University of Kent

The University of Kent (formerly the University of Kent at Canterbury, abbreviated as UKC) is a university within the London and South East University Group (LASE) in Kent, England. It was an independent university from 1965, when it was founded by royal charter, to 2026, when it merged with the University of Greenwich to form LASE. Following the merger, Kent is formally an academic division within LASE, but continues to operate as a university, including recruiting students, teaching and granting degrees, under the branding of the University of Kent (now formally a trading name of LASE), under LASE's shared governance, management and academic board..

The university's principal campus occupies 300 acres of land overlooking the World Heritage Site of Canterbury Cathedral, and also maintains a campus in Medway and a postgraduate centre in Paris. The university is international, with students from 158 different nationalities and 41% of its academic and research staff being from outside the United Kingdom. It is a member of the Santander Network of European universities encouraging social and economic development.

Alumni include two Nobel laureates in literature – Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and Abdulrazak Gurnah – as well as prominent individuals in politics, media, and law.

History

Origins

A university in the city of Canterbury was first considered in 1947, when an anticipated growth in student numbers led several residents to seek the creation of a new university, including Kent. However, the plans never came to fruition. A decade later both population growth and greater demand for university places led to a re-consideration. In 1959 the Education Committee of Kent County Council explored the creation of a new university, formally accepting the proposal unanimously on 24 February 1960. Two months later the Education Committee agreed to seek a site at or near Canterbury, given the historical associations of the city, subject to the support of Canterbury City Council.

By 1962 a site was found at Beverley Farm, straddling the then boundary between the City of Canterbury and the administrative county of Kent. The university's original name, chosen in 1962, was the University of Kent at Canterbury, reflecting its cross-boundary campus. The name adopted reflected the support of both the city and county authorities; as well as the existence of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, which officially opposed the use of a name too similar to its own. The abbreviation "UKC" became a popular abbreviation for the university.

1965 to 2000

The University of Kent at Canterbury was granted its Royal Charter on 4 January 1965 and the first group of 500 students arrived on 11 October 1965. On 30 March 1966 Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent was formally installed as the first Chancellor.

The university was envisaged as being a collegiate establishment, with most students living in one of the colleges on campus, and as specialising in inter-disciplinary studies in all fields. Over the years, changes in government policy and other changing demands have largely destroyed this original concept, leading to the present state, which is nearer the norm for a British university. However, the four original colleges – Darwin, Eliot, Keynes and Rutherford – remain, together with the newer Woolf and Turing colleges.

The university grew at a rapid rate throughout the 1960s, with three colleges and many other buildings on campus being completed by the end of the decade. The 1970s saw further construction, but the university also encountered 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 11 July. Fortunately, the university had insurance against subsidence, so it was able to pay for the south-west corner of the building to be demolished and replaced by a new wing at the other end of the building.

Campuses

Canterbury campus

The main Canterbury campus covers 300 acres (120 hectares) and is situated in parkland in an elevated position just over two miles (three kilometres) from the city centre, with views over the city and Canterbury Cathedral UNESCO world heritage site. The campus currently has approximately 12,000 full-time and 6,200 part-time students, with accommodation for over 5000, in addition to 600 academic and research staff. Residential and academic buildings are intermingled in the central part of the campus, science building are clustered west of Giles Lens and there is a dedicated student village on the western edge, several minutes’ walk from the main campus. The campus is ecologically diverse and home to a number of protected species, including Great Crested Newts. The North West of the site is heavily forested, including pockets of ancient woodland, while the Southern Slopes contain a mix of wildflower and hay meadows, and there are seven ponds spread across the campus.

Facilities

The campus has a selection of shops, including a grocery store, bookshop, pharmacy and launderettes. Food and drink is provided by range of cafes and bars run either by the university or the students' union.

The campus nightclub, The Venue, was refurbished and modernised in 2010.

Sporting facilities are spread across two main sites: the sports centre, which contains several multi-purpose sports halls, a fitness suite, squash courts and climbing wall, and the Sports Pavilion site, with a variety of indoor and outdoor sports pitches and training facilities, including 3G and astroturf.

Gulbenkian arts complex

The Gulbenkian arts complex includes a theatre and cinema, as well as a small stage which hosts monthly comedy nights as well as occasional shows such as Jazz at Five and The Chortle Student Comedy Awards. The adjacent Colyer-Fergusson Building, which opened in 2013, includes an adaptable format concert/rehearsal hall with retractable seating and variable acoustics and practice rooms. The Gulbenkian Theatre seats 340 and presents student, professional and amateur shows throughout the year. The theatre was opened in 1969 and was named after the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation which helped fund its construction. The Gulbenkian Cinema is an independent cinema in the Gulbenkian complex open to students and the general public. It is Kent's regional film theatre showing new mainstream and non-mainstream releases as well as archive and foreign language films. In the daytime the cinema is used as a lecture theatre for University students. The Gulbenkian complex also hosts a cafe/ bar and restaurant facility open to students, staff and the general public.

