phoenixwyecollege Wye Agricola
The Objective of
PhoenixWyeCollege
The objective of the PhoenixWyeCollege
initiative is to re-establish Wye College to the role, status and reputation it
held within the global rural economy before its amalgamation with Imperial
College in 2000.
The New Wye College
The raison
d’être of the re-established Wye College will be very similar to the original
Wye College in that it will specialise in education and research in the fields
of Natural Resources, the Environment and the Global Rural Economy. It will be constituted as a not-for-profit company
owned in trust by its members who will primarily be past and future graduates
of Wye College. People who studied and
worked there should, through their membership of PhoenixWyeCollege, play
a major role in not only re-establishing the nature, direction and ethos of the
college but also in an overseeing role when it becomes operational again.
We envisage that Imperial
College would transfer the Wye College campus and farmland into a trust (the
Wye College Campus Trust) which would, in turn, lease it to the re-established
Wye College on a full-repairing and insuring lease. In terms of access to and use of buildings this would place the
new Wye College into virtually the same position it held before its
amalgamation with Imperial College.
The PhoenixWyeCollege
initiative was formalised into a properly constituted Association on Jan 4 2008
and its constitution is available by clicking
here. The constitution enables everyone
who studied or were staff at Wye to become members and an application form is
available for downloading by clicking
here.
Strategy
The original strategy was to
re-establish Wye College as a state-funded university as it was until its
closure. Consequently the first action
was to approach 15 universities in London and Kent in order to persuade them to
establish a new faculty or department of their own institution at the Wye
College campus specialising in ‘Wye-like’ subjects. Bearing in mind this approach was made as the recession bit in
summer 2008 it is of no surprise that this suggestion was not taken up at all.
In early 2008 we were invited by
the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) to approach their Strategic
Development Fund for funding but a stipulation was that our application had to
be sponsored by an existing university.
So from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2009 several universities
were approached to sponsor us. The universities
were selected on the basis of having either a geographical or sectoral link to
Wye College. Some did not even respond
but the general reaction was that they already had their own priorities within
their own institutions such that they could not be distracted from them.
In Autumn 2009 it was realised
that this strategy would be unlikely to be successful and so it was decided to
devise an alternative strategy to re-establish Wye College as an independent
university similar to the University of Buckingham. Consequently a prospectus was drawn up outlining the ethos and
operational nature of the new Wye College to be established by
PhoenixWyeCollege. .
For the latest news of
developments in the new strategy please click here.