2,000 local history books to what was then Leicester College.
- The library also holds a number of collections containing items written by several famous writers, these include:
Joe Orton Collection. Joe Orton (1933-1967) was a Leicester-born playwright, the collection contains his manuscripts and correspondence.
Laura Riding Letters. The collected correspondence of the American poet and critic Laura Riding (1901-1991).
Sue Townsend Collection. The personal papers of Sue Townsend (born 1946). The collection contains Townsend's literary correspondence and notebooks detailing her works.
Archives of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism (see Jillian Becker).
Academic achievements
Science
The University of Leicester is one of the 1994-Group research universities. The University has scientific research groups in the areas of astrophysics, biochemistry and genetics. The techniques used in Genetic fingerprinting were invented and developed at Leicester in 1984 by Sir Alec Jeffreys. It also houses Europe's biggest academic centre for space research, in which space probes have been built, most notably the Mars Lander Beagle 2, which was built in collaboration with the Open University. A Leicester built instrument has been operating in space every year since 1967. Leicester Physicists (led by Professor Ken Pounds) were critical in proving a fundamental law of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - that black holes exist and are common in the universe. It is a founding partner of the £52 million National Space Centre. In total Leicester has the highest research income of any non Russell Group institution in the UK. The University of Leicester is one of a small number of Universities to have won the prestigious Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education on more than one occasion: in 1994 for physics & astronomy and again in 2002 for genetics. The Guardian's 2008 University Guide, published in 2007, ranked Leicester 2nd in the UK for Physics and 8th for Mathematics.
Arts, humanities and social sciences
Literary connections include Kingsley Amis, who is believed to have partially based his Campus novel Lucky Jim on Leicester University. Amis is alleged to have been inspired to write the book when visiting his friend Phillip Larkin who was working at the university as a librarian at the time. Malcolm Bradbury also used Leicester as a basis for his satire on university life Eating People Is Wrong. More recently, novelist Adele Parks graduated from the university in the 1990s, and the university library now holds the writings of both Joe Orton and Sue Townsend.
The School of Historical Studies at Leicester is, with 35 full time members of staff, including 11 Professors at current, one of the largest of any university in the country. It is has made considerable scholarly achievements in many areas of history, notably Urban History, English Local History, American Studies and Holocaust Studies. The School houses both the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA) and the Media Archive for Central England (MACE) MACE.
The School of English is one of the UK’s leading providers of English at degree level. The Guardian's 2009 University Guide ranked Leicester 6th in the UK for English and 2nd for American Studies. The School comprises 25 members of staff, including 8 Professors, and is committed to offering the whole spectrum of English Studies from Contemporary Writing to Old English and language studies. It contains the distinguished Victorian Studies Centre, the first of its kind in the UK. Malcolm Bradbury is one of the Department's most famous alumni: he graduated with a First in English in 1953.
The School of Archaeology and Ancient History is likewise one of the UK's largest, and highest-ranked, departments in its two subjects. It was formed in 1990 from the former Departments of Archaeology and Classics, under the headship of Professor Graeme Barker (now Disney Professor at Cambridge). The current Head of School is Professor Colin Haselgrove. The current academic staff comprises 5 professors, 3 readers, 4 senior lecturers, and 12 lecturers. Of these staff members, 19 are archaeologists and 5 ancient historians, though several staff teach and research in both disciplines. In addition the School has an emeritus professor, 4 research fellows, and 9 honorary and associated members. The School was awarded a grade 5 in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and a maximum score of 24 points in the Quality Assurance Agency's review of teaching in that year. The School has particular strengths in Mediterranean archaeology, ancient Greek and Roman history, and the archaeology of recent periods including Industrial Archaeology. In April 2008 the Centre for Historical Archaeology was opened. The School is also home to University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS).
The Centre for Mass Communication Research, now part of the Department of Media and Communications, is one of the longest established academic centres at Leicester, engaging in pioneering research in the 1970s and 1980s and now specializing in Masters courses, as does the Department of Museum Studies, in terms of both campus-based and distance-learning Masters.
