University of Manchester

Origins (1824 to 2004)

The University of Manchester traces its origins to the formation of the Mechanics' Institution in 1824, the distant precursor of UMIST, and its heritage is intertwined with Manchester's identity as the world's first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, founded the institution to ensure that workers might learn the basic principles of science.

John Owens, a textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 (equivalent to some £5.6 million in 2005 prices) to establish a college for the education of men on non-sectarian lines. His trustees founded Owens College in 1851 on a site at the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street that had once been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden and later housed Manchester County Court. The locomotive designer Charles Beyer served as a governor of the college and became its most generous single donor to the extension fund, which raised the capital for the move to a new site and the construction of the main building now known as the John Owens Building. He also campaigned for and helped to fund the chair of engineering, the first applied science department in the north of England. His bequest to the college in 1876, a time of acute financial difficulty, was equivalent to £10 million. Beyer met the entire cost of constructing the Beyer Building to house the biology and geology departments, and his will also endowed chairs in engineering and the Beyer Professorship of Applied Mathematics.

The university possesses a strong German intellectual heritage. The Owens College Extension Movement formulated its plans following a tour of predominantly German universities and polytechnics. Thomas Ashton, a Manchester mill owner and chairman of the extension movement, had studied at Heidelberg University. Sir Henry Roscoe also studied at Heidelberg, under Robert Bunsen, and the two collaborated on research projects for many years. Roscoe championed the German model of research-led teaching that later became the template for the red-brick universities. Charles Beyer had studied at the Dresden Academy Polytechnic. Germans featured prominently on the staff, among them Carl Schorlemmer, Britain's first professor of organic chemistry, and Arthur Schuster, professor of physics. A German church also stood nearby on what is now part of the campus (this church was acquired by the university in 1949 and at a later date became the Stephen Joseph Studio).

In 1873, Owens College moved to new buildings on Oxford Road (then called Oxford Street) in Chorlton-on-Medlock, and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. This university, which received its royal charter in 1880, became England's first civic university. Following the independence of Liverpool and Leeds, it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and absorbed Owens College the following year.

By 1905, the two institutions were substantial and dynamic forces. The Municipal College of Technology, the forerunner of UMIST, functioned both as the Victoria University of Manchester's Faculty of Technology and, in parallel, as a technical college offering advanced courses of study. Although UMIST achieved independent university status in 1955, the two institutions continued to work together. During the late twentieth century, however, formal ties diminished, and in 1994 new legislation enabled UMIST to become a separate university with its own degree-awarding powers. A decade later, the process was reversed. In March 2003, the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology agreed to merge into a single institution.

Prior to the merger, the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST could together count 23 Nobel laureates among their former staff and students, with two more being added subsequently. Manchester has traditionally been strong in the sciences: it was here that Ernest Rutherford established the nuclear structure of the atom, and the world's first electronic stored-program computer was built at the university. Notable scientists associated with the university include the physicists Ernest Rutherford, Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. Contributions to mathematics were made by Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing. The university's heritage in the humanities and social sciences is at least equally distinguished. Major figures include the economists William Stanley Jevons and Sir Arthur Lewis; the philosophers Samuel Alexander, Dorothy Emmet and Alasdair MacIntyre; the historians Thomas Tout, Sir Lewis Namier and A. J. P. Taylor; the French scholar Eugène Vinaver; and the Latinist James Noel Adams. Michael Polanyi, one of the great polymaths of the twentieth century, held the chair of physical chemistry for fifteen years before moving to a specially created chair in social studies. The author Anthony Burgess, the Pritzker- and Stirling Prize-winning architect Norman Foster, and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies all studied 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. It was named the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006, having won the inaugural Times Higher Education University of the Year award in 2005.

The founding president and vice-chancellor of the new university was Alan Gilbert, formerly 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. Rothwell served as vice‑chancellor from 2010 to 2024 before being succeeded by Duncan Ivison. The Nancy Rothwell Building was named in her honour. One of the university's stated aims in the Manchester 2015 Agenda was to rank among the top 25 universities worldwide, building on Alan Gilbert's vision of establishing 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.

Professional services

A number of professional services, organised as directorates, support the university. These include the Directorates of Compliance and Risk, Estates and Facilities, Finance, Planning, Human Resources, IT Services, and Legal Affairs, as well as the Board Secretariat and Governance Office, the Directorate of Research and Business Engagement, the Directorate for the Student Experience, the Division of Communications and Marketing, the Division of Development and Alumni Relations, the Office for Social Responsibility and the University Library. Professional services staff are also embedded within the faculty structure, in roles such as technician and experimental officer.

Each directorate reports to the Registrar, Secretary and Chief Operating Officer, who in turn reports to the President of the university. A Director of Faculty Operations sits within each faculty, overseeing support for these areas.

Research

The University of Manchester is a major centre for research and a member of the Russell Group of leading British research universities. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, the university was ranked fifth in the United Kingdom for research power and eighth for the grade point average quality of staff submitted among multi‑faculty institutions, placing tenth when specialist institutions were included. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, it had been ranked fifth for research power and fifteenth for the grade point average quality of staff submitted among multi‑faculty institutions, a position that fell to seventeenth when specialist institutions were taken into account. Manchester has the sixth‑largest research income of any English university, behind Oxford, University College London (UCL), Cambridge, Imperial and King's College London, and has been informally described as forming part of a "golden diamond" of research‑intensive UK institutions, a grouping that adds Manchester to the Oxford–Cambridge–London "Golden Triangle".

The university has a strong track record in securing funding from the three principal UK research councils. It is ranked fifth by the EPSRC, seventh by the Medical Research Council (MRC), and first by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). It is also one of the wealthiest universities in the UK in terms of income and interest from endowments; an estimate made in 2008 placed it third, exceeded only by Oxford and Cambridge.