Welcome to Birkbeck And what’s different about postgraduate study?

Welcome to Birkbeck

And what’s different about postgraduate study?

Our charter …

The objects of the College shall be to promote for the public benefit and to provide for persons who are engaged in earning their livelihood during the daytime and other persons, education, instruction and means for research and such facilities as may be deemed appropriate …

Birkbeck’s radical origins

J C Robertson & Thomas Hodgskin – October, 1823 – appeal to set up the London Mechanics Institute to make working men “acquainted with the facts of chemistry and of mechanical philosophy and of the creation and distribution of wealth”.George Birkbeck joins the appeal

“…As the labourers acquire knowledge, thefoundations of the social edifice will be dug up from the deep beds into which they were laid in times past, they will be curiously handled and closely examined, and they will not be restored unless they were originally laid in justice, and unless justice commands their preservation.”

Hodgskin T. Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital; or, the Unproductiveness of Capital Proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen. By A Labourer. 1825.

“A scheme more completely adapted for the destruction of this empire could not have been invented by the author of evil himself than that which the depraved ambition of some men, the vanity of others, and the supineness of a third and more important class, has so nearly perfected.”St James Chronicle, May, 1925

Opening up the university to those who “desire knowledge, not diplomas or degrees” has become a normal part of university work, “essential to a University, not in the narrower sense of being a condition of its existence, but in the broader view which lays upon a place of learning the duty of using its talents to the utmost, and offering its treasures freely to all who can benefit of them and sincerely desire to do so.”Royal Commission (1912) on University of London

Who is Birkbeck?• Birkbeckians, past and present:– Rosalind Franklin (DNA)– Ramsay MacDonald (First Labour Prime Minister)– Eric Hobsbawm (Historian)– Rob Williams (Olympic rower)– Moorad Choudhry (Head of Treasury, Europe Arab Bank)– Luciana Berger, MP (Shadow Minister for Energy and

Climate Change)– Ed Davey MP (Secretary of State)

What is Birkbeck? Research

• Top 200 universities in the world• Leading thinkers and public intellectuals• Research seminars, centres, public lectures,

conferences …

Body image constructed inside the brain: Researchers measure the brain’s map of a phantom hand

What is Birkbeck? Teaching (and learning)

“I envy Birkbeck – you like your students!” (Colleague from another University, not far away …)

What’s different about studying at postgraduate level?

• Focus and depth• Frontiers of knowledge• Independence• Experience (life, work, study …)• Reflexivity and expectations• Time (in short supply)

What’s it for?