18 | FOREVER Keele
Even with a Principal and a campus , resources at a national level were necessary if the new university was to get off the ground . In early 1948 the University Grants Committee , chaired by Walter Moberly , concluded that it was ‘ in the interests of university education for an experiment on these lines to be carried out ’.
The Keele Vision
The image ( directly below ) shows the later part of the Queen ’ s opening speech at Keele on 17 April 1951 , in which she speaks of ‘ acts of courage and imagination such as the founding of this College ’, and has two messages for the first intake of students , the ‘ pioneers ’. First , not to believe ‘ that the significance of your own efforts is of no value ’; and second , of their ‘ special responsibility ’ to endow the University with ‘ a tradition which will enrich it long after you have gone ’.
Walter Moberly outside the building at Keele which is named after him
When it admitted its first students on 16 October 1950 , the University College of North Staffordshire became the first postwar British university . A few months later , on 17 April 1951 , the University was formally opened by Her Majesty the Queen .
When Lindsay said he wanted the new university to be ‘ experimental and original ’, he meant that he wanted it to counteract what he called ‘ the extreme specialization of modern university teaching ’. Lindsay felt that studying a single subject to degree level had value but would not on its own produce the well-rounded undergraduates that society required . There was a need for people who could make connections between different areas and talk to different audiences .