University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is a public research university located in Falmer, East Sussex, England. It lies mostly within the city boundaries of Brighton and Hove. Its large campus site is surrounded by the South Downs National Park, and provides convenient access to central Brighton 5.5 kilometres (3.4 mi) away. The university received its royal charter in August 1961, the first of the plate glass university generation.[5]
More than a third of its students are enrolled in postgraduate programmes and approximately a third of staff are from outside the United Kingdom.[6] Sussex has a diverse community of nearly 20,000 students, with around one in three being foreign students, and over 1,000 academics, representing over 140 different nationalities.[7][8] The annual income of the institution for 2022–23 was £380.1 million with an expenditure of £345.1 million.[1]
Sussex counts five Nobel Prize winners, 15 Fellows of the Royal Society, 10 Fellows of the British Academy, 24 fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences and a winner of the Crafoord Prize among its faculty. By 2011, many of its faculty members had also received the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Order of the British Empire and the Bancroft Prize. Alumni include heads of states, diplomats, politicians, eminent scientists and activists.
History[edit]
20th century[edit]
In an effort to establish a university to serve Sussex, a public meeting was held in December 1911 at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton to discover ways to fund the construction of a university; the project was halted by World War I, and the money raised was used instead for books for the Municipal Technical College.
The idea was revived in the 1950s, and in June 1958 the government approved the corporation's scheme for a university at Brighton, to be the first of a new generation of what came to be known as plate glass universities.[5] The university was established as a company in 1959, with a Royal Charter being granted on 16 August 1961.[5] This was the first university to be established in the UK since the Second World War, apart from Keele University. The university's organisation broke new ground in seeing the campus divided into Schools of Study, with students able to benefit from a multidisciplinary teaching environment. Sussex would emphasise cross-disciplinary activity, so that students would emerge from the university with a range of background or 'contextual' knowledge to complement their specialist 'core' skills in a particular subject area.[9] For example, arts students spent their first year taking sciences while science students took arts.This experimental interdisciplinary educational model was famously described by Professor Asa Briggs as pioneering "a new map of learning".[10]
The university grew from 52 students in 1961–62 to 3,200 in 1967–68. After starting at Knoyle Hall in Brighton, the Falmer campus was gradually built with Falmer House opening in 1962.[11] The campus was praised as gorgeously modernist and groundbreaking, receiving numerous awards.[12] The student union, as is typical,[13] organised events and concerts, bringing in acts like Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Berry to perform at the University Common Room.[14]
Academically, Sussex was home to figures such as Asa Lord Briggs, Helmut Pappe, Gillian Rose, Jennifer Platt and Tom Bottomore. In its first years, the university attracted a number of renowned academics such as Sir John Cornforth, John Maynard Smith, Martin Wight, David Daiches, Roger Blin-Stoyle and Colin Eaborn. Similarly, renowned scholars like Marcus Cunliffe, Gabriel Josipovici, Quentin Bell, Dame Helen Wallace, Stuart Sutherland and Marie Jahoda also became central figures at the university and founded many of its current departments. Additionally, a number of initiatives at the university were started at this time, such as the Subaltern Studies Group, founded by Ranajit Guha who was Reader in History at Sussex between 1962 and 1981.[15]
In the late 1960s, the United Nations asked for science policy recommendations from a team of renowned academics at Sussex. The ensuing report became known as the Sussex Manifesto.[16]
Sussex came to be identified with student radicalism. In 1973, a group of students prevented United States government adviser Samuel P. Huntington from giving a speech on campus, because of his involvement in the Vietnam War.[17] Similarly, when the spokesperson for the US embassy, Robert Beers, visited to give a talk to students entitled 'Vietnam in depth' three students were waiting outside Falmer House and threw a bucket of red paint over the diplomat as he was leaving.[18]
In both 1967 and 1969, Sussex won the television quiz University Challenge.[19]
In 1980, Sussex edged out the University of Oxford to become the university with the highest income from research grants and contracts.[20]
Grade I listed Falmer House
A picture of Meeting House
View of Arts A
Arts Inner courtyard, characteristic of the Spence design
University of Sussex Monolith
Brighton and Sussex Medical School
Organisation and administration[edit]
Schools of Studies[edit]
The university was founded with the unusual structure of "Schools of Study" (ubiquitously abbreviated to "schools") rather than traditional university departments within arts and science faculties.
In the early 1990s, the university promoted the system by claiming "[c]lusters of faculty [come] together within schools to pursue new areas of intellectual enquiry. The schools also foster broader intellectual links. Physics with Management Studies, Science and Engineering with European Studies, Economics with Mathematics all reach beyond conventional Arts/Science divisions."[39] By this time the original schools had been developed somewhat and were:
National rankings
47
65
48
201–300
246=
201–250
Northfield
Brighthelm
Park Village
Lewes Court
Norwich House
Stanmer Court
King's Road
Swanborough
Rebeca Grynspan, Head of United Nations Development Programme and former Under-Secretary General of the UN
Renée Jones-Bos, Dutch diplomat and ambassador to the United States (2007-2012) and to Russia (2016-)
![Shantanu Gupta, Author & Political Analyst [162] [163][164]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Shantanu_Gupta_Photo.png/100px-Shantanu_Gupta_Photo.png)