Tuesday 26 February 2008

Redbricks

The original redbricks were the imposing civic universities established by the Victorians in the great industrial and commercial cities of England in the 19th Century: Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol, and Leeds. They were established largely as technical universities aimed at driving the industrial revolution by producing engineers and other professionals, and thus contrasted with the classical "knowledge fr its own sake" position of the Oxbridge institutions. In contrast with the "concrete and glass" universities that followed 100 years later, however, in the first attempt to open up university education to wider participation, the term redbrick itself becomes a term of elitism, as the redbricks constitute the core of the UK's 'elite' Russell Group of research intensive universities.

from wordsmith.org

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