University of Nottingham

Founding The University of Nottingham traces its origins to both the founding of an adult education school in 1798, and the University Extension Lectures inaugurated by the University of Cambridge in 1873, which were launched at Nottingham before expanding to other posts of the country. However, the foundation of the university is generally regarded as being the establishment of University College Nottingham, in 1881 as a college preparing students for examinations of the University of London. In 1875, an anonymous donor provided £10,000 to establish the work of the Adult Education School and Cambridge Extension Lectures on a permanent basis, and the Corporation of Nottingham agreed to erect and maintain a building for this purpose and to provide funds to supply the instruction. and the college's neo-gothic building on Shakespeare Street was formally opened on 30 July 1881 by Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, with the college admitting its first students that autumn In 1881, there were four professors – of Literature, Physics, Chemistry and Natural Science. New departments and chairs quickly followed: Engineering in 1884, Classics combined with Philosophy in 1893, French in 1897 and Education in 1905; in 1905 the combined Department of Physics and Mathematics became two separate entities; in 1911 Departments of English and Mining were created, in 1912, Economics, and Geology combined with Geography; History in 1914, Adult Education in 1923 and Pharmacy in 1925. Boot and his fellow benefactors sought to establish an "elite seat of learning" committed to widening participation, and hoped that the move would solve the problems facing University College Nottingham, in its restricted building on Shakespeare Street. Boot stipulated that, whilst part of the Highfields site, lying south-west of the city, should be devoted to the university college, the rest should provide a place of recreation for the residents of the city, and, by the end of the decade, the landscaping of the lake and public park adjoining University Boulevard was completed. The original university college building on Shakespeare Street in central Nottingham, known as the Arkwright Building, now forms part of Nottingham Trent University's City Campus. University College Nottingham was initially accommodated within the Trent Building, an imposing white limestone structure with a distinctive clock tower, designed by Morley Horder, and formally opened by King George V on 10 July 1928. During this period of development, Nottingham attracted high-profile visiting speakers, including Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, and Mahatma Gandhi. The blackboard used by Einstein for his lecture at Nottingham is still on display in the Physics department. Apart from its physical transfer to surroundings that could not be more different from its original home, the college made few developments between the wars. The Department of Slavonic Languages (later Slavonic Studies) was established in 1933, the teaching of Russian having been introduced in 1916. In 1933–34, the departments of Electrical Engineering, Zoology and Geography, which had been combined with other subjects, were made independent; and in 1938 a supplemental charter provided for a much wider representation on the governing body. However, further advances were delayed by the outbreak of war in 1939. In 1948, the institution was granted a royal charter as the University of Nottingham, giving it university status and the power to confer its own degrees. In the 1940s, the Midlands Agricultural and Dairy College at Sutton Bonington merged with the university as the School of Agriculture, and in 1956 the Portland Building was completed to complement the Trent Building. In 1970, the university established the UK's first new medical school of the 20th century. Subsequently, the teaching of terrorism studies was dropped at the university. The university's student rag, Karnival, was suspended in 2016 to ensure compliance with the Charities Act 2016, particularly in the safeguarding of participants in fundraising activities and the people they interacted with. It was reinstated later that year, but an investigation the following year, 2017, determined that "RAG raids" had breached the safeguarding requirements and health and safety policies on multiple occasions, leading the students' union executive to ban these activities. In the 2020–21 academic year, students of the University of Nottingham organised large-scale campaigns for wider academic, welfare, and financial support for students during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the university briefly blocked the appointment of a Catholic chaplain due to his social media posts on abortion and euthanasia. The university maintained that their concern was not about the priest's views but the way they had been expressed. Following discussions, the priest was able to take up the post the following month. In November 2023, the University of Nottingham became the first university in the UK to be awarded an institutional Athena SWAN Gold Award for its commitment to advancing gender equality. In January 2025, the university announced plans to sell its King's Meadow Campus. and that it intended to sell its Castle Meadow Campus. The accounts for 2024/25 revealed that the Castle Meadow Campus, which the university bought for £37.5 million in 2021 and spent over £40 million refurbishing, was now valued at between £14.8 and £18 million. ==Campuses==