History
The university is the recent successor of a large number of merged and name-changed institutions of further and higher education. Its history began with the Mechanics' Institute founded in 1834. From 1992, Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education (CGCHE) was permitted to award first and postgraduate degrees and 1998 it achieved Research degree awarding powers. However, it was only in 2001 that the University of Gloucestershire was awarded university status. Its history spans nearly two centuries.
Dame Janet Trotter was the Vice-chancellor and Principal from 2001, retiring in 2006.
The University of Gloucestershire has pursued an environmental sustainability strategy since 1993, and was the first UK university to meet the ISO 14001 environmental management standard. In the People & Planet Green League 2008 published by the Times Higher Education (THE), it was ranked as the greenest university in the UK. The University of Gloucestershire is also an active participant of the ERASMUS programme and the only UK university to be part of the BCA Programme offering semester abroad, most notably with the USA.
Simon Pegg, the comic actor and director who plays Scotty in the 2009 revamp of Star Trek, received an Honorary Fellowship from the University of Gloucestershire on the 4th of December 2008, for his contribution to the arts.
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“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
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“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
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“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
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