The University of Glasgow: Learning, Power and Reckoning

The Lost Bull

Glasgow has not had its founding document since the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1560, as the Reformation broke over Scotland, Chancellor Archbishop James Beaton — a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots — fled to France taking the University’s archives, valuables, the Mace and the bull with him for safekeeping. The Mace came home in 1590. The bull did not, and was most likely destroyed or dispersed during the French Revolution, when the Scots College in Paris was under threat.

The loss is legally immaterial and historically vivid: the University still awards its degrees on the authority of a piece of parchment nobody has seen for four hundred and fifty years.

Melville, the Nova Erectio and the Regents

The medieval University moved out of the cathedral to Rottenrow, into a building known as the Auld Pedagogy. From around 1460 land granted by James, first Lord Hamilton, on the east side of the High Street fixed the site of the Old College, occupied until the move to Gilmorehill in 1870, and in 1563 Mary, Queen of Scots granted thirteen acres of former Blackfriars land nearby.

After the Reformation the University came close to failing altogether. Its recovery dates from 1574, when Andrew Melville became Principal, and from the charter he secured from James VI in 1577 — the Nova Erectio, which provided a Crown-leased endowment and set Glasgow’s pattern of governance for nearly three hundred years.

Teaching under that system was delivered by regents: one master took a year’s intake of students through the entire multi-year curriculum, philosophy included. Glasgow abolished regenting in 1727, twenty years before St Andrews, creating specialised chairs and turning the former regents into the University’s first professors. That reform is not a footnote. Specialised chairs are what made possible the concentrated expertise of the next fifty years.

The Enlightenment Hub

Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1730 until his death in 1746, founded moral-sense theory and was reportedly the first Glasgow professor to lecture in English rather than Latin — a small change with enormous consequences for who could follow the argument. Adam Smith, who sat in his classroom, called him “the never to be forgotten Dr Hutcheson.”

Joseph Black held the chair of anatomy and chemistry, later medicine and chemistry, for ten years from 1756. His work on fixed air — carbon dioxide — was published in 1756, and during his Glasgow years he developed the concept of latent heat, first communicated to a Glasgow society in 1762. He also befriended and financially supported a young instrument maker in the University’s employ.

John Anderson, professor of oriental languages from 1755–56 and of natural philosophy from the later 1750s, pioneered practical experimental teaching and evening classes for working people. His 1796 will founded Anderson’s Institution, the ancestor of the University of Strathclyde. It was Anderson who handed James Watt the model Newcomen engine to repair.

James Watt: What He Actually Did

From 1756–57 the University employed Watt as a mathematical-instrument maker, giving him lodgings and a workshop inside the college. He was never a professor and held no degree from the place. In the winter of 1763–64 he was asked to repair the University’s model Newcomen atmospheric engine, a machine type that had been in industrial use since about 1712.

What Watt saw was waste. The single cylinder had to be heated to admit steam and then cooled to condense it, throwing away most of the fuel’s energy on every stroke. In 1765 he conceived the separate condenser — condensing the steam in a second, permanently cold vessel while the cylinder stayed hot — and patented it in 1769. A fully developed Watt engine used roughly seventy-five per cent less fuel than the Newcomen engine it replaced. Commercial success came only after his 1775 partnership with Matthew Boulton in Birmingham.

Adam Smith: Developed Here, Written Elsewhere

Smith arrived at Glasgow as a student of fourteen around 1737 and studied under Hutcheson. He returned as Professor of Logic in 1751 and Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1752, holding the chair until 1764, and later described those Glasgow years as “by far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life.”

The city fed the work. Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence contain the skeleton of his later political economy, and his contact with Glasgow merchants, including Andrew Cochrane’s Political Economy Club, supplied the empirical texture of a trading city at full tilt. But the book was written elsewhere. Smith resigned in February 1764 to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch on a continental tour lasting until late 1766; from Toulouse in July 1764 he wrote to David Hume that he had begun to write a book to pass away the time. He completed The Wealth of Nations largely at his mother’s house in Kirkcaldy, and it appeared on 9 March 1776.

Kelvin, Lister and the Medical Firsts

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, first enrolled at Glasgow aged ten and held the Chair of Natural Philosophy for fifty-three years, from 1846 to 1899. He formulated the absolute temperature scale in 1848, founded one of Britain’s first physics teaching laboratories, and in 1881 had his Glasgow house lit by 106 electric lamps, among the first in the world. In 1892 he became the first scientist raised to the House of Lords, taking his title from the River Kelvin that runs past the campus.

Joseph Lister — Regius Professor of Surgery at Glasgow from 1860, and not a Glasgow graduate — pioneered antiseptic surgery with carbolic acid, first used successfully on 12 August 1865 on a boy called James Greenlees, and published in The Lancet in 1867.

The medical record continues into the modern era: Marion Gilchrist, the first woman to graduate in medicine in Scotland, in 1894; John Macintyre’s hospital X-ray department at Glasgow Royal Infirmary in 1896, within a year of Röntgen’s announcement; Ian Donald’s obstetric ultrasound in the 1950s; and the Glasgow Coma Scale, published by Graham Teasdale and Bryan Jennett in 1974 and now used in emergency departments worldwide.

The Nobel roll is real and, awkwardly, uncertain in size. Frederick Soddy took the 1921 Chemistry prize for isotope work done at Glasgow, where he lectured from 1904 to 1914; John Boyd Orr won the Peace Prize in 1949; Alexander Todd took Chemistry in 1957, Derek Barton in 1969, James Black Medicine in 1988, and David MacMillan Chemistry in 2021. The University usually says seven laureates; some of its own materials say eight with MacMillan counted. Both figures circulate, and the honest move is to say which basis you mean.

