University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge (informally Cambridge University, or simply Cambridge) is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world (after the University of Oxford), and the seventh-oldest globally. In post-nominals the university's name is abbreviated as Cantab, a shortened form of Cantabrigiensis (an adjective derived from Cantabrigia, the Latinised form of Cambridge). 

The university grew out of an association of scholars in the city of Cambridge that was formed in 1209, early records suggest, by scholars leaving Oxford after a dispute with townsfolk. The two "ancient universities" have many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge. In addition to cultural and practical associations as a historic part of British society, they have a long history of rivalry with each other. 

Academically Cambridge ranks as one of the top universities in the world: first in the world in both the 2010 and 2011 QS World University Rankings,sixth in the world in the 2011 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and fifth in the world (and first in Europe) in the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities. Cambridge regularly contends with Oxford for first place in UK league tables. In the most recently published ranking of UK universities, published by The Guardian newspaper, Cambridge was ranked first. 

Graduates of the University have won a total of 61 Nobel Prizes, the most of any university in the world. In 2009, the marketing consultancy World Brand Lab rated Cambridge University as the 50th most influential brand in the world, and the 4th most influential university brand, behind only Harvard, MIT and Stanford University, while in 2011, The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings ranked Cambridge as the 3rd most reputable university in the world, after Harvard and MIT. 

Cambridge is a member of the Coimbra Group, the G5, the International Alliance of Research Universities, the League of European Research Universities and the Russell Group of research-led British universities. It forms part of the 'Golden Triangle' of British universities.Contents.   

History 

Cambridge's status was enhanced by a charter in 1231 from King Henry III of England which awarded the ius non trahi extra (a right to discipline its own members) plus some exemption from taxes, and a bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX that gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach everywhere in Christendom. 

After Cambridge was described as a studium generale in a letter by Pope Nicholas IV in 1290, and confirmed as such in a bull by Pope John XXII in 1318, it became common for researchers from other European medieval universities to come and visit Cambridge to study or to give lecture courses.

 

Clare College (left) and part of King's College, including King's College Chapel (centre), built between 1441 and 1515. 

Foundation of the colleges 

Cambridge's colleges were originally an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself. The colleges were endowed fellowships of scholars. There were also institutions without endowments, called hostels. The hostels were gradually absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, but they have left some indicators of their time, such as the name of Garret Hostel Lane. 

Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse in 1284, Cambridge's first college. Many colleges were founded during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but colleges continued to be established throughout the centuries to modern times, although there was a gap of 204 years between the founding of Sidney Sussex in 1596 and Downing in 1800. The most recently established college is Robinson, built in the late 1970s. However, Homerton College only achieved full university college status in March 2010, making it the newest full college (it was previously an "Approved Society" affiliated with the university). 

In medieval times, many colleges were founded so that their members would pray for the souls of the founders, and were often associated with chapels or abbeys. A change in the colleges’  focus occurred in 1536 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. King Henry VIII ordered the university to disband its Faculty of Canon Law and to stop teaching "scholastic philosophy". In response, colleges changed their curricula away from canon law and towards the classics, the Bible, and mathematics. 

As Cambridge moved away from Canon Law so too did it move away from Catholicism. As early as the 1520s, the continental rumblings of Lutheranism and what was to become more broadly known as the Protestant Reformation were making their presence felt in the intellectual discourse of the university. Among the intellectuals involved was the theologically influential Thomas Cranmer, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury. As it became convenient to Henry VIII in the 1530s, the King looked to Cranmer and others (within and without Cambridge) to craft a new religious path that was different from Catholicism yet also different from what Martin Luther had in mind. 

Nearly a century later, the university was at the centre of another Christian schism. Many nobles, intellectuals and even common folk saw the ways of the Church of England as being all too similar to the Catholic Church and moreover that it was used by the crown to usurp the rightful powers of the counties. East Anglia was the centre of what became the Puritan movement and at Cambridge, it was particularly strong at Emmanuel, St Catharine's Hall, Sidney Sussex and Christ's College. They produced many "non-conformist" graduates who greatly influenced, by social position or pulpit, the approximately 20,000 Puritans who left for New England and especially the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Migration decade of the 1630s. Oliver Cromwell, Parliamentary commander during the English Civil War and head of the English Commonwealth (1649–1660), attended Sidney Sussex.

