Forget Oxbridge - Manchester's Better for Students
Once again a row has broken out between northern universities and Oxbridge. It began when one of the national Sunday broadsheets pulled a sting on Oxford University. The outcome wasn’t particularly surprising; students could receive preferential treatment on admissions if “daddy” would make a chunky financial contribution.
No sleaze, no keys. Alas, the taxpayer funds much of the university teaching in this country and it should be fair shares and equal opportunities for all. It was the aftermath of the sting that really caught the eye as myths and moths were flushed out of the Oxbridge closets with the force of a fox in a hen coop.
It took the combined brains of two Oxford dons to offer reasons why Oxford should receive more money to teach students than, say, Manchester. Firstly, they claimed, it would keep Oxford honest and secondly, if the country needed quality graduates to compete with the U.S., it was implicit that Oxbridge needed more money than “red-brick” universities!
Deal
The only problem is that when it comes to teaching and researching subjects like physics, Manchester has been doing it longer, better and cheaper. Pound for pound, student for student, the taxpayer gets a better deal from Manchester.
Formal physics teaching in Manchester started more than 150 years ago when Oxbridge was still restricting admissions to males who would swear an oath to the Church of England. When Manchester started training one of the first winners of the Nobel prize for physics, Oxford was still not much more than a collection of fancy Sunday Schools, albeit in pretty buildings and with clever men.
Meanwhile, Manchester was progressing with a sequence of “firsts” almost unparalleled in the rest of the industrial world. Former student J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, which now underpins much of the gross national product of the modern world. Ernest Rutherford unravelled the structure of the atom and Niels Bohr made it into a theory. Lawrence Bragg’s team, working on x-ray crystallography, led the world.
A whole sequence of Nobel laureates learned their physics or provided an atmosphere of excellence here in the north west, firing up new blood down the generations. The first electronic computer to store a programme and execute the instructions was built and operated in Manchester in 1948.
Jodrell Bank burst on to the world stage in 1957 and has remained there ever since. Manchester research students were using e-mail in the mid 1970s and started moving their data around the world using the web by 1990. The students were, and still are, taught by some of the best physicists in the country, in an atmosphere of scientific discovery.
Despite some views to the contrary, the best researchers in general make the best teachers because they love the science and enthuse to impart their knowledge. Students in Manchester are always exposed to cutting edge science and technology. Right now, they are working on the “grid”, the next generation of the “worldwide web”. Stand by for more action!
Giants
Oxford themselves admit that they really do not have a history of physics. So they have invented one. Two of the icons and giants of early 20th century physics were Henry Moseley and Rutherford, both of whom did their greatest work in Manchester.
Moseley provided the key to understanding the significance of atomic number and how it relates to Dmitri Mendeleyev’s periodic table. Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus; in common parlance, he split the atom and knew what that meant.
Moseley eventually worked in Oxford for a few months at the end of his short career, before falling in the great war, even though the university there refused him a job. In their PR, Oxford unashamedly place Moseley in Oxford in the years he was at Manchester.
Cambridge use a photograph of Rutherford with Hans Geiger, taken in the Manchester physics laboratory, and talk about his work in Manchester as if it were done in Cambridge. “Rutherford split the atom in Cambridge”, they say.
His team did, when he moved there in the later years of his career, but he was pretty bored with it by then. This is nothing more than nicking someone else’s history to form an unjustified legend, building up a fake culture.
