University of Kent: Difference between revisions

University of Kent

File:Uok Logo PMS294 PC.jpg
Motto	Cui servire regnare est (literal translation: 'whom to serve is to reign') (Book of Common Prayer translation: 'whose service is perfect freedom')
Type	Public
Established	January 4 1965
Chancellor	Sir Robert Worcester KBE DL
Vice-Chancellor	Professor Sir David Melville CBE
Visitor	The Archbishop of Canterbury ex officio
Students	18,220
Undergraduates	13,695
Postgraduates	4,525
Location	Canterbury, Medway and Tonbridge , Kent , United Kingdom
Campus	Rural
Affiliations	University Alliance Association of Commonwealth Universities European University Association
Website	http://www.kent.ac.uk/
The University of Kent's Coat of Arms

The University of Kent is a plate glass campus university in Kent, England.

Name

The university's original name was the University of Kent at Canterbury, reflecting the fact that at the time of its foundation the then single campus crossed the borders of the jurisdictions of the county borough of Canterbury and Kent County Council. At the time it was the normal practice for universities to be named after the town or city whose boundaries they were in, but there were few precedents for one straddling the boundary. The name reflected the support of both the city and county authorities, as well as the existence of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. The acronym UKC became a popular short form for the university. The reasoning for the name subsequently became anachronistic when local government reforms in the 1970s resulted in the Canterbury campus falling entirely within the jurisdictions of both the City of Canterbury (which no longer had county borough status) and the Kent County Council.

In the 1990s and 2000s the University has expanded and now has campuses in Medway, Tonbridge and Brussels, and works in partnership with Canterbury College, South Kent College and Mid-Kent College. In 2003 the formal title was changed to University of Kent. University of Kent at Canterbury and UKC are still used to refer to the Canterbury site (with other variants such as University of Kent at Medway also in use). The term UKC is also still heavily used by both students and alumni for the University as a whole.

Canterbury has a second university, Canterbury Christ Church University.

History

A university in the ancient city of Canterbury was first considered in 1947, when an anticipated growth in student numbers led several localities to seek the creation of a new university, including Kent. However the plans came to nothing.

A decade later both population growth and greater demand for university places led to new considerations. Kent County Council explored the possibilities of a university through its education committee. The proposals were largely accepted by the authorities and by 1963 a site was found at Beverley Farm, suitably straddling the then boundary between the City of Canterbury and the County of Kent. The University was granted its Royal Charter on January 4 1965 and the first students arrived in the October of that year. On March 30 1966 Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent was formally installed as the first Chancellor.

The University of Kent at Canterbury was envisaged as being a Collegiate establishment, with most students living in College; and specialising in inter-disciplinary studies in all fields. Over the years, changing demands have effectively destroyed this original concept, leading to the present state, near the "norm" for a British University.

The university grew at a rapid rate throughout the 1960s, with three of the colleges and many other buildings on campus completed by the end of the decade. The 1970s saw further construction but the university also enountered the biggest physical problem in its history. The university had been built above a tunnel on the disused Canterbury and Whitstable Railway. In July 1974 the tunnel collapsed, damaging part of the Cornwallis Building which sank nearly a metre within about an hour on the evening of July 11th. The south west corner of the building had to be demolished and was replaced by a new wing at the other end of the building. Fortunately it transpired the university had insurance against subsidance.

In 1982 the university opened the University Centre at Tonbridge for its School of Continuing Education, helping to enhance the availability of teaching across the county. Development of the campus has continued almost constantly, with many new buildings added in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the 2000s the university entered a collaboration with the University of Greenwich and Mid-Kent College to deliver university provision in the Medway area. This led to the development of the University of Kent at Medway, opened from 2001 though with the new joint campus opening in 2004. As a consequence of the expansion outside of Canterbury the university's name was formally changed to the University of Kent in 2003.

In 2007 the university was rebranded with a new logo and website. The logo was chosen following consultation with existing university students and those in sixth forms across the country.

Coat of Arms

File:Kent Coat of Arms.jpg

The University of Kent's Coat of Arms

The University of Kent's Coat of Arms were granted by the College of Arms in September 1967. The white horse is taken from the arms of the County of Kent. The three Cornish Choughs, originally belonging to the arms of Thomas Becket, were taken from the arms of the City of Canterbury. The Crest depicts the West Gate of Canterbury with a symbolic flow of water, presumably the River Stour, below it. Two golden Bishops' Croziers in the shape of a St.Andrews Cross are shown in front of it. The supporters - lions with the sterns of golden ships - are taken from the arms of the Cinque Ports.

Campus

The main Canterbury campus covers 300 acres (1.2 km²) and is in an elevated position just over two miles (3 km) from Canterbury's city centre. It currently has approximately 11,000 full-time and 6,200 part-time students and some 600 academic and research staff.

