“A Small Town of Character”: Locating a New Scottish University, 1963−1965

Abstract

The ancient Scottish universities of St. Andrews (founded in 1410), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1495), and Edinburgh (1583) are among Europe's most celebrated institutions of higher learning, renowned for their liberal commitment to religious and social inclusion. Established centuries before the union between Scotland and England in the early eighteenth century, the Scottish universities occupy a unique and distinctive position in British higher education. Although the three oldest were religious foundations, Edinburgh was established by the city's council, which remained the governing authority until 1858. Two years later, King's College Aberdeen combined with Marischal College, a separate institution established in the same city in 1593, to create a powerful quartet of Victorian universities that educated in the mid-nineteenth century proportionately twice as many Scottish students as the similar number of English universities educated from the population south of the border (Anderson, 2006, pp. 12À13; Whyte, 2015, pp. 4À5, 32).Scotland's relative preeminence in British higher education began to wane in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when six new "redbrick" universities were established in the larger industrial cities of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and Bristol, mainly inspired by the civic higher educational ideals developed in London and Edinburgh rather than the ecclesiastical traditions of Oxford and Cambridge. Further new university colleges, emerging in smaller cities and towns such as Nottingham, Reading, and Southampton and also initially offering degrees validated by the University of London, reinforced the changing geography of British higher education (Beloff, 1969).