Law
Within the university structure, the Faculty of Law is the smallest Faculty, however, it has one of the biggest departments as the Department of Law. The Law School has strong formal relationships with top law schools in many other countries such as France, South Africa, Singapore and Australia. It also has a number of leading academics who provide consultation to a number of legal and governmental bodies such as Professor Erika Szyszczak, Professor Chris Clarkson and Professor Malcolm Shaw QC.
In July 2007, two undergraduate law students, namely Steven Meltzer and Michael Weinstein won the International Negotiation Competition in Singapore, which is only the second occasion that a team from England and Wales has won the competition. As a result of this win, the law school will be the hosts for the 2008 National Negotiation Competition, which is sponsored by the College of Law and CEDR.
The Faculty maintains links with many top law firms, including the Magic Circle firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, who offer a one year scholarship to a Leicester student studying for the dual Law and French degree. The Law School is very proud of its flourishing Student Law Society which plays a central role in the life of the student body. Many law graduates at the university go on to follow careers in the City as commercial solicitors or barristers and so law at the university remains a popular choice and is always over-subscribed.
According to the Times Online Good University Guide 2009, the Faculty of Law is ranked 8th, out of 87 institutions, making it one of the top law schools in the country.
Teaching
The University is also held in high regard for the quality of its teaching. 19 subject areas have been graded as "Excellent" by the Quality Assurance Agency — including 14 successive scores of 22 points or above stretching back to 1998, six of which were maximum scores. Leicester was ranked joint first amongst full-time mainstream English universities in the 2005, 2006 and 2007 National Student Survey for overall student satisfaction. Leicester is home to two prestigious national Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (in Genetics and Geographical Information Science) and plays an important role in a third (Physics). Over two thirds of subjects feature in the national top 10.
Engineering
The Department of Engineering has 33 academic staff (including 8 Professors) supported by 5 academic-related staff, about 20 research staff and 30 technical and clerical staff. Engineering is one of the largest departments at Leicester and has approximately 240 undergraduate students, 50 taught postgraduate students, and 50 postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers. The student/staff ratio is 10:1, which the Times Good Universities Guide describes as its "benchmark for excellence".
The Department is renowned for its research in the areas of Control and Instrumentation, Electrical and Electronic Power, Radio Systems, Mechanics of Materials, and Thermofluids and Environmental Engineering. The department achieved a rating of 5A in the latest HEFCE Research Assessment Exercise, putting it in the top tier of UK Engineering departments. Among those General Engineering departments that submitted the research records of more than 95% of their staff, only Cambridge and Oxford did better. Several research led appointments have been made in recent years, including a number of chairs, and this has resulted in research groups of international standing with strong leadership and a research base of highly talented staff.
In terms of teaching, the Department offers MEng and BEng degrees in Embedded Systems Engineering, Communications and Electronic Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and General Engineering. Each course is accredited by the relevant professional institutions. The Department also offers MSc courses in Embedded Systems and Control, Information and Communication Engineering, Advanced Mechanical Engineering, and Advanced Electrical and Electronic Engineering. The Department is fully committed to teaching excellence and the quality of its provision was affirmed by the results of the 2005 and 2006 National Student Satisfaction Surveys. The Department came joint first (out of 44 universities) for their teaching in Electrical Engineering and joint second (out of 43 universities) in Mechanical Engineering. The overall satisfaction score for the Department of Engineering at the University of Leicester was 4.3.
The Department has an extensive range of industrial partners including: BAe Systems, Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Siemens, Corus, Mercedes-Benz. Many undergraduate and postgraduate projects are carried out in collaboration with industry. The employment record for new graduates is strong.
Faculties
The University is organised into six faculties.
- Faculty of Medicine and Biological Sciences
- Faculty of Arts
- Faculty of Law
- Faculty of Science
- Faculty of Social Sciences (expanded in 2004 to include the Faculty of Education)
- Faculty of Engineering
University of Leicester was ranked 177th in the 2008 THES-QS World University Ranking.
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