Colleges

Darwin Houses, a set of student housing next to Darwin college, surrounds a large rose garden

The university is now divided into four colleges, named after distinguished scholars. In chronological order of construction:

• Eliot (the poet T. S. Eliot) (1965)
• Rutherford (the physicist Ernest Rutherford) (1966)
• Keynes (the economist John Maynard Keynes) (1968)
• Darwin (the biologist Charles Darwin) (1970)

There was much discussion about the names adopted for most of the colleges with the following alternative names all in consideration at one point or another:

• For Eliot: Caxton, after William Caxton
• For Keynes: Richborough, a town in Kent; Anselm, a former Archbishop of Canterbury
• For Darwin: Anselm (again); Attlee, after Clement Attlee, the post war Prime Minister; Becket, after Thomas Becket, another former Archbishop (this was the recommendation of the college's provisional committee but rejected by the Senate); Conrad; Elgar, after Edward Elgar; Maitland; Marlowe, after Christopher Marlowe; Russell, after Bertrand Russell (this was the recommendation of the Senate but rejected by the Council); Tyler, after both Wat Tyler and Tyler Hill on which the campus stands. The name for the College proved especially contentious and was eventually decided by a postal ballot of members of the Senate, chosing from: Attlee, Conrad, Darwin, Elgar, Maitland, Marlowe and Tyler.

(Both Becket and Tyler were eventually used as the names for residential buildings on campuses and the building housing the Architecture department is named Marlowe.)

Each college features residential rooms, lecture theatres, study rooms, computer rooms and social areas. The intention of the colleges was that they should not be just Halls of Residence, but complete academic communities. Each college has its own bar, all rebuilt on a larger scale, and originally its own dining hall (today, only Rutherford has a functioning dining hall; Darwin's is now hired out for conferences and events; Keynes' was shut down in 2000 and converted into academic space; and Eliot's was closed in 2006). It was expected that each college (more were planned) would have around 600 students as members, with an equivalent proportion of staff, with half the students living within the college itself and the rest coming onto campus to eat and study within their colleges. Many facilities, ranging from accommodation, tutorials and alumni relations, would be handled on a college basis. With no planned academic divisions below the Faculty level, the colleges would be main focus of students' lives and there would be no units of a similar or smaller size to provide a rival focus of loyalties.

However this vision of a collegiate university has increasingly fallen away. The funding for colleges did not keep pace with the growth in student numbers, with the result that only four colleges were built. In later years when there was heavy student demand for scarce accommodation in Canterbury the solution was found in building additional on campus accommodation but not in the form of further colleges. The hopes that students living off campus would stay around to eat dinner in their colleges were not met, whilst the abolition of college amenities fees removed students' direct stake in their colleges. With the growth of specialist subject departments as well as of other university wide facilities, more and more of the role of colleges was transferred to the central university. Even the accommodation and catering was transferred to the centralised University of Kent at Canterbury Hospitality (UKCH).

Tyler Court, Block C, is part of a new halls of residence built in 2004.

Today the University cannot be considered collegiate in any true sense - applications are made to the University as a whole, and many of the colleges rely on each other for day-to-day operation. Academic departments have no formal ties to colleges other than those that are located within particular college buildings due to availability of space, with lectures, seminars and tutorials taking place wherever there is an available room rather than on a college basis. Many students are allocated accommodation in their respective college, but some are housed in developments with no defined collegiate link whilst others are housed in different colleges. In addition to these college accommodations there are also:

• Darwin Houses, a set of 26 student houses next to Darwin College, opened in 1989
• Becket Court, next to Eliot College, opened in 1990
• Tyler Court, three blocks of halls of residence. Block A was opened in 1996 mostly postgraduates; Blocks B and C were completed in 2004 for undergraduates.
• Parkwood, a mini student village comprising 262 two-storey houses and a recently built apartment complex, about 5 minutes walk from the main campus. A large addition to the Parkwood area was completed in 2005, comprising a number of en-suite fitted rooms grouped into four, five and six bedroom flats.

Library

Students studying in the Templeman Library, which offers impressive views of Canterbury and Canterbury Cathedral.

Photograph of the University Library, with the Senate in the foreground on the right, taken in 2006.

The Templeman Library (named after Dr Geoffrey Templeman, the University's first Vice-Chancellor) contains over a million items in stock including books, journals, videos, DVDs, and archive materials (for example, a full text of The Times from 1785 onwards), yet it is still only half its planned size. It has a materials fund of approximately £1million a year, and adds 12,000 items every year. It is open every day in term time. It receives 800,000 visits a year, with approximately half a million loans per annum.

It also houses the British Cartoon Archive, a national collection of, mainly, newspaper cartoons, with over 90,000 images catalogued.

