History
The University was founded as the Portsmouth and Gosport School of Science and the Arts in 1869. Due to the dependence on shipping and trade to the city, the main function of the college was to train the engineers and skilled workmen who went on to work at the city docks, as well as at the large Royal Navy dockyard situated in Portsmouth. However, due to a decline in shipping and population since World War II, when large swathes of the city were destroyed by German bombing, the college was forced to diversify in terms of its syllabus and teaching in order to attract new students.
This steadily continued until the 1960s when, due to a massive government-sponsored expansion in Higher Education, the college was renamed Portsmouth Polytechnic. Along with this new name came the power for Portsmouth to award degrees, accredited and validated by the centralised CNAA. The expansion of the polytechnic continued and in the late 1980s, it was considered one of the largest and the best performing polytechnics in the UK. Portsmouth was granted university status with the power to validate its own degrees along with the other polytechnics in 1992, under the provision of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992.
The University of Portsmouth is managed in accordance with Articles of Government approved by the Secretary of State. The Act also set the general format for an Instrument of Government determining the membership, constitution and organisational structure of Boards of Governors.
The formal inauguration of the University of Portsmouth was celebrated at a ceremony in the Portsmouth Guildhall on 7 July 1992.
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“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
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—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)