Magee College - History

History

The Magee Campus gained its name from Martha Magee, the widow of a Presbyterian minister, who, in 1845, bequeathed £20,000 to the Presbyterian Church of Ireland to found a college for theology and the arts. It opened in 1865 primarily as a theological college, but accepted students from all denominations to study a variety of subjects. It was a college of the Royal University of Ireland from 1880 and later became associated with the Trinity College, Dublin when the Royal University was dissolved in 1909 and replaced by the National University of Ireland..

In 1953, Magee Theological College separated from the remainder of the college, eventually moving to Belfast in a 1978 merger that formed Union Theological College. Also in 1953, Magee College broke its links with Dublin and became Magee University College. It was hoped that this university college would become Northern Ireland's second university after Queen's University of Belfast, but in the 1960s, the Stormont Parliament, made a controversial decision to pass it over in favour of a new university in Coleraine, a decision which was one of the pivotal points in the history of The Troubles. Instead it was incorporated into the two-campus New University of Ulster in 1969. The next fourteen years saw the college halve in size, while development focused on the main Coleraine campus. In 1984, the New University merged with the Ulster Polytechnic, and Magee became the early focus of development of a new four-campus university, the University of Ulster. Student and faculty numbers recovered and grew rapidly over the next ten to fifteen years, accompanied by numerous construction projects Magee has grown from just 273 students in 1984 to over 4,000 undergraduates today. In 2009, the University of Ulster's Vice Chancellor Professor Richard Barnett identified Magee as the only campus the University had earmarked for the expansion of student numbers. The University has been lobbying the Northern Ireland Executive for an additional 1,000 full-time undergraduate places.