 

Contributions to the advancement of science 

Many of the most important scientific discoveries and revolutions were made by Cambridge alumni. These include:

Understanding the scientific method, by Francis Bacon

The laws of motion and the development of calculus, by Sir Isaac Newton

The development of thermodynamics, by Lord Kelvin

The discovery of the electron, by J. J. Thomson

The splitting of the atom, by Ernest Rutherford and of the nucleus by Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton

The unification of electromagnetism, by James Clerk Maxwell

The discovery of hydrogen, by Henry Cavendish

Theory of Evolution by natural selection, by Charles Darwin

Mathematical synthesis of Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics, by Ronald Fisher

Organisation

 

View over Trinity College, Gonville and Caius, Trinity Hall and Clare College towards King's College Chapel, seen from St John's College chapel. On the left, just in front of King's College chapel, is the University Senate House. 

Cambridge is a collegiate university, meaning that it is made up of self-governing and independent colleges, each with its own property and income. Most colleges bring together academics and students from a broad range of disciplines, and within each faculty, school or department within the university, academics from many different colleges will be found. 

The faculties are responsible for ensuring that lectures are given, arranging seminars, performing research and determining the syllabi for teaching, overseen by the General Board. Together with the central administration headed by the Vice-Chancellor, they make up the entire Cambridge University. Facilities such as libraries are provided on all these levels: by the University (the Cambridge University Library), by the Faculties (Faculty libraries such as the Squire Law Library), and by the individual colleges (all of which maintain a multi-discipline library, generally aimed mainly at their undergraduates). 

Colleges 

The colleges are self-governing institutions with their own endowments and property, founded as integral parts of the university. All students and most academics are attached to a college. Their importance lies in the housing, welfare, social functions, and undergraduate teaching they provide. All faculties, departments, research centres, and laboratories belong to the university, which arranges lectures and awards degrees, but undergraduates receive their supervisions—small-group teaching sessions, often with just one student—within the colleges. Each college appoints its own teaching staff and fellows, who are also members of a university department. The colleges also decide which undergraduates to admit to the university, in accordance with university regulations.

 

Timeline of the colleges compared with some events in British history. 

Cambridge has 31 colleges, of which three, Murray Edwards, Newnham and Lucy Cavendish, admit women only. The other colleges are mixed, though most were originally all-male. Darwin was the first college to admit both men and women, while Churchill, Clare, and King's were the first previously all-male colleges to admit female undergraduates, in 1972. In 1988 Magdalene became the last all-male college to accept women. Clare Hall and Darwin admit only postgraduates, and Hughes Hall, Lucy Cavendish, St Edmund's and Wolfson admit only mature (i.e. 21 years or older on date of matriculation) students, including graduate students. All other colleges admit both undergraduate and postgraduate students with no age restrictions. 

Colleges are not required to admit students in all subjects, with some colleges choosing not to offer subjects such as architecture, history of art or theology, but most offer close to the complete range. Some colleges maintain a bias towards certain subjects, for example with Churchill leaning towards the sciences and engineering, while others such as St Catharine's aim for a balanced intake. Costs to students (accommodation and food prices) vary considerably from college to college. Others maintain much more informal reputations, such as for the students of King's College to hold left-wing political views,or Robinson College and Churchill College's attempts to minimise its environmental impact. 

There are also several theological colleges in Cambridge, separate from Cambridge University, including Westcott House, Westminster College and Ridley Hall Theological College, that are, to a lesser degree, affiliated to the university and are members of the Cambridge Theological Federation.

 

Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University

Teaching 

Students are taught by a mixture of lectures, organised by the university departments, and supervisions, organised by the colleges. (For science subjects, there are also laboratory sessions, organised by the departments.) The relative importance of these methods of teaching varies according to the needs of the subject. Supervisions are typically weekly hour-long sessions in which small groups of students (usually between one and three) meet with a member of the teaching staff or a doctoral students. Students are normally required to complete an assignment in advance of the supervision, which they will discuss with the supervisor during the session, along with any concerns or difficulties they have had with the material presented in that week's lectures. The assignment is often an essay on a subject set by the supervisor, or an problem sheet set by the lecturer. Depending on the subject and college, students might receive between one and four supervisions per week. This pedagogical system is often cited as being unique to Cambridge and Oxford (where "supervisions" are known as "tutorials") 

The concept of grading students' work quantitatively was developed by a tutor named William Farish at the University of Cambridge in 1792. 

