University of Warwick

University of Warwick   (University)
Motto	Mens agitat molem (Mind moves matter)
Formation	1965
Headquarters	Coventry, England
Type	Public research university
Important UK university

The University of Warwick is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. It was founded in 1965 as part of a government initiative to expand higher education. Within the University, Warwick Business School was established in 1967, Warwick Law School was established in 1968, Warwick Manufacturing Group (now WMG) in 1980, and Warwick Medical School opened in 2000. Warwick incorporated Coventry College of Education in 1979 and Horticulture Research International in 2004.

Warwick is primarily based on a 290 ha (720 acres) campus on the outskirts of Coventry, with a satellite campus in Wellesbourne and a central London base at the Shard. It is organised into three faculties — Arts, Science Engineering and Medicine, and Social Sciences — within which there are 32 departments. As of 2019, Warwick has around 26,531 full-time students and 2,492 academic and research staff. It had a consolidated income of £631.5 million in 2017/18, of which £126.5 million was from research grants and contracts. Warwick Arts Centre, a multi-venue arts complex in the university's main campus, is the largest venue of its kind in the UK outside London.

Some competitive employment sectors, such as Investment Banking, regard Warwick in their top 6 "magic circle" of universities, alongside LSE, UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London. Its politics department is also included in the Political Studies Associations’ UK ‘big five’ politics departments. Warwick has an average intake of 4,950 undergraduates out of 38,071 applicants (7.7 applicants per place).

Warwick is a member of AACSB, the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Association of MBAs, EQUIS, the European University Association, the Midlands Innovation group, the Russell Group, Sutton 13 and Universities UK. It is the only European member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress, a collaboration with New York University. The university has extensive commercial activities, including the University of Warwick Science Park and Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Warwick's alumni and staff include winners of the Nobel Prize, Turing Award, Fields Medal, Richard W. Hamming Medal, Emmy Award, Grammy, and the Padma Vibhushan; fellows to the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society. Alumni also include heads of state, government officials, leaders in intergovernmental organisations, and the current chief economist at the Bank of England. Researchers at Warwick have also made significant contributions such as the development of penicillin, music therapy, Washington Consensus, Second-wave feminism, computing standards, including ISO and ECMA, complexity theory, contract theory, and the International Political Economy as a field of study.

Research

In 2013/14 Warwick had a total research income of £90.1 million, of which £33.9 million was from Research Councils; £25.9 million was from central government, local authorities and public corporations; £12.7 million was from the European Union; £7.9 million was from UK industry and commerce; £5.2 million was from UK charitable bodies; £4.0 million was from overseas sources; and £0.5 million was from other sources.

In the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), Warwick was again ranked 7th overall (as 2008) amongst multi-faculty institutions and was the top-ranked university in the Midlands. Some 87% of the University's academic staff were rated as being in "world-leading" or "internationally excellent" departments with top research ratings of 4* or 3*.

Warwick is particularly strong in the areas of decision sciences research (economics, finance, management, mathematics and statistics). For instance, researchers of the Warwick Business School have won the highest prize of the prestigious European Case Clearing House (ECCH: the equivalent of the Oscars in terms of management research).

Warwick has established a number of stand-alone units to manage and extract commercial value from its research activities. The four most prominent examples of these units are University of Warwick Science Park; Warwick HRI; Warwick Ventures (the technology transfer arm of the University); and WMG.

Commercial focus

Warwick has at times received criticism for being too commercially focused, at the expense of academic creativity and diversity. The most famous proponent of this critique was the noted historian E.P. Thompson, who edited and wrote much of Warwick University Ltd in 1971. The book focuses on the brief student occupation of the Registry in 1967, and its causes, the files that were discovered and published, and the subsequent actions of the university, students and staff.

Nevertheless, with the appointment of Sir Nicholas Scheele as Chancellor in 2002, the university signalled that it intended to continue and expand its commercial activities. In an interview for the BBC, Scheele said: "I think in the future, education and industry need to become even more closely linked than they have been historically. As government funding changes, the replacement could well come through private funding from companies, individuals and grant-giving agencies."

Notable people

Warwick has over 150,000 alumni and an active alumni network. Among the university's alumni, academic staff and researchers are two Nobel Laureates, a Turing Award winner, and a significant number of fellows of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society.

