Red brick university (or redbrick university) is an informal term used to refer to six particular universities founded in the major industrial cities of England. Five of the six red brick institutions gained university status before World War I and were initially established as civic science and/or engineering colleges. In the case of the University of Manchester which merged in 2004, its predecessor, the Victoria University of Manchester, gained a royal charter and red brick status in 1903.
Whilst the term was originally coined as these institutions were new and thus regarded by the ancient universities as arriviste, the description has since ceased to be derogatory with the 1960s proliferation of universities and the reclassification of polytechnics in 1992. The six institutions are members of the Russell Group (which receives two-thirds of all research grant funding in the United Kingdom).
Read more about Red Brick University: The Civic University Movement, Origins of The Term, Other Institutions, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words red, brick and/or university:
“How red the rose that is the soldier’s wound,
The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all
The soldiers that have fallen, red in blood,
The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)