Cardiff's college charter was the first in Wales to admit women
When the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire received its royal charter in 1884, it became the first in Wales to allow women to enrol and to ban religious tests for entry. Twenty years later it appointed Britain's first female associate professor. Today it is Cardiff University, Wales's only Russell Group member.
Its roots lie in a Welsh university movement that began at a London meeting called by Hugh Owen in 1854, modelled on Ireland's Queen's Colleges. In 1880 Gladstone's government asked a committee chaired by Lord Aberdare to examine higher education in Wales. After hearing more than 250 witnesses, it recommended one college for the north and one for the south, noting that many Welsh students could not afford to study in England or Scotland. Swansea and Cardiff competed for the southern college, and arbitration went Cardiff's way on 12 March 1883, helped by a public appeal that raised £37,000 and gifts from the 3rd Marquess of Bute.
The college opened on 24 October 1883 in the old Royal Infirmary buildings on Newport Road, teaching subjects from Greek and Welsh to astronomy. Its first principal, John Viriamu Jones, was just 27. Unable to award degrees, it prepared students for University of London exams until it became a founding college of the federal University of Wales in 1893. Aberdare Hall opened in 1885 as the first residence, giving women access, and Millicent Mackenzie, appointed in 1904, became the first woman full professor at a fully chartered British university in 1910.
In 1901 Jones talked the city into handing over five acres in Cathays Park free rather than selling the land. Architect W. D. Caröe aimed to blend the grace of Trinity College, Cambridge with the balance of Oxford colleges, but money ran short and his planned great hall was never built. The new main building opened on 14 October 1909. In the early 1990s, the university's computers even hosted The Internet Movie Database.
The institution went through many names. Near insolvency in 1988 forced it to combine with UWIST, the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology. It gained degree-awarding powers in 1997 but left them unused, adopted the name Cardiff University in 1999, absorbed the University of Wales College of Medicine in 2004, and became a fully independent university awarding its own degrees in 2005. Its staff and alumni include two Nobel laureates.
Source: Cardiff University
