Great expectations on the Medway

In the area where Charles Dickens found his inspiration, two universities are taking the pioneering step of establishing a joint campus. Lucy Hodges reports

Tomorrow a new school of pharmacy will be formally opened at one of the United Kingdom's great historic sites, Medway, opposite the former royal dockyard at Chatham where Elizabeth I's ships were prepared for battle against the Spanish and where Samuel Pepys used to come to survey his storehouse. That may hardly seem an event of significance.

But what is new and interesting about the Medway School of Pharmacy is that it is the first major collaboration between an old and new university.

The University of Greenwich, a former polytechnic, and the University of Kent, have joined forces to establish a joint campus on the spot where the Royal Navy was kitted out and where Charles Dickens grew up.

This is thought to be a first in higher education, a sector which is bedevilled by concerns with status. In the pecking order, Kent is superior to Greenwich because it was established before 1992. The fact that the two have been able to make common cause shows the extent to which they are able to put aside their traditional suspicions to further their joint and separate interests. "It's a complex and unusual development," says Rick Trainor, vice-chancellor of Greenwich. "There has been broad support for the idea that the two organisations working together can accomplish things that they could not do separately."

The new campus is winning plaudits across the higher education world.

John Brennan, who runs the Open University's Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, says it's an interesting development that should be watched. "We could see much more of this sort of thing," he adds. And Wendy Piatt, senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think tank which is close to Tony Blair, is impressed that the two universities have pulled it off.

Collaboration between universities and between schools is one of the Government's big ideas. Indeed, it is one of the big new ideas of the 21st century. Universities, business schools and companies around the world are teaming up to give customers a better deal and burnish their reputations. The idea is that universities still compete with one another where necessary. But, where it isn't necessary, it may suit them to work together. "The model is that people do what they are good at," explains David Melville, Kent's vice chancellor. "You minimise competition. You need a common purpose. In our case it was to grow the provision, particularly in Medway and the Thames Gateway."

When Professor Melville took over the top job at Kent two years ago he announced that his big ambition was to turn Kent into an American-style state university where you have further education students - those doing courses below degree level - able to move between campuses and jump from further education to higher education. That was a novel idea, particularly for an "old" university. And it is what the Medway campus achieves because it brings together the two universities and Mid-Kent College, which has decided to relocate its main building on the same site.

"This is the multiversity concept," says Melville. "You have a number of institutions, each doing what they are good at on the same campus but also having the opportunity to do things together."

That flexibility was the key to persuading academics at Kent University, which is based on a green-field site outside Canterbury, that they had something to gain from opening at the Medway campus. According to Melville, his Kent colleagues didn't object to collaboration with a new university. "If I had been talking about merger, it would have been different," he says. "And it helps that we are working with Greenwich in an area where there is mutual respect - pharmacy."

Kent's sociologists and social policy wonks (who have a 6* in the research assessment exercise) see that there is something to be said for drawing on an area with a bigger local population. Canterbury has only 45,000 residents whereas the Medway has more than 250,000. And the actuarial scientists are pleased to be a bit closer to London and to be plugging into a bigger professional population just as the computer scientists will have a wider range of business on their doorstep.

One of the most important aspects of the new campus is that it will boost the social and economic renaissance of an area that has experienced hard times since the dockyards closed in the Eighties after 250 years. It should also help to raise the aspirations of the local people. Successive studies have shown that the proportion of students in the Medway is about half the proportion of graduates found in the national population and there is said to be significant unmet demand from employers and potential students for higher education.

For this reason large sums of money have been contributed to a new building programme. And, significantly, much of the cash has come from outside higher education. Medway unitary authority, in particular, is incredibly enthusiastic about the part that higher education can play in economic and social regeneration. The hope is that the new campus will improve the skill base of the area and make its residents more employable.

Only £4m is from the Higher Education Funding Council for restructuring. Kent University has produced £15m. A further £15m has come from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, as part of the Thames Gateway project which is seeking to regenerate the area east of Tower Bridge in London, North Essex and North Kent. A total of £9m has come from the regional development agency, £2.5m from the Medway unitary authority and another £2.5m from Canterbury Christchurch College which will be engaging in nurse training.

After some extra amounts are added in from the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, for the school of pharmacy, the investment reaches £50m. When it is finally complete by the end of the decade, it is envisaged that the whole campus will quadruple existing student numbers in Medway to 6,000.

It is estimated that the project will create more than 600 jobs directly or indirectly as well as give support to businesses, encourage graduate entrepreneurship and lead to spin-off companies. And students will benefit from some wonderful new facilities. A new 180m long library is being created out of the old drill hall built in 1903 as part of the HMS Pembroke royal Navy barracks, which is now a listed building.

At the moment Greenwich has moved a number of departments on to the site which it gained in 1995 when it acquired the Natural Resources Institute from the Government. Engineering, as well as earth and environmental sciences, are in Medway. So is virtually all its science and technology. Now Greenwich is starting to put all its business and computing courses there too.

Traditionally Kent had only a small presence in the area. Bridge Wardens College, an historic building, on the old dockyard, ran some postgraduate business courses. As well as the new pharmacy programmes, Kent will begin to offer sports science at Medway.

John Humphreys, Greenwich's pro vice-chancellor for academic planning, is a happy man. He was the man who saw the opportunity for the two institutions to get together back in 1995 when the university acquired the site and made the initial overture to Kent. "It's a natural for collaboration," he says. "We can achieve more together than either one can separately. We can access more investment. Together we can access resources and together we can deploy resources that are greater than the sum of the parts."

l.hodges@independent.co.uk

POOLING RESOURCES: THE START OF SOMETHING BIG?

Student applications are being invited now for places at the new Medway School of Pharmacy in Chatham which opens its doors in September 2004.

The first new pharmacy programme in 10 years to be approved by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, its students will graduate with a joint qualification from the universities of Greenwich and Kent.

Pharmacy training places are in short supply both nationally and regionally and the new school will tackle the shortage of pharmacists in the south east of England. Funding for the school is being provided by the global pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to the tune of £500,000 over five years. The company is also financing a new chair of pharmacy which has been awarded to Professor Clare Mackie, recruited from The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.

The Medway School of Pharmacy is expected to grow substantially over the next six years and 24 staff are to be appointed.

The two universities bring their own different specialisms to the joint venture. Greenwich has a good deal of expertise in pharmaceutical sciences and Kent in biological sciences. Kent scored a grade four in the research assessment exercise in biological sciences and Greenwich achieved some grade fours in pharmaceutical chemistry. The two universities pooling their expertise and bidding for a school of pharmacy provided a better prospect than one of them doing so, according to Rick Trainor, Greenwich's vice-chancellor.

"The education we can give together is greater than we could do separately," he says.