University of Buckingham

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University of Buckingham
Motto:	Flying on our own Wings
Established:	1976[1]
Type:	Private
Chancellor:	Sir Martin Jacomb
Vice-Chancellor:	Dr Terence Kealey
Staff:	89[1]
Students:	840[1]
Undergraduates:	610[1]
Postgraduates:	230[1]
Location:	Buckingham, England 51°59′45″N 0°59′31″W / 51.99583°N 0.99194°W / 51.99583; -0.99194Coordinates: 51°59′45″N 0°59′31″W / 51.99583°N 0.99194°W / 51.99583; -0.99194
Website:	http://www.buckingham.ac.uk

The University of Buckingham is the only degree-awarding independent university in the United Kingdom. The university has the highest ranking in the UK for student satisfaction. Its highest-rated departments are English, Business, and Law (see below).

The University's two main campuses are in Buckingham. The upper campus covers Law and Science; the river-side campus (in the centre of town), Humanities, Business, Social Sciences, and Education. Some teaching takes place in London, in Grosvenor Place, London, at the home of one of its partner institutions, the European School of Economics^{[citation needed]}. Its prominent academics include philosopher Roger Scruton, educationalist Alan Smithers, the former Chief Inspector of Schools Chris Woodhead, the cancer specialist Karol Sikora, and the expert in UK Intelligence, Anthony Glees^{[citation needed]}.

Contents 1 History 2 Campuses 3 Teaching 4 Degrees: timescale and cost 5 Research 6 Reputation and ranking 7 Quality 8 Alumni and Honorary Graduates 9 External degrees 10 Chancellorship 11 University of Buckingham Press 12 International connections 13 References 14 External links

[edit] History

Some of the founding academics migrated from the University of Oxford,^[2] disillusioned or wary of aspects of the late 1960s' ethos. On 27 May 1967, The Times published a letter from Dr J. W. Paulley, which said: "Is it now time to examine the possibility of creating at least one university in this country on the pattern of [the] great private foundations in the USA"^{[citation needed]}. Three London conferences followed which explored this idea^{[citation needed]}.

Subsequently the university was incorporated as the University College of Buckingham in 1973, and received its Royal Charter from the Queen in 1983.

Its development was influenced by the libertarian Institute of Economic Affairs, in particular, Harry Ferns and Ralph Harris, heads of the Institute. In keeping with its adherence to a libertarian philosophy, the university's foundation-stone was laid by Margaret Thatcher, who was also to be the university's Chancellor (nominal and ceremonial head) between 1993 and 1998. The University's first two Vice-Chancellors were Lord Beloff (1913-1999), the former Gladstone Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford, and Sir Alan Peacock, the economist, founder of the Economics department at York University, and Fellow of the British Academy.

[edit] Campuses

The centrally-located Tanlaw Mill, beside the river, is one of the students' social centres, with bars, gym, cafe, refectory, and other facilities. The university's Clore Laboratory is also nearby.

The Antony de Rothschild Building, overlooking the river Ouse on the other side, houses the School of Business and also the Department of International Studies and Economics. Higher up the hill, off the river, the Chandos Building, is another complex of lecture theatres, language-learning and media and computer suites, examination halls, gallery spaces, English-language study rooms and cinema.

The second main campus is up the hill, nearer to the edge of the town. Its central building is now the home of the Law School. Some postgraduate teaching also takes place at its London base.

[edit] Teaching

The university's five main faculties are Law, Humanities, Business, Science, and Medicine. Each of these is presided over by a Dean of Studies, an academic leader in their field.

In relation to teaching, the university is best known for continuing the tradition of "tutorial" (i.e small group) teaching^[3] which its founders brought over from the University of Oxford. While there are seminars and lectures, much teaching is done in small groups of 4 to 8 students, with one member of staff. It is this personalized teaching which gives the university its distinctive mood and ethos. The staff-student ratio is 1:8.4, which is high among UK universities.^[4] The Times Good University Guide (2009) notes that "one-to-one tutorials^{[citation needed]}, which have almost died out elsewhere, with the exception of Oxbridge...are quite common at Buckingham" because of the good staff-student ratio.

The quality of the university's provision is maintained, as at other UK universities, by an External Examiner system (i.e., professors from other universities oversee and report on exams and marking), by an Academic Advisory Council (comprising a range of subject-specialist academics from other universities), and by membership of the QAA, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.