Finances 

Cambridge is by far the wealthiest university in the UK and in the whole of Europe, with an endowment of around £4,1 billion in 2011. This is made up of around £1,4 billion tied directly to the university and £2,7 billion to the colleges. As of 2009, Oxford had an endowment valued at around £3 billion. The university's operating budget is well over £1 billion per year. Each college is an independent charitable institution with its own endowment, separate from that of the central university endowment. If ranked on a US university endowment table on most recent figures, Cambridge would rank fourth in a ranking compared with the eight Ivy League institutions (subject to market fluctuations). 

Comparisons between Cambridge's endowment and those of other top US universities are, however, inaccurate because being a state-funded public university (although the status of Cambridge as a public university can not be compared with US or European public universities as, for example, the state do not "own" the university), Cambridge receives a major portion of its income through education and research grants from the British Government. In 2006-7, it was reported that approximately one third of Cambridge's income comes from UK government funding for teaching and research, with another third coming from other research grants. Endowment income contributes around £130 million. The University also receives a significant income in annual transfers from the Cambridge University Press, which is the oldest, and second largest university press in the world.  

Collections 

Libraries and museums

 

The Cambridge University Library. 

The university has more than 100 libraries. The Cambridge University Library is the central research library, which holds over 8 million volumes and, in contrast with the Bodleian or the British Library, many of its books are available on open shelves. It is a legal deposit library, therefore it is entitled to request a free copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland. It receives around 80,000 books every year. In addition to the University Library and its dependent libraries, every faculty has a specialised library, which, on average, holds from 30,000 to 150,000 books; for example the History Faculty's Seeley Historical Library posess more than 100.000 books. Also, every college has a library as well, partially for the purposes of undergraduate teaching, and the older colleges often possess many early books and manuscripts in a separate library. For example Trinity College's Wren Library, Cambridge has more than 200,000 books printed before 1800, while the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College posess one of the greatest early medieval European manuscript collections in the World, with over 600 manuscripts. The total number of books owned by the university is about 13 million. 

Cambridge University operates eight arts, cultural, and scientific museums, and a botanic garden:

 

The Museum of Archeology and Anthropology

The Fitzwilliam Museum, is the art and antiquities museum

The Kettle's Yard is a contemporary art gallery

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge houses the University's collections of local antiquities, together with archaeological and ethnographic artifacts from around the world

The Cambridge University Museum of Zoology

The Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge

The Whipple Museum of the History of Science

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciencesis the geology museum of the University

The Scott Polar Research Institute comprises the Polar Museum, dedicated to the Arctic and Antarctic exploration

The Cambridge University Botanic Garden is the botanic garden of the university, created in 1831 

Reputation

 

Results for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos are read out inside Senate House and then tossed from the balcony. 

In the last two British Government Research Assessment Exercise in 2001 and 2008 respectively, Cambridge was ranked first in the country. In 2005, it was reported that Cambridge produces more PhDs per year than any other British university (over 30% more than second placed Oxford). In 2006, a Thomson Scientific study showed that Cambridge has the highest research paper output of any British university, and is also the top research producer (as assessed by total paper citation count) in 10 out of 21 major British research fields analysed. Another study published the same year by Evidence showed that Cambridge won a larger proportion (6.6%) of total British research grants and contracts than any other university (coming first in three out of four broad discipline fields). 

The university is also closely linked with the development of the high-tech business cluster in and around Cambridge, which forms the area known as Silicon Fen or sometimes the "Cambridge Phenomenon". In 2004, it was reported that Silicon Fen was the second largest venture capital market in the world, after Silicon Valley. Estimates reported in February 2006 suggest that there were about 250 active startup companies directly linked with the university, worth around US$6 billion.