What does UGC stand for?

The funding body, then the University Grants Committee (UGC), hardly touched the more established universities, while Salford, with more than 40% cuts, was the most extreme example of what happened to non-traditional, vocational, new universities.

This research received funding, in part, from a commissioned project of the Research Fund for the Control of Infectious Diseases of the Food and Health Bureau of the Hong Kong Government and from the Area of Excellence Scheme of the University Grants Committee (Grant AoE/M-12/06).

Only since the creation of the University Grants Committee after the Great War has it been drawn ever closer to the public trough.

At that stage it was still simply the University Grants Committee with a brief to look after the relatively old University of Hong Kong (HKU) founded in 1912 on the base of a medical school founded in 1887, plus the newly formed Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) then scattered over four different sites but about to start work on a large new site beyond Shatin in the New Territories.

Four research areas led by CUHK staff have been selected as four of only ten Areas of Excellence funded by the University Grants Committee.

These ranged from the Alvey committee, intended to stimulate Britain's hi-tech research, to the Defence Scientific Advisory Council, to the (in his words) "sometimes-lamented" University Grants Committee.

In 1960, leaders of education, industry, commerce, religion and politics in the city and county supported a petition to the national University Grants Committee, calling for a University of Warwick.

Even by the outbreak of the Second World War, the University Grants Committee could only muster Oxford, Cambridge, the northern civics and the celtic universities.