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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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)