Sir
On 9th February 1825 The Times printed an open letter from the poet Thomas Campbell to Henry Brougham MP, calling for a new university, the first in England outside Oxford and Cambridge, to be established in London.
The result was University College London: the first university to admit students of all faiths and of none, the first to admit women, and the first to offer external degrees via distance learning, among a host of other ground-breaking achievements.
Today NMITE, the New Model Institute in Technology and Engineering, will be formally inaugurated in Hereford Cathedral. Its ambition is no less great: to be the first specialist technology and engineering university in the UK; to draw on the best global examples to create new approaches to learning in its chosen fields; and to spread educational, social and intellectual opportunity by admitting men and women of every background in equal numbers from the outset.
Innovation in British Higher Education has almost always come from outside, from new and insurgent institutions. As Thomas Campbell did a century ago, I would like to invite people of good will across this country and more widely to step forward and give their support to this brilliant, indeed transformative project.
Yours,
Jesse Norman
Member of Parliament
Hereford and South Herefordshire
Today NMITE, the New Model Institute in Technology and Engineering, will be formally inaugurated in Hereford Cathedral. Its ambition is no less great: to be the first specialist technology and engineering university in the UK; to draw on the best global examples to create new approaches to learning in its chosen fields; and to spread educational, social and intellectual opportunity by admitting men and women of every background in equal numbers from the outset.
Innovation in British Higher Education has almost always come from outside, from new and insurgent institutions. As Thomas Campbell did a century ago, I would like to invite people of good will across this country and more widely to step forward and give their support to this brilliant, indeed transformative project.
Yours,
Jesse Norman
Member of Parliament
Hereford and South Herefordshire