The Department of Education is home to some of the most prominent educationalists in Britain, including Professor Chris Woodhead (former head of Ofsted), Professor Anthony O'Hear (director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy), and Professor Alan Smithers. Its Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) – which specialises in the independent sector – is accredited with Qualified Teacher Status which means that it also qualifies graduates to teach in the state sector.

The cancer specialist Karol Sikora is Dean of the School of Medicine.

The university was – in the spirit of North-American Ivy League Universities – created as a liberal arts college, and the major humanities subjects such as History and Politics are offered with Economics as a degree in International Studies. Economics, however, is available as a stand-alone degree, as is English Literature and combined degrees relating to Journalism. The Professor of Economics, and Dean of Humanities, Professor Martin Ricketts, is the chair of the Institute of Economic Affairs Academic Advisory Council, thus cementing the links between the two libertarian bodies.

Courses at Buckingham place far greater emphasis on exams as an assessment method rather than coursework (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/student/university_guides/article2764572.ece)

[edit] Degrees: timescale and cost

The university offers traditional degrees over a shorter time-frame. Students at Buckingham study for 8 terms over two years, rather than 9 terms over three, which (with extra teaching) fits a three-year degree into two years. From September 2009, tuition fees for full-time UK and EU undergraduate students will be £8,040 per year for these 2-year Bachelor's degree programmes. For non-EU students, fees will be equivalent to £13,500 p.a. Because Buckingham's degrees take only two years to complete, the university views its courses as cost-effective compared to ordinary UK university courses, once living expenses and the income from an extra year's employment are taken into account.^{[citation needed]}

Dr Terence Kealey, published an article on 4 June in the Daily Telegraph newspaper^[5] arguing that getting better-funded and more effective universities means charging higher fees.

[edit] Research

The university's research strengths are in a number of disparate areas: in Law, family law and law relating to gender; in the Humanities, Dickens, with the Dickens Journals Online project, and also Biography and Life-writing; in Business, particularly entrepreneurship; in Science, particularly diabetes, obesity, and metabolic research, at the Clore Laboratory; face recognition systems, within Applied Computing; and Intelligence issues, within the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies.^{[citation needed]} The Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies moved from Brunel when Anthony Glees, its founder, moved to Buckingham in 2007.

Education research takes place at the Centre for Education and Employment Research within the Department of Education. This is under the directorship of Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson, and investigates "the current state of education for policymakers, practitioners and others who make education happen".

Dickens Journals Online, which is run from within the Department of English, aims to make available free, for schools, universities, and others, a complete online edition of Charles Dickens's weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. When completed, it will make available, to a wide audience, a rich slice of nineteenth-century literature, opinion, information, and history. Dr John Drew, of the department of English, has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship (2009-11) to further the project.

The School of Business is an Accredited Study Centre for The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)^{[citation needed]}.

The Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, which runs an MA in this field, is prominent in recent debates concerning Muslim radicalization in the UK and the role of the intelligence forces in this area.

[edit] Reputation and ranking

The Times Higher Education Supplement reported that Buckingham was ranked first in 2006^[6], 2007^[7] and 2008^[8] in the NSS or National Student Survey of student satisfaction. This is a census, albeit controversial, of final-year undergraduates conducted by IposMori, the polling organization, to determine satisfaction levels at UK universities. ^[9] The survey relates to the whole student experience, from the experience of classes, and lecturer feedback, to the quality of pastoral care.

The Times Good University Guide (2009) notes that Buckingham comes high up in the student satisfaction data (see above) but cannot conventionally 'rank' the university because, as an independent institution, it does not take tax-payers' money from the funding councils (and is hence not ranked by them in terms of research). The Guardian University Guide (2009) makes similar points: in particular, breaking down the National Student Survey figures, that students in Law and Business report very high satisfaction levels.

The University's highest-ranking departments are English, Business, and Law. The league tables of individual university departments produced by The Guardian newspaper (University Guide, 12 May 2009), for example, rank English at Buckingham at 15th out of 97 UK departments, Business at Buckingham at 20th overall, and Law at 23rd (as in 2008).^[10]

The university does not at present rank in the top 600 universities globally as rated by Quacquarelli Symonds and the Times Higher Education Supplement.^[11]

[edit] Quality

The University was a pioneer of quality and its Royal Charter, unusually, provides for 3 sovereign bodies, the third one (in addition to the usual Council and Senate) being the Academic Advisory Council, which is a group of external academics that audits the academic staff.

