In the early 1990s I taught politics at what was Liverpool Poly. I loved it, a great bunch of colleagues, fantastic students, and a senior management seemingly out of synch with both.
The Further and Higher Education Acts 1992 allowed the thirty-five polytechnics to become universities.
One of the issues for most institutions was what to do about a name. For a few it was relatively straightforward: Huddersfield Polytechnic, Portsmouth Polytechnic, and Wolverhampton Polytechnic all dropped the Poly suffix and became Universities.
In a few more, the insert Metroploitan was added, as in Leeds, London, and Manchester, clunky but doable.
Yet others decided to go with names of the great and good, Anglia Ruskin, De Montfort, and Oxford Brookes.
Now this practice is very common in North America (Yale, Harvard, McGill, etc.), Europe (Charles, Comenius, Palacký), and Asia (Chulalongkorn, Sun Yat-sen, Kim Il-sung University), but not so in Britain.
We had Heriot-Watt, Brunel, and Royal Holloway but all had been named after people long dead.
The problem of what to call Liverpool Poly exercised many people, The Liverpool Echo ran a competition and if I remember came up with Atlantic University, North West University, and Everton University as we already had a Liverpool University.
The Students' Union came up with Rigsby University in honour of the character from Rising Damp played by Leonard Rossiter who was born in Liverpool.
The management came up with (Sir) (John) Moores University. We were offended at the idea of naming our institution after a living person whose multi-million pound fortune had been built on gambling, as founder of Littlewoods Pools.
Yours truly, came up with Gladstone University in honour of the great Liberal and four-time Prime Minister who was born in Liverpool, and who introduced the first Irish Home Rule Bill on this day in 1886.
The management ignored my suggestion.
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