Then and Now
When Queen's started its fi rst full year of independence in 1909-10, it had 618 students, 22 per cent of them female. There were 23 professors, 10 lecturers and a variable number of annually appointed assistants. There was a full-time Secretary and Bursar and two dozen 'attendants'. A century later Queen's is educating more than 17,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, and has more than 3,500 staff.
In 1908 the University aimed to provide a balance between liberal and practical courses for the young men and women of Ulster. Medicine, the most vocational of the four Faculties, contained almost half of all students; the other vocational Faculty, law, was very small. The Arts syllabus was dominated by the study of greek, latin, mathematics, english and french. Two-thirds of science enrolments were in physics and chemistry. There were few research students, although several professors had considerable publication records.
The liberal / vocational balance remains in place today, but patterns of study are much more varied. The classics have been subsumed into other subject groupings and broad labels such as physics and chemistry conceal sub-disciplines unimagined a century ago. The social sciences, scarcely visible in 1908, have burgeoned into a vast dominion. And, Queen's now proudly boasts of being a 'research-driven' university. Most undergraduates continue to be local, but many postgraduates come from beyond Northern Ireland.
The University inherited substantial buildings from the Royal University, notably the Lanyon Building, which remains the core of the estate, although today it is supplemented by around 250 other buildings. The University also inherited the funding arrangements in place previously. Income in 1909-10 was £38,000, 70 per cent coming from governmental sources. Today annual income is around £250 million, 43 per cent of it from government, roughly a 60-fold increase over the last 100 years.
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