A symbol of academic excellence throughout the world, University College London is the 2004 Sunday Times University of the Year.

Ranked fifth in our league table, it is the leading multi-faculty alternative to Cambridge and Oxford. It offers a very different university experience to the only two English universities with a longer history, less of the Pimms and punts and more a steely mix of the pioneering and the pragmatic.

UCL has never finished lower than eighth in our league table and this year comes within a whisker of being ranked fourth, the first time the top four have been seriously at risk of being disturbed.

Our award, however, does more than recognise one-off performance in the Sunday Times league table. It is a reflection of the sustained academic excellence offered by UCL, an institution at once frighteningly strong in biomedical science with a clutch of leading London hospitals within its purlieu, but also home to creative gems such as the Slade school of fine art and the Bartlett, UCL’s faculty of the built environment that takes in architecture and urban planning. UCL also has arguably the finest economics department in the UK and one of just two nationally to earn the highest 5* research rating in successive assessments in 1996 and 2001.

UCL is one of the intellectual powerhouses of British higher education, able to compete with the best nationally and internationally. A recent survey which ranked the world’s leading universities based on academic citations, Nobel prize and Fields medal winners among staff and alumni, and performance relative to size, placed UCL 25th (see Table: World Ranking).

It is a truly multi-disciplinary organisation. Professor Malcolm Grant, the provost and president of UCL, believes this is at the heart of its strength. Not for him the niche specialities favoured by some institutions. He wants academics to break out from their traditional subject areas and make use of the university’s strength in related disciplines.

“There is so much knowledge in universities brigaded into Victorian silos,” says Grant. “You have to have scholars who have the ability to be masters of their own field but are intellectually flexible enough to understand other disciplines.”

To this end, the college is to group research into seven centres or institutes: the environment, genetics and society, bioinformatics, intercultural studies, health and wellbeing, enterprise and the management of innovation and human communication.

Grant, a 56-year-old lawyer who specialises in environmental law, believes UCL has a “social responsibility” to conduct research relevant to current human problems.

“If the leader has a role, it is to ensure that we bring together the different disciplines towards objectives that are of basic value to humankind,” he says. “It is not sufficient that we have a responsibility on the teaching front; there has to be a correlating one in research.”

The quality of research at UCL underpins a teaching record few can rival. No less than 31 subjects have been rated excellent for teaching in the past decade. They range from the unusual such as Dutch and Scandinavian studies to the ubiquitous, English, law and politics, to the unique such as economics within the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, one of the world’s leading schools for the study of this region.

Competition to study here is fierce, with more than seven applicants chasing every place, but it is the most accessible university in our top 10. The 383 A- and AS-level points garnered on average by last year’s entrants is high (three As at A-level is the equivalent to 360pts) but lower than its immediate competitors. Students can even get a place through clearing; one in 11 came in via this route in 2003.

UCL is one of a dwindling band of universities that still interviews all those likely to be offered a place. It helps it to sift through often uniformly strong applications on paper.

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