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GLASGOW UNIVERSITY
 
Education has been a primary concern of the Church’s ministry through the ages – and even today all graduates of Glasgow University get their degrees thanks to a Pope, and the tenacity of one of Glasgow’s foremost bishops, William Turnbull.


Issued on 7 January 1451, the decree was solemnly proclaimed at the Market Cross on Trinity Sunday 20 June 1451.

The determination that Glasgow should have its own university was conceived by Bishop William Turnbull after whom today’s Catholic Chaplaincy, Turnbull Hall, is named. He was a strong defender of the papacy against the theories of conciliarism which were prevalent in Scotland even after the Council of Basle in 1455. Conciliarism was the disputed doctrine that authority within the Church was vested in General Councils rather than with the Pope. Bishop Turnbull was given full powers to reconcile all who had been excommunicated for adhering to the Council of Basle, with the exception of Scots abroad.
Bishop Turnbull’s enthusiasm was encouraged by the monarch. King James II had two main concerns, one legal, and the other religious. He wished to train the nobility to act as legal officers, and to seek to ensure 'equity and justice' by creating an educated and law-abiding governing class.

 

 

The King's plans for the new university seem to have been in some measure a continuation of his father's proposals in 1426 for such an establishment at Perth. The Cistercian and Dominican Orders appeared in the proposals for both Perth and Glasgow.

Pope Nicholas V wanted the new university to follow his own university at Bologna as its model, but Glasgow drew on many other universities as well.

The bishop of Glasgow was ex officio Chancellor of the new university, and in him was vested the power of conferring degrees and of granting licences to teach.

The faculties originally envisaged were Theology, Laws, Decretals, Arts, and Medicine. The students arranged themselves into four nations, Clydesdale, Rothesay, Albany, and Lothian.

As early as 1451, the Arts Faculty met in the Chapter House of the Black Friars. Until 1459 there was virtually no accommodation, except possibly for an old school in Rottenrow. In 1459 Lord Hamilton gifted a tenement and a strip of land adjoining the Dominican church, with the stipulation that the students should pray for his own soul and that of his wife. Sir Thomas Arthurlie later gave a grant of land to the Faculty of Arts so that gradually the university centred around the old buildings in the High Street from which it was transferred, in 1870, to Gilmorehill.

Some teaching also took place,and graduates were capped, in the cathedral chapter-house,and in the big lecture-hall in the Dominican priory.

The collapse of the ancient church brought the college of Glasgow to the verge of extinction. But the Reformers' concern for education ensured its survival. A new charter was granted by King James VI in 1597.

The preservation of some Glasgow archdiocesan records in the Scots College at Paris helped to maintain contact in the aftermath of the upheavals wrought by the Reformation. In the eighteenth century, the university authorities approached the college rector, Rev Thomas Innes, to request copies of some of the Glasgow items. Much later, in 1892, the university awarded Archbishop Eyre, the first archbishop of Glasgow in the restored hierarchy, an honorary degree of LL.D(Doctor of Laws).

From the twentieth century onwards, and particularly by the mid-1920s the number of Catholic students began to steadily increase, with the Catholic Chaplaincy(Turnbull Hall) being founded. In 1930 a property at 53 Southpark Avenue was bought and, in the same year, Rev Dr W E Brown arrived as chaplain.

In his Bull founding the university,Pope Nicholas V stated that one of his objects was that those born in poverty might reach the heights of learning; and this aim has again been fulfilled in the social transformation of the Catholic community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.