| University of Essex | | | Established | 1964 (Royal Charter 1965) | | Location | Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom | | Enrolment (approx.) | 5,200 undergraduate, 2,200 postgraduate, 1700 short programmes | | Employees (approx.) | 410 academic/teaching, 110 research, 220 other academic, 680 other | | Chancellor | Lord Phillips of Sudbury OBE | | Vice-Chancellor | Professor Ivor Martin Crewe, DL, MA (Oxf), MSc (Econ) Lond, AcSS | | Campus Size | Over 200 acres (over 80 hectares) |
Introduction The University of Essex is a Campus university based at Wivenhoe Park on the outskirts of Colchester (the oldest recorded town in Britain) in the English county of Essex, less than a mile from the town of Wivenhoe.
Departments and research centres The University has 17 departments spanning the Humanities, Social Sciences, Science, and Engineering. Its departments of economics, government (political science), and sociology are particularly well-known and belong to the best in all of Europe. Essex is the only university which received the top rating (5*) in the UK government's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) for these three departments (5* in economics: Essex, LSE, UCL, Warwick; 5* in politics: Essex, Oxford, Sheffield, Wales-Aberystwyth; 5* in sociology: Essex, Goldsmiths, Lancaster, Loughborough, Manchester, Surrey).
Also, the human rights centre and the linguistics department are well-known. The East 15 Acting School at Loughton is part of the University since 2000. Moreover, the university is home of the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), the top UK research centre for the analysis of panel data in economics and sociology which opened in 1989 as the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change in Britain, the UK Data Archive (UKDA), the biggest archive for electronic data in the social sciences and humanities, the British Election Study (BES), the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), and many more research activities, particularly in the social sciences.
The campus The uni is set in 200 acres of park land It is one of the New Universities (like Warwick or York) and received its Royal Charter in 1965. The campus, Wivenhoe Park which once was painted by famous landscape painter John Constable, with its concrete architecture is typical of England's 60s universities and quite similar to that of nearby University of East Anglia. The 60's buildings are set in a huge park, called Wivenhoe park. There are also 2 large lakes on campus (below the trees out of site in the picture to the left) as well as a full 18 hole Frisbee or Disc golf course, which is an excellent way to avoid any pressing work. The architect of the University of Essex campus took the Tuscan town of San Gimignano with its squares and towers as an inspiration (the university has six residential towers mainly for undergraduates, but the original plan was to build 29) although people are not quite sure whether he succeeded in translating that town's flair into modern architecture. As well as the towers there is also South Courts (which can be seen at the back of the photo at the top of this page), giving the university enough space to guarantee every first year a place on campus.
Reputation Essex is the smallest non-specialist university in Britain, but its academic excellency is evaluated as one of the top universities. It came out as one of the top 10 UK universities in both research and teaching evaluations. It is a member of the 1994 Group, and has a very high proportion of overseas students (almost 40%; only LSE and SOAS have higher proportions) due to the good reputation. There are certainly only few universities in the world which can match Essex's diversity with respect to ethnicity and citizenship of its students. One of the major reasons for its international reputation is arguably the annual Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection which will be held for the 38th time in 2005 and which always attracts faculty and students from all over the world. Historically, the university was known as a left-wing hotbed with respect to faculty and students, but today hardly anything of this heritage is left.
40th anniversary in 2004 and future On 25 November 2004, Her Majesty the Queen and HRH The Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, visited the university as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations (1964-2004). The university's first student, John M. Dowden, who started postgraduate research on fluid dynamics at the age of 23 in 1964, is today a professor of mathematics and the head of the university's mathematics department, which today, an irony of history, is by far the weakest department of the university in terms of its research output.
The university is continuously expanding which includes the University of Essex Southend development, a new lecture hall with two lecture theatres for 500 students each, new students residences (The Meadows, with 650 rooms to be opened in autumn 2006, close to the University Quays which houses 750 rooms opened in September 2003), and a new social science research building. The new Network Centre recently opened, housing robotics research and more.
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