Largest faculty sets out ambition

The UK's largest humanities faculty, officially launched by Manchester University yesterday, has set itself ambitious staff and student recruitment targets designed to place it among the world's best.

Drawing together eight schools following a merger with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, the so-called "super faculty" is the size of a medium university, with 1,000 academics and research staff, 15,000 students and an income of more than £100 million a year.

Over the next ten years, it plans to get even bigger, taking on at least another 150 research staff, recruiting 1,000 more PhD students and tripling its intake of scholars from overseas.

Among the appointments, it plans to take on at least two of the five Nobel laureates the university hopes to attract by 2008. Luke Georghiou, the faculty's associate dean for research, said the new posts will be at all levels and spread across a range of disciplines, with the greatest concentrations in informatics, business studies and the social sciences.

The new staff will help the faculty to develop cross-disciplinary research in six broad themes over the next decade: Chinese studies; poverty, inequality, development and globalisation; governance; innovation, science and society; culture, identity and change; and creativity.

Professor Georghiou said: "From the point of view of research, the launch of this faculty opens up all kinds of opportunities in terms of cross-disciplinary initiatives. We have considerable devolution of budgets and decision-making to schools that are themselves the size of faculties in many universities."

The faculty is developing links with top-ranking universities overseas, including several Chinese universities involved in the new Centre for Chinese Studies and a Confucius Institute that will teach Chinese language and culture.

Alistair Ulph, vice-president and dean of the faculty, said it was hoped that within ten years Manchester's achievements and standing in humanities would place it among the world's elite.

"It might sound overambitious, but we could see ourselves ranking alongside the likes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University," he said.

But Professor Georghiou said that while there was a trend towards the creation of super faculties, Manchester was not modelling its development on any other institution.

tony.tysome@thes.co.uk