The History of Imperial College London 1907-2007

Read the fifth of our excerpts from Dr Hannah Gay's new book - the first major history of Imperial College London

Dr Hannah Gay's book The History of Imperial College London 1907-2007: Higher Education and Research in Science, Technology and Medicine is the first major history of the College to be published, telling the story of a new type of institution. We are whetting your appetite by publishing excerpts from Dr Gay's book throughout 2007.

Alumni can purchase copies of the book online from Imperial College Press books at www.worldscibooks.com/histsci/p478.html, where if you enter discount code P478 when ordering, you will receive a 20 per cent discount on the book price. You can also purchase copies of the book from the Union Shop on the Sherfield Walkway, South Kensington Campus.

The Penney Years, 1967–73

As an old student of the College, and with a distinguished career behind him, Penney was highly respected despite his association with nuclear weaponry and an increasingly unpopular nuclear industry.

Penney instigated the first of a series of attempts to improve ties with the alumni. The College had a very small endowment fund and Penney was hoping to increase it. Even today, income from endowments is a small fraction of the total. At the same time as seeking ways to raise new money, Penney sought ways to save. He set up a working party, under Professor G. Ball, to look into how the College deployed its financial resources, and set a savings target of £200,000 for the 1968–9 year.

One problem that Penney identified was departmental isolation. He blamed it on the fact that departments were located in separate buildings, and that departmental heads had complete control over the use of space within those buildings. He ordered a review of how college space was being used and slowly moved control over space to the central administration.

Penney overstated the degree of departmental isolation; Imperial had encouraged interdisciplinary research from the start. However, that there should be more interdisciplinary work became a rallying cry in the 1970s. To address this and the academic future more generally, Penney put in place a Growth Points Steering Committee which focussed first on two academic areas, materials science and bioengineering. Materials science was already a major research area in the College, pursued in a number of departments. The time seemed right to push for an undergraduate course in the field. Bioengineering was less well established and the aim was to see what more could be done to bring departments together on joint research projects.

The Growth Points Steering Committee also recommended that exploratory talks begin with officials at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in Hammersmith, the Brompton Hospital, and the National Heart Hospital to promote common interests and more interdisciplinary research. These discussions were the start of reorganisation of work both in engineering and in the life sciences, and anticipated later mergers with a number of medical schools.

Overall, the College responded well to the changing needs of British industry and introduced a range of new courses which attracted many applicants once the pendulum began to swing in favour of science and engineering studies in the late 1970s.

Text taken from chapter 12: The Making of the Modern College, 1967–85. Part One: Governance in a New Political Climate.

Reproduced with the kind permission of author Dr Hannah Gay
Copyright © 2007 by Imperial College Press