Word: redbrickers
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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...
...Redbricks abound in able professors, from Leeds's noted Chemist Frederick Dainton to Swansea's Novelist Kingsley (Lucky Jim) Amis. But not all redbrick dons are happy with their "exile" from cozy Oxbridge. Novelist Amis himself is shifting soon to Cambridge. Says Nobel Prizewinner Cecil Frank Powell, head of Bristol's topnotch (cosmic rays) physics department: "We've got Cambridge licked in our department-but Cambridge nevertheless has something we can never match...
Anxious Panting. That something is the ancient ambiance of Oxbridge-the sheer delight of living and jousting with England's finest minds. And redbrick students rarely match those at Oxbridge...
Livelier students are on the way: Oxbridge refuses to expand, and redbricks are beginning to get graduates of Britain's top private schools. But not for many years will redbrick products be Top People in the Establishment. Three-quarters of all university graduates in the House of Commons, for example, are Oxbridge products. Though industry and the foreign service are softening, they still snap up more Oxbrigians than redbrickers...