ABSTRACT
The move to Birmingham, like that to Leicester, was marked by an academic stroll; one more instance of the casual humaneness of appointing practices in some universities at the time. The journey to that garden had begun three or four months before, in early 1961. Like Leicester’s, Birmingham’s university fitted and in some ways mirrored its town. The university and the College of Advanced Technology– on the other, less solidly bourgeois, side of town – were not greatly involved with each other. The irony was that the university’s own strength was founded more than anything else on its science and technology. When the Vice-Chancellorship became vacant those Powers would assume that one of their kind should be asked to take the helm. The silent leaving to one side of the Boyle proposal was typical of Birmingham’s government at that time.
