Word: redbrickers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tenths of 1% of the population (v. 2% in the U.S.), it has more than doubled since 1948, to 103,000; in four years, it may hit 175,000. "Oxbridge" has opened few doors. Shouldering almost the entire weight of the new students are Britain's 15 "redbrick" universities, the shirtsleeve provincial schools that got their name from the red bricks with which most of them were built when they began as seedy local colleges in the late 19th century...
Padded Cells. Sprouting between steel mills and shipyards, in grimy Liverpool, Manchester or Nottingham, redbricks* were originally founded to nurture local talents. Amenities were few: Leicester's main building (sooty yellow brick) was once the county asylum; the library still has padded cells. Redbrick graduates, generally 9-to-5 commuter students with no chance for donnish tea and tutorials, were hardly considered "educated"-though they included such talents as Novelists D. H. Lawrence (Nottingham) and C. P. Snow (Leicester). Oxbridge so scorned the breed that to this day it insists on calling redbrick Ph.D.s...
Something Missing. Redbricks have already surged ahead in many fields. Oxbridge has nothing like Manchester's electrical-engineering course. Bristol's physics and English are tops; so is metallurgy at Birmingham. Many redbrick universities are superior in modern languages, and three of them have chairs in modern American literature. "At Oxbridge," sniffs one schoolmaster, "they teach such rarefied English literature that only recently have they reached...