The 2018 Slavery Report and Reparative Justice

In 2018 the University published Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow, a self-commissioned historical audit of its own funding. The findings were mixed in the way honest findings usually are. The University never owned enslaved people, and prominent abolitionists were among its members and graduates. It also received substantial gifts and bequests from individuals whose fortunes came from Atlantic slavery, in a city whose tobacco and sugar wealth was built on it.

The report valued that benefit at between £16.7 million and £198 million in 2016 values. The width of that range is not evasion; it reflects genuine methodological uncertainty about how to translate eighteenth-century bequests into present-day money, and the University published both ends rather than the comfortable one. Glasgow then established Britain’s first university programme of reparative justice, including a partnership with the University of the West Indies.

This collection gives that chapter a section of its own deliberately. The editorial rule here is accuracy over patriotism, and it applies to funding as much as to invention. A university that investigated itself, published an unflattering range and then acted on it has done something genuinely unusual — and leaving it out of a celebratory account would be a decision, not an omission.

Glasgow Today

The move to Gilmorehill in 1870, into George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic Revival buildings above the Kelvin, gave Glasgow the silhouette that now stands in for “old Scottish university” in film and photography — which is mildly ironic, since the genuinely medieval fabric was on the High Street and is largely gone. Today Glasgow is a large, research-intensive member of the Russell Group with strengths in medicine, veterinary science, engineering and the humanities, and a student body drawn from well over a hundred countries.

Its Enlightenment inheritance is not a museum exhibit. The pattern set by Anderson’s evening classes, Black’s laboratory chemistry and Watt’s workshop — theory tested against machinery and practice — is precisely the pattern that Scottish technical education went on to export, and that the Strathclyde story in this series picks up.

Timeline

1. 7 Jan 1451

   Pope Nicholas V issues the founding bull

   Granted at the petition of James II and Bishop William Turnbull; a Rome pope, not an Avignon claimant

2. 1451

   Teaching begins in the chapter house of Glasgow Cathedral

   The original purpose was training clergy and lawyers for the diocese

3. c. 1460

   Lord Hamilton grants land on the east side of the High Street

   Establishes the Old College site occupied until 1870

4. 1563

   Mary, Queen of Scots grants 13 acres of former Blackfriars land

   A crucial endowment during post-Reformation decline

5. 1560

   Archbishop James Beaton flees to France with the archives, Mace and bull

   The Mace returned in 1590; the bull never did

6. 1574

   Andrew Melville becomes Principal

   Begins the reform that rescues the University from near-collapse

7. 1577

   James VI grants the Nova Erectio

   A Crown-leased endowment and a governance model that lasted nearly 300 years

8. 1727

   The regenting system is abolished

   Specialised chairs created; former regents become the first professors

9. 1730

   Francis Hutcheson appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy

   Reportedly the first Glasgow professor to lecture in English rather than Latin

10. 1751–64

    Adam Smith holds the chairs of Logic then Moral Philosophy

    He called it the happiest and most honourable period of his life

11. 1756–57

    James Watt employed as mathematical-instrument maker

    Not a professor — a craftsman with University lodgings and a workshop

12. 1765

    Watt conceives the separate condenser

    After repairing the University's model Newcomen engine; patented 1769

13. 1846–1899

    William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, holds the Chair of Natural Philosophy for 53 years

    Absolute temperature scale 1848; one of Britain's first physics teaching laboratories

14. 1865

    Joseph Lister performs the first successful antiseptic surgery

    12 August, on James Greenlees; landmark Lancet papers followed in 1867

15. 1870

    The University moves to Gilmorehill

    Gilbert Scott's Gothic Revival buildings replace the High Street Old College

16. 1894

    Marion Gilchrist becomes the first woman to graduate in medicine in Scotland

    Followed the 1889 Act opening Scottish universities to women

17. 1896

    John Macintyre opens a hospital X-ray department at Glasgow Royal Infirmary

    Within a year of Röntgen's announcement

18. 1974

    The Glasgow Coma Scale is published

    Graham Teasdale and Bryan Jennett; now standard worldwide

19. 2018

    Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow published

    Britain's first university reparative-justice programme follows

Did You Know?

• Glasgow still awards degrees on the authority of a papal bull that has been missing since the sixteenth century.
• The University's Mace went to France in 1560 with Archbishop Beaton and came back in 1590; the bull did not.
• Glasgow abolished the medieval regenting system in 1727, twenty years before St Andrews did.
• Lord Kelvin enrolled as a student at the age of ten and later held a Glasgow chair for fifty-three years.
• It was John Anderson — whose bequest founded the ancestor of Strathclyde — who gave James Watt the model Newcomen engine to repair.
• Frederick Soddy's Nobel-winning isotope work was done during his Glasgow lectureship of 1904 to 1914.

Honest Caveats

Watt improved; he did not invent. The Newcomen atmospheric engine had been working since about 1712. Watt’s separate condenser of 1765, patented in 1769, made it roughly four times more fuel-efficient. He was also an employee of the University, a mathematical-instrument maker, not a professor — and the Glasgow Green revelation is lore rather than record.

Smith wrote his book elsewhere. Glasgow shaped the argument; Kirkcaldy and the continental tour produced the manuscript, published in 1776, twelve years after he left the chair. Nor did he invent capitalism.

The Nobel count depends on the basis. Seven is the University’s habitual figure; eight includes David MacMillan’s 2021 Chemistry prize. Neither is wrong, but an unattributed number invites contradiction.

The slavery valuation is a range for good reason. £16.7 million to £198 million in 2016 values is an order-of-magnitude spread, and citing only the higher or the lower figure misrepresents the report’s own carefully stated uncertainty.

Founding dates carry a calendar footnote. 7 January 1451 is 1450 in Old Style reckoning; both appear in reputable sources and neither is an error.