When the national Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) was created, the University felt it should join, even though - as Britain’s only independent University – it is markedly different from the state-funded universities that the QAA otherwise audits.

The University has emerged as a critic of the QAA. Professor Geoffrey Alderman, in his inaugural lecture at the University of Buckingham Teaching Quality Assessment, League Tables and the Decline of Academic Standards in British Higher Education^[12] demonstrated that degree inflation had taken off in the 10 years of the QAA’s existence. This lecture provoked a wide national debate ^[13] which encouraged the House of Commons Select Committee to review quality and related issues.^[14]

The University got broad confidence its first QAA audit in 2003.^[15] In 2008 the QAA said that:

"limited confidence can reasonably be placed in the soundness of the University's current and likely future management of the academic standards of its awards" and also that "confidence can reasonably be placed in the soundness of the University's current and likely future management of the quality of the learning opportunities available to students." ^[16]

The University's Vice-Chancellor, Dr Terence Kealey, commented on the QAA report in the Times Higher Education magazine on 16 September 2008,^[17] followed a week later by a lead letter from the Chief Executive of the QAA^[18] and an article by Melanie Newman in the same issue.^[19]

A few weeks later, Dr Kealey discussed the QAA in a feature article in the Guardian newspaper.^[20] A week later the Chief Executive of QAA and Professor Gill Evans responded in the same paper.^[21] The Vice-Chancellor, Dr Terence Kealey, then wrote a further article for the Guardian newspaper linking the QAA inspection regime with degree inflation which has so undermined UK Higher Education that the Burgess Report recommends abandoning classed degrees altogether ^[22].

In June 2009 Dr Kealey wrote a further article, published on 4 June in The Independent newspaper^[23], arguing that the QAA should be incorporated into Hefce and a new Standards Assurance Agency should be set up.

[edit] Alumni and Honorary Graduates

Recent honorary graduates include Sir Martin Evans, Nobel prize-winner in medicine, the Rt Hon Frank Field, the prominent Labour MP, and Sir Steven Redgrave, the gold-medal Olympic oarsman.

Prominent alumni include: Bader Ben Hirsi, Susanne Klatten, Michael Misick, Brandon Lewis, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, and Mark Lancaster, the MP for Milton Keynes. Prominent international alumni include Pravind Jugnauth MP in the Mauritius parliament, former Deputy Prime Minister, and the Leader of one of Mauritius's main parties, the Militant Socialist Movement.

In the BBC Radio 4 panel game The Museum of Curiosity, host John Lloyd claims to be, "The Professor of Ignorance at the University of Buckingham".

Author V. M. Xavier presented special cultural performances at student functions in the 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] External degrees

The University awards undergraduate and graduate (Masters/MBA) degrees to students who have studied at the European School of Economics and at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology.

[edit] Chancellorship

The current Chancellor is Sir Martin Jacomb, Chairman of Canary Wharf Group PLC, and Share PLC (in Aylesbury), and the director of other companies including Oxford Playhouse Trust. He was Chairman of Prudential PLC from 1995 to 2000 and last year retired from the boards of Rio Tinto Group and Marks & Spencer. Former Chancellors of the university have been Margaret Thatcher who retired in 1999, and Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone.

The current Vice-Chancellor is Dr Terence Kealey, formally of Cambridge University, who has held the post since April 2001. He is a well-known academic specialising in Clinical Biochemistry. He now writes regularly on educational issues for The Guardian and other newspapers.

[edit] University of Buckingham Press

The University of Buckingham Press publishes in the areas of law, education, and business through its journal articles, books, reports and other material. In 2006 the press relaunched The Denning Law Journal^[24] and it is now available in print and its whole archive is online.^[25]. It also publishes two other journals; The Journal of Prediction Markets,^[26] and The Journal of Gambling Business and Economics.^[27] It has a co-publishing arrangement with The Policy Exchange^[28] for its Foundations series.

[edit] International connections

The university has close links with colleges abroad including the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, an independent university college in Bosnia. The university has also established a postgraduate medical school under the leadership of Professor Karol Sikora.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• University of Buckingham website
• Buckingham University Profile

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