Former Warwick students active in politics and government include Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, President of Iceland; Luis Arce, President of Bolivia; Joseph Ngute, Prime Minister of Cameroon; Yakubu Gowon, former President of Nigeria; Sir Gus O'Donnell, former Cabinet Secretary and head of the British Civil Service; Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England; David Davis, former Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and former Shadow Home Secretary; Baroness Valerie Amos, the eighth UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator and former Leader of the House of Lords; Mahmoud Mohieldin the Senior Vice President of the World Bank Group; Bob Kerslake, former Head of the Home Civil Service; Kim Howells, former Foreign Office Minister; and Isabel Carvalhais, Portuguese MEP (S&D Group); H.A Hellyer, led the British government's Taskforce on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism; George Chouliarakis, Greek Alternate Minister of Finance; and Sir Bob Kerslake, Head of the Home Civil Service.

In academia, people associated with Warwick include: Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1975) winner Sir John Cornforth who was a Professor at Warwick; mathematicians Ian Stewart, David Preiss, David Epstein and Fields Medallist Martin Hairer; computer scientists Mike Cowlishaw and Leslie Valiant; and neurologist Oliver Sacks. In arts and the social sciences: Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart; economist and President of the British Academy Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford; academic and Provost of Worcester College Sir Jonathan Bate; academic and journalist Germaine Greer; literary critic Susan Bassnett; historians Sir J. R. Hale and David Arnold; economist Andrew Oswald; economic historian Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky; Lady Margaret Archer, theorist in critical realism, former Warwick lecturer and accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, former President of International Sociological Association, current president of Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences; Sir George Bain, former Principal of London Business School; John Williamson, English economist who coined the term Washington Consensus; Susan Strange, British scholar of international relations who was almost single-handedly responsible for creating international political economy; Avinash Dixit, former President of the Econometric Society and American Economic Association, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005; Robert Calderbank, winner of the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal and the Claude E. Shannon Award; and Upendra Baxi, winner of the Padma Shri award.

Warwick graduates are active in business. In the automotive industry, this includes Linda Jackson, CEO of Citroën; Andy Palmer, CEO of Aston Martin; Ralf Speth, CEO of Jaguar Land Rover; Sudarshan Venu, MD of TVS Motor Company; Rajiv Bajaj, MD of Bajaj Auto. Others include Bernardo Hees, CEO of the Heinz Company & former CEO of Burger King; Nigel Wilson, CEO of Legal & General; and Ian Gorham, CEO of Hargreaves Lansdown; Ness Wadia; and Sajiv Bajaj – Chairman, Bajaj Finance.

Notable Warwick alumni in media, entertainment and the arts include Emmy and BAFTA Award-winning Stephen Merchant, best known for being the co-writer and co-director of the sitcoms The Office and Extras; Oscar-nominated screenwriter Tony Roche, known for co-writing and co-producing Veep and The Thick of It; Olivier Award-winning director and writer Dominic Cooke, who is also Artistic Director at the Royal Court Theatre; actress Ruth Jones; comedian and actor Frank Skinner; Guardian columnist Dawn Foster; blacksmith turned comedian and comedy writer Lloyd Langford; actor Adam Buxton; science fiction and fantasy author Jonathan Green; actor Julian Rhind-Tutt; Olivier Award-winning actor, Alex Jennings; author Anne Fine; author A.L. Kennedy; Tony Wheeler, creator of the Lonely Planet travel guides; Camila Batmanghelidjh; Merfyn Jones, governor of the BBC; and electronic dance music artist Gareth Emery. Grammy- and Emmy Award-winning musician Sting enrolled at Warwick, but left after a term.

 

Alumni on Wikispooks

Person	Born	Nationality	Summary	Description
Valerie Amos	13 March 1954		Politician	British Labour politician
Vernon Coaker	17 June 1953
David Davis	23 December 1948
Gideon Falter	July 1983		Activist Zionism	The Simon Wiesenthal Center has hailed him as a “Jewish hero who proves that there are still powerful ways to leverage democratic rules to serve justice and protect Jewish community”.
David Hencke		UK	Journalist	British investigative journalist and writer
Kim Howells	27 November 1946	UK	Diplomat Politician
Bob Kerslake	28 February 1955			Head of the UK Home Civil Service 2012-2014
Andrea Leadsom	13 May 1963	UK		British Conservative Party politician
Duarte Moreira		Portugal	Businessperson	Portuguese businessman. Attended the 2023 Bilderberg meeting.
Gus O'Donnell	1 October 1952	UK	Civil servant
Brian Paddick	24 April 1958	UK	Politician Academic Police officer	British politician and retired police officer,
Phil Shiner	25 December 1956	UK	Academic Lawyer
Peter Skinner	1 June 1959	UK	Politician	A member of the European Parliament
Carrie Symonds	17 March 1988		Special Adviser	Wife of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Head of public relations at the Aspinall Foundation.
Markos Veremis	1973	Greece	Businessperson	Greek businessman who attended the 2022 Bilderberg
Christian Wolmar	3 August 1949	UK	Author Journalist Politician	British journalist, author, and railway historian.

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