A prestigious seat of learning with an outstanding academic reputation which is highly rated by its students, the University of Glasgow is the 2007 Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year.

Founded in 1451, it is the UK’s fourth oldest university and has risen four places in the past year to sit 26th overall in our league table – one of its highest ever rankings.

Glasgow’s continual quest for excellence means that students get a good deal out of their experience here. This big city institution shows that metropolitan doesn’t mean mediocre, winning an impressive 76.5% for student satisfaction in its first year of participation in the National Student Survey. This is significantly higher than the two other Glasgow-based universities and leaves just 20 institutions across the UK ranked higher; only Southampton, Aberdeen and Leicester among universities in the main cities.

“Glasgow as a university has a good reputation for openness and being relaxed. I get very positive feedback about every aspect of the students’ engagement with the university,” says Sir Muir Russell, the university’s principal and vice-chancellor for the past four years.

The university shares 550 years of history with the city in which it stands. It was a centre of both the industrial revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment and includes among its illustrious alumni scientist Lord Kelvin and political economist Adam Smith.

More recently Glasgow has been the crucible in which many a political career has been fired. The late Labour leader, John Smith, Scotland’s first first minister, Donald Dewar, and the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell all studied and first took to the soapbox here.

The university’s academic excellence draws 16,000 undergraduates and 4,000 postgraduates from across the UK and 100 countries worldwide, making it one of the largest universities in Britain. Its academics are involved in pioneering research in a number of fields including medicine, engineering, ethics, physics and astronomy, and it is leading the way in modern disciplines such as bioelectronics, cell signalling, nanotechnology and optoelectronics.

In the most recent assessment of research 23 subjects gained either 5 or 5* rankings, denoting world-class quality in all or part of the work submitted. The university hopes to do even better in next year’s assessments, particularly as a result of pooled and interdisciplinary research.

For Russell, coming back to his alma mater offers him a pleasing mixture of nostalgia and modernity. Building on excellence are his bywords; excellence in teaching and excellence in research – the two are inextricably linked, he believes.

A member of the prestigious Russell Group of research universities – Britain’s equivalent of the American Ivy League institutions – and a founder member of Universitas 21, a global group of institutions dedicated to setting worldwide standards for higher education, Glasgow is recognised internationally for its ground-breaking work. It has teamed up with Columbia University in New York on academic teaching and research initiatives in areas from biomedical and life sciences, cancer studies, new media teaching and learning and public health.

It is already ranked 81 in the most recent Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings and it hankers after a top 50 billing. Russell, who graduated from the university in the 1960s with a first-class degree in natural philosophy, acknowledges that a good research profile attracts applicants. “It is an important marker of the quality of the university,” he says. “If you are doing well, it means you have good people who are also teaching.

“When I hear students giving feedback they say we are being taught by people at the leading edge of their subject and that is exciting.”

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