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Middlesex University
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Middlesex University is a university in north London, England, located in the historic county boundaries of Middlesex (from which it takes its name).
History
The history of Middlesex University began in the late 1880s, when two educational institutions opened their doors in north London - St Katherine's College and the Hornsey School of Arts and Crafts. Both would become part of Middlesex Polytechnic, which was founded in 1973.
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Encyclopedia
Middlesex University is a university in north London, England, located in the historic county boundaries of Middlesex (from which it takes its name).
History
The history of Middlesex University began in the late 1880s, when two educational institutions opened their doors in north London - St Katherine's College and the Hornsey School of Arts and Crafts. Both would become part of Middlesex Polytechnic, which was founded in 1973. Middlesex was awarded the title 'University' - by Royal Assent - in 1992.
The institution was created in 1973 when Enfield College of Technology, Hendon College of Technology and Hornsey College of Art, joined to create Middlesex Polytechnic. The College of All Saints (St Katherine's College, founded 1878, uniting with Berridge House in 1964 to form All Saints) and Trent Park College joined in 1978 and in 1992 it became Middlesex University. In 2005, Middlesex University opened an overseas campus in Dubai, offering undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Business, Computing Science, Media Studies and Psychology.
Key dates in Middlesex history
- 1878 - St Katherine's College opens in Tottenham and is in use for more than a century
- 1882 - Hornsey School of Arts and Crafts founded
- 1901 - Ponders End Technical Institute begins
- 1939 - Hendon Technical Institute opens in the Burroughs, Hendon.
- 1947 - Trent Park College of Education opens to train necessary teachers in the post-war period.
- 1962 - New College of Speech and Drama opens
- 1973 - Middlesex Polytechnic formed
- 1974 - Trent Park College of Education and New College of Speech and Drama join Middlesex Polytechnic
- 1978 - All Saints Teacher Training College joins Middlesex Polytechnic
- 1992 - Middlesex University formed
- 1994 - The London College of Dance becomes part of Middlesex University
- 1995 - North London College of Health becomes part of Middlesex University; First regional offices open in Europe
- 2005 - First overseas campus opens in Dubai (U.A.E.); Tottenham Campus closes with most programmes transfered to Trent Park
- 2008 - Enfield campus closes in summer. All programmes, students and staff relocate to Hendon
Campuses
The University is spread across 5 sites. All campuses are located in North London. Each campus has a quite distinct character and some of the campuses are important architecturally, especially Trent Park.
The university is planning to consolidate many of its activities onto the Hendon campus over the next few years.
Hendon
Hendon was known as the Hendon College of Technology. Today's main (or college) building was built in the neo-Georgian style by H.W. Burchett and opened in 1939. It has been refurbished in a £40 million project, which includes the addition of a glass covered central court yard forming Ricketts Quadrangle. The college was extended in 1955 and in 1969 a new refectory and engineering block (the Williams Building) was added. In 2004 The new Learning Resource Centre, The Sheppard Library opened on the site. Hendon also has a sports club, known as The Burroughs for students and staff which has one of the few real tennis courts in the UK. Middlesex University Business School, the School of Computing Science and the bulk of the School of Health and Social Science are located in Hendon.
The campus in Hendon is expanding dramatically over the next five to ten years using a number of London Borough of Barnet office buildings including the current Town Hall in The Burroughs as well as the construction of new buildings including a new state of the art Science Building which opened in September 2008. The research centres for biomedical science, risk and environmental sciences are based here.
The University aims to achieve the consolidation of nearly all its London based teaching at Hendon.
Trent Park
See Trent Park for a short history of the campus
Trent Park is a palatial mansion set in a 4 km² country park, originally a fourteenth-century hunting ground of Henry IV. Performing arts, teacher education, humanities, product design, engineering, modern European philosophy, critical theory and art theory/aesthetics are based here. It is home to the Gubbay and Sassoon halls of residence.
The university had ambitious plans to redevelop the site, however, these were rejected by Enfield council. The Flood Hazard Research Centre moved here from the closed Enfield campus in July 2008.
Cat Hill
Cat Hill Campus is located in Cockfosters. It was originally the illustrious Hornsey College of Art, founded in 1880. In the late 1970s the campus was extended to become the Faculty of Art & Design of the then Middlesex Polytechnic. Today, art and design, cinematics and electronic arts are located at Cat Hill. The Cat Hill Campus houses MoDA, the University's Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture and the National Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive. The campus also houses the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, named after John Lansdown which runs a variety of graduate and undergraduate degrees in interactive media and electronic arts including MA Design for Interactive Media which teaches interaction design, usability, information architecture, game design and other digital disciplines.
Hospital campuses
Additionally, the School of Health and Social Sciences occupies the Archway and Hospitals campuses operating from four sites at the Royal Free Hospital, Whittington Hospital (jointly owned and in development with University College London), Chase Farm and North Middlesex hospitals.
Dubai
In 2004, Middlesex University opened its campus in Dubai, UAE, situated at Dubai Knowledge Village, a free economic zone. It is a joint venture between Middlesex University and Middlesex Associates - a business consortium in Dubai. The campus is spread over nearly 50,000 sq. ft. (ca. 4,600 sqm) and is the first Middlesex campus outside north London. The first programmes - mostly, in Business Studies - were offered to studends from January 2005. All degress are issued by Middlesex University, UK.
Currently Middlesex University Dubai offers both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, as well as pre-undergraduate studies. All four of University's schools (Arts and Education, Business School, Computing Science and Health and Social Sciences) offer degrees in Dubai.
