All Student League: Sheffield University

The University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It is one of the original 'red brick' universities and a member of the Russell Group.

Motto: Latin: Rerum cognoscere causas

Motto in English: To discover the causes of things

1 History

2 Organisation

3 Location

4 Research and teaching quality

4.1 Students and academics

5 Students' Union, sports and traditions

5.1 Varsity sports

History

Origins

The University of Sheffield was originally formed by the merger of three colleges. The Sheffield School of Medicine was founded in 1828, followed in 1879 by the opening of Firth College by Mark Firth, a steel manufacturer, to teach arts and science subjects. Firth College then helped to fund the opening of the Sheffield Technical School in 1884 to teach applied science, the only major faculty the existing colleges did not cover. The three institutions merged in 1897 to form the University College of Sheffield.^[3] Sheffield is one of the six original red brick universities.

Victoria University

It was originally envisaged that the University College would join Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as the fourth member of the federal Victoria University.

Royal Charter

However, the Victoria University began to split-up before this could happen and so the University College of Sheffield received its own Royal Charter in 1905 and became the University of Sheffield.

From 200 full-time students in 1905, the University grew slowly until the 1950s and 1960s when it began to expand rapidly. Many new buildings (including the famous Arts Tower) were built and student numbers increased to their present levels of over 20,000. In 1987 the University began to collaborate with its once would-be partners of the Victoria University by co-founding the Northern Consortium; a coalition for the education and recruiment of international students.

In 1995, the University took over the Sheffield and North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery, which greatly increased the size of the medical faculty. In 2005, the South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority announced that it would split the training between Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University - however, the University decided to pull out of providing preregistration nursing and midwifery training due to "costs and operational difficulties".^[4]

Over the years, the University has been home to a number of notable writers and scholars, including the literary critic William Empson, who was head of the Department of English; author Angela Carter; five Nobel Prize winners; and Bernard Crick.