Organisation and administration

The university is formally an academic division within LASE, operating under a trading name as the University of Kent. LASE holds the degree-awarding power of the institution, and has been permitted by the Office for Students to award degrees under the name of the University of Kent.

Faculties, departments and schools

In 2020, because of financial pressures caused by a combination of the 2000 demographic dip and the 2020/21 COVID-19 pandemic, the university abolished the faculties and reorganised itself into six divisions (see below).

Until 2020, the university was divided into three faculties: humanities, sciences and social sciences, which were further sub-divided into 20 schools.

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.

Substantial change to this structure did not come until the 1990s, driven more by national government policy than curricular demands, which were, after all, very flexible by nature. In 1989 the Universities Funding Council, which was merged into the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in 1992, was charged by the UK Government to determine the cost for teaching each subject. To meet these accountancy requirements, Kent required for the first time that each member of staff declare a single discipline they would be affiliated with in future. When departments were formed in the early 1990s this led to a great deal of reorganisation of staff, and destroyed many existing inter-disciplinary relationships. Following the formation of departments, finance was devolved to departments based on how many students were taught. This quickly evolved into undermining the interdisciplinary context further, as departments sought to control finance by increasing the amount of specialist teaching in the first year.

Academic profile

Research

Kent is a research-led university with 24 schools and 40 specialist research centres spanning the sciences, technology, medical studies, the social sciences, arts and humanities. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), which assesses the quality of research in UK higher education institutions, Kent is ranked 38th by GPA and 32nd for research power (the grade point average score of a university, multiplied by the full-time equivalent number of researchers submitted). In the 2014 REF, the University of Kent was ranked 40th out of 128 participating institutions in a 'grade point average' league table in The Times Higher Education Supplement (falling from 31st in 2008), 30th in terms of 'Research Power' (rising from 40th in 2008), and 19th in terms of 'Research Intensity' (rising from 49th in 2008). The university had a total research income of £17.7 million in the 2021-22 academic year.

Reputation and rankings

For 2020, The Guardian newspaper ranked Kent 65th in the UK, while The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2018 put Kent in 25th place, as did The Independent's Complete University Guide. QS placed Kent 46th in the UK and 366th in the world, while Times Higher Education placed it 44th in the UK and in the 301–350 group worldwide. In The Sunday Times 10-year (1998–2007) average ranking of British universities based on consistent league table performance, Kent was ranked 48th overall in the UK. In 2015, Kent ranked ahead of 10 Russell Group universities according to the ranking of The Complete University Guide. In research, both The Guardian and The Times newspapers ranked Kent 29th, with The Independent rating the university 28th for its overall research activity in 2014.

The National Student Survey in 2017 placed Kent joint 20th in the UK, with an overall satisfaction of 90%.

In the Times Higher Education's assessment of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, the History department at Kent was ranked first in the country.

Library

The Templeman Library (named after 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, on a 24/7 basis. It receives 800,000 visits a year, with approximately half a million loans per annum.

The library also houses the British Cartoon Archive, (established 1975) a national collection of political and social cartoons, with over 90,000 images catalogued and an extensive collection of related books.

Student life

Admissions and enrolment

The student population is mixed, with around 15,000 undergraduates and 4,000 postgraduates, with approximately 22% of students coming from overseas. Approximately 128 different nationalities are currently represented, and the female to male ratio is 55 women to every 45 men.

New students entering the university in 2021 had an average of 127 points (the equivalent of BBB-ABB at A Level). According to the 2023 Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, approximately 4% of Kent's undergraduates come from independent schools.

Students' Union

The Students' Union, officially known as "Kent Union", is the student representative body for students at the university. It is led by five elected full-time officers (the 'sabbatical team'), a Board of trustees, part-time student officers and 'lay' members of the local community and business selected for their specialist expertise.

The university has two Co-Op shops, one in the main campus area, and the other in Park Wood student village. The two all-purpose food and essentials stores were previously known Essentials and Parkwood Essentials. The Union also operates the Park Wood bar Woody's and a 1,500 capacity nightclub The Venue which, unusually, is located on the central campus. Essentials, the Venue and other shops and Union offices are located in purpose-made buildings completed in 1998. Kent Union also co-ordinates over 200 sports clubs and societies, as well as media outlets, volunteering and charity activities, and provides student welfare services.

The Students' Union has hosted concerts by bands including Led Zeppelin and The Who.

Demonstrations

In early March 1970 a General Meeting of the University of Kent at Canterbury Students' Union voted to occupy the Cornwallis Building as part of a national student movement to open personal records to individual student scrutiny. The occupation lasted about two weeks, with a majority vote ending the occupation on 18 March. Approximately 400 students marched out of the Cornwallis Building to present a set of demands that were handed by Union President David Lawrence to the University Registrar Mr Eric Fox. The demands had been drawn up and debated by groups of up to 300 students at a time in meetings and seminars held throughout the occupation.

In the early to mid-1970s, along with other plate-glass universities, the Union had a reputation for revolutionary politics, leading to demands for law changes from some staff trade unionists. It was active in anti-poll tax, anti-student loans and anti-racism campaigns as well as safety campaigns on campus in the late 1980s.

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