Theatre and cinema

The University is home to the Gulbenkian Theatre, an acclaimed 344-seat theatre that shows a variety of local, national and international plays and productions as well as playing host to well-known comedians and celebrities. The theatre was opened in 1969 and was named after the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation which helped fund its construction. Attached to the building is the popular Cinema 3, an arthouse cinema showing a mix of classics, films in association with the University's film studies department, and new Hollywood movies. In the daytime the cinema is used as a lecture theatre. Both the cinema and theatre are open to the public and are popular with residents of Canterbury.

A new café-bar extension was completed in 2005.

Sports Centre

A £1.5million development completed in 2003 meant that the Sport Centre is among the best of all UK universities. Its facilities include tennis and squash courts, hockey and football pitches, a state of the art gymnasium, a cardio theatre, a dance studio, a multi purpose sports hall and a fair trade cafe, although unusually, no swimming pool.

Academic Faculties and Departments

The University is divided into three faculties:

• Humanities
• Social Sciences
• Science, Technology and Medical Studies (STMS)

The original plan was to have no academic sub-divisions within the three faculties (initially Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences) and to incorporate an interdisciplinary element to all degrees through common first year courses ("Part I") in each faculty, followed by specialist study in the second and final years ("Part II"). The lack of Departments encouraged the development of courses that crossed traditional divides, such as Chemical Physics, Chemistry with Control Engineering, Biological Chemistry and Environmental Physical Science.

However the interdisciplinary approach proved increasingly complex for two reasons. The levels of specialisation at A Levels meant that many students had not studied particular subjects for some years and this made it impossible to devise a course that both covered areas unstudied by some and did not bore others. This proved an especial problem in Natural Sciences, where many Mathematics students had not studied Chemistry at A Level and vice versa. Additionally many subjects, particularly those in the Social Sciences, were not taught at A Level and required the first year as a grounding in the subject rather than an introduction to several different new subjects. Problems were especially encountered in the Faculty of Natural Sciences where the differing demands of Mathematics and physical sciences led to two almost completely separate programmes and student bases. In 1970 this led to the creation of the School of Mathematical Studies, standing outside the Faculties. The addition of other subjects led to increased pressure on common Part I programmes and increasingly students took more specialised Part I courses designed to prepare them for Part II study.

The University now has the Faculties further divided into 18 Departments and Schools, ranging from the School of English to the Department of Biosciences, and from the Kent Law School to the Department of Economics. Also of note is the University's Brussels School of International Studies, located in Brussels, Belgium. The School offers Master's degrees in international relations theory and international conflict analysis, along with an LLM in international law. In 2005 a new department, The Kent School of Architecture, began teaching its first students.

Student body

The student population is quite mixed, with approximately 25% of students coming from overseas. No less than 128 different nationalities are currently represented. The female to male ratio is 54 women to every 46 men.

Students' Union

Main article: University of Kent Students' Union

The Students' Union is known as "Kent Union" and has a considerable presence on campus. Kent Union runs three shops on campus, Essentials (all-purpose food and essentials), Parkwood Essentials (ditto, but in student village Parkwood) and Extras (off-licence). The Union also runs the Parkwood bar Woody's and the two-storey nightclub The Venue, which in 2006 played host to big names such as Zane Lowe, Pendulum, DJ Hype, the Scratch Perverts, members of B*Witched and Tim Westwood.

The union is notable for having the unique position of "Duck Warden", (currently held by 1st year psychology student Sam Leivers) amongst its many office bearers.

In the early 1980s the Students' Union had a strong reputation for live music and played host to such acts as U2, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, The Smiths', Echo & the Bunnymen and Elvis Costello.

The Student Bar

The Student Bar is an online community, developed by a student at the university, which currently has over 6,000 members that consist of people that either study or work at the University of Kent, or are members of the university's alumni.

The website itself is similar to other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Members are able to provide a profile which can include information about their course of study, personal details and interests as well as upload photos. The mainstay of The Student Bar is the ability to create and join groups for discussion on a range of topics. It creates a closer unity between students at the university that wasn't usually provided for students prior to 2006 and adds an extra level of socialising. The Student Bar is now open to students at other universities in the UK.

Despite the popularity of The Student Bar, students have also recently begun to use other sites like Facebook.

Academic Dress

Academic dress is normally only worn at graduation ceremonies. In common with most British universities a graduand begins the ceremony wearing the dress of the degree they are being admitted to. This is in contrast to the practice at some universities such as Oxford where a graduand only dons the dress of a degree after they have been conferred it.

Graduation ceremonies were originally held on campus, in, first, Eliot and, then, Rutherford Dining Halls; but as numbers grew were transferred to Canterbury Cathedral. Since 2003, graduates of the University of Kent's Medway campus have had separate graduation ceremonies at Rochester Cathedral in Medway.