Former campuses
Tottenham
The campus was closed in Summer 2005, and its programmes of study have been moved to the university's other campuses. The Tottenham campus started life as St Katharine's College, one of the first British teacher training colleges in 1878, later to become the College of All Saints - a Church of England college of higher education and a constituent college of the Institute of Education, University of London, for whose degrees it taught. The name change was a result of the 1964 union of St Katharine's with Berridge House, Hampstead, on the Tottenham site. The college expanded in the 1960s, although much of the campus retained its Victorian architecture. After the union with Middlesex Polytechnic, the campus was home to humanities and cultural studies, business studies, law, sociology and women's studies, all of which have been moved to other campuses. The College of All Saints itself continues to this day in the All Saints Educational Trust.
Bounds Green
Bounds Green campus, home to the Engineering and Information Technology schools was sold to a residential developer in December 2003. It was used extensively for location shooting for the 1989 film, Wilt.
Enfield
The campus closed in July 2008, and the majority of departments located here moved to the extended Hendon campus and some to the Archway Campus shared with UCL. Enfield campus was originally the Enfield College of Technology, founded in 1901 as Ponders End Technical Institute.
Schools of Middlesex University
Middlesex University is divided into four Schools:
- School of Arts and Education
- Business School, (famous for Professor John Grahl's work)
- School of Engineering & Information Sciences
- School of Health and Social Sciences
Students
Middlesex University has a very diverse student body, around 22,000 strong, many of whom are mature students. Around 5,000 students are from overseas, coming from more than 100 countries (2004). The application/places ratio is 6.1:1 (2002). The University also has student exchange links with 100 colleges and universities around the world.
Students' Union
As of 2005, Middlesex University Students' Union (MUSU) is undergoing a period of large-scale change. Academic year 2004-05 saw the university management force MUSU, against the wishes and votes of MUSU members, to give up its commercial areas - i.e., shops, bars, cafeterias and entertainments. These have now been taken over by Scolarest, a major provider of catering and support services to UK educational institutions, who was already handling catering facilities for the university proper. This situation has arisen due to a dispute over a £300,000 debt owed by MUSU to the university.
MUSU has four sabbatical officers, each with a specific portfolio, and who also represent the students on their base campus. MUSU runs a number of student lead entertainment and communication activities under the name of MUD (Middlesex University Direct). This includes a radio station (MUD Radio) and a student magazine (MUD Magazine), which is published six times a year and is available to students for free.
In 1981 Union president Nick Harvey joined protests outside Rochester Row police station after six Irish students were detained without charge under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. That year student John Kennedy stood in the Crosby by-election to highlight the case of seven students suspended from the Polytechnic after a sit-in protest demanding nursery facilities.
See John Kennedy
Restructuring
In May 2001 Middlesex University appointed C Eye, a branding consultancy, to design a new logo for the University. In 2003, the previous "M" logo was replaced with a new red-colored wavy line that is supposed to express a flexible and responsive approach to the needs of students.
In late 2006 the University decided to stop offering History as Degree, both Major and Minor in an attempt to try and reduce the £10 Million deficit that had built up. The decision, in the words of the Vice Chancellor to 'suspend the History course for the time being' was met with considerable hostility from the student body and was felt by some Faculty members to be a worrying development.
In conjunction with this move the University offered the entire History Faculty voluntary redundancy packages which the majority felt compelled to accept. As of March 2006 there are 3 History lecturers left, this then fell to 1 full timer and 2 part timers from the beginning of the Academic year, 2007.
The plight of the History department was a part of a much larger batch of cost saving exercises. These would lead to in total the loss of 142 administrative and technical staff and 33 academic staff.
Quality, Awards and Rankings
Middlesex University has been awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize three times and has also won a Queen's Award for Enterprise (for its international work). Like many universities, its league table placing varies depending on what is being measured by journalists.
In 2006, the University was ranked second in a re-assessment of teaching quality in all English universities. The Times Higher Education Supplement of 17 November 2006 reported on how the scores for each university, as marked by the Quality Assurance Agency, had been “adjusted to remove the link with research” and form a league table which had post-1992 universities performing strongly.
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) ranks Middlesex University Business School among the top 20 international business schools in the world, ahead of Oxford and Cambridge.
Middlesex University Business School is also rated as a "centre of excellence" by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the first university in the UK to offer courses accredited by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as well as accredited by the Association of MBAs.
The University is home to two HEFCE 'Centres for Excellence in Learning and Teaching' -one in Work Based Learning - one in Mental Health and Social Work.
In The Guardian's University Guide 2009, Middlesex's average teaching score was 37.90 out of 100, which placed it 108th out of 117 universities ranked.
The Independent newspaper league table 2009 ranked Middlesex 82nd out of 113 universities. The standing reflected an improvement of 25 positions from the 2008 league table, when Middlesex was ranked 107th.
Prestigious Alumni
As most other UK universities, Middlesex runs an Alumni Association that allows former students to maintain close contact with the University after their graduation. Additionally, it offers various discount and benefits to its members, as well as organizes regular reunions and social events.
Notable academics
- Richard Bayford (biomodelling and bioinformatics)
- Dan Cohn-Sherbok (theology)
- Stephan Dahl (marketing)
- Michael Driscoll (economist)
- Ray K Iles (biomedical science - biomarkers)
- Ed Gallagher (environmental studies)
- Colin Green (Flood Hazard - economics)
- Bernard Ingham (marketing)
- John Merrington deceased (history)
- Francis Mulhern (critical studies)
- Geoff Pilling deceased (political economy)
- Irena Papadopoulos (transcultural nursing research)
- Edmund Penning-Rowsell (flood hazard - geography)
- John Redwood (management)
- Mike Revitt (environmental science - water quality)
- Bali Rooprai (scientific basis of complementary medicine)
- Jonathan Rée (philosophy)
- Adrian Rifkin (visual culture)
- David Turner (computing science)
- Roman Belavkin (computing science)
- Judith Williamson (cultural history)
See also
External links
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