The dress for members of the University of Kent is as follows:

Gowns

For Bachelor's, Master's and MPhil graduates a plain black gown is worn. For PhD graduates the gowns have facings of scarlet velvet. For Higher Doctorates the gown is scarlet with scarlet velvet facings and two bands of scarlet velvet on the sleeves. The Doctor of Civil Law (an honorary degree) has facings of purple velvet. The Chancellor's gown is elaborately trimmed with gold lace, whilst the Vice-Chancellor's gown is black, adorned with gold lace in an oak leaf pattern.

Hoods

File:UnikentBAhood.PNG

The hood design as seen from behind. The outer colour denotes the level of degree (here silver for a Bachelor's degree. The central panel indicates the Faculty (here green for Humanities).

The hoods are triangular and contain two colours, with the colour of the bulk of the hood indicating the level of study whilst a central panel denotes the faculty.

Level

Degrees

• Foundation Degree - Bronze
• Bachelor's - Silver
• Master's - Gold
• PhD - Cardinal red
• Higher Doctorates - Scarlet

Non degrees

• Certificates - Navy blue
• Diplomas - Burgundy
• Postgraduate awards - Navy and burgundy
• Edexcel Higher National Diplomas & Higher National Certificates - Bright blue and red

Faculty

• Humanities - Green
• Social Sciences - Grey
• Science, Technology & Medical Sciences - Royal blue
• Affiliated & Associate institutions - Pale blue
• Doctor of Civil Law - Black

Headdress

All Foundation, Bachelor's and Master's graduates wear a plain black mortarboard. All Doctoral graduands wear a plain black cloth bonnet with a maroon cord and tassel, except Doctor of Civil Law graduands have a cord and tassel in gold silk. The Chancellor wears a bonnet of forest green silk satin damask. The Vice-Chancellor wears a mortarboard with a gold netted button and black silk tassel.

Alumni services

In contact with almost 30,000 alumni worldwide, the Development & Alumni Relations Team produces publications, undertakes fundraising activities to support the University and organises events for alumni.

The Chaplaincy

Whilst the University is secular, there is a strong chaplaincy consisting of permanent Anglican and Catholic priests, a Pentecostal minister, as well as part-time chaplains from other denominations and faiths.

The chaplaincy runs the annual Carol Service that takes place every year in the Cathedral at the end of Autumn Term.

League Table Results

The 2008 Guardian Newspaper University League Tables (published 2007) puts the University of Kent in 30th place in the institutional rankings, while The Times Good University Guide (2007 - published 2006) puts Kent in 34th place. The Sunday Times University League Table (2006) placed Kent in 46th place.

Kent does not appear in the top 200 World Universities listed by The Times Higher Education Supplement or the top 500 World Universities listed by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University's world rankings table.

In the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise the University of Kent was placed 46th (according to the RAE league tables in The Times Higher Education Supplement).

Sixteen departments from Kent appear in the top 20 of either The Times or The Guardian's British subject rankings from 2005 (including six departments in the top ten).

The National Student Survey conducted in 2005 reported that the University of Kent had the best student satisfaction in the South East (excluding London, which is considered a region in its own right) and was 26th out of 128 institutions surveyed. Part-time students gave the University an even better ranking, putting Kent in 4th place nationally when only part-time student opinions were taken into account.

The Franco-British double degree programme

This bi-lingual programme combines subjects in one degree and is taught in two countries. The first year is spent at the University of Kent, the second year at the Institut d'études politiques de Lille (IEP), the third year at the University of Kent, the fourth year at the IEP of Lille and the fifth is either spent in Canterbury, in Brussels or in Lille.

The students of the Franco-British double degree programme receive at the end of the fourth year the BA (Bachelor of Arts) from the University of Kent, the Diplôme by the IEP of Lille and at the end of the fifth year, either the MA (Master of Arts) in Canterbury or in Brussels or the Master delivered by the IEP of Lille, chosen between 14 parcours de formation by the IEP of Lille.

• Official Site of the Franco-British course at the IEP of Lille and at the University of Kent at Canterbury - French and English

Plagiarism detected

In a case that received widespread national and international media attention, Michael Gunn, a third year English Literature student at the University of Kent, was found in 2004 - just before taking his final examinations - to have plagiarised large proportions of his essays and examinations from the time that he began the course, and he was subsequently expelled from the University without a degree. The case was widely reported after Gunn and his parents threatened to sue the University for negligence, on the grounds that the University had not caught him earlier or told him that his actions were forbidden. The University pointed out that plagiarism was clearly forbidden by the School of English handbook. Gunn's proposed legal action never took place. Kent has recently been praised as one of "the best universities at tackling plagiarism" (alongside six other Universities) by Oxford Brookes University academic Jude Carroll, cited in The Times Higher Education Supplement on 19 May 2006.

See also

• Brussels School of International Studies
• UKC Radio

External links

• University of Kent website