Victoria University of Wellington (Māori: Te Whare Wānanga o Te Ūpoko o Te Ika a Māui) is a university in Wellington, New Zealand. It was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a constituent college of the University of New Zealand.
The university is well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, and offers a broad range of other courses. Entry to all courses at first year is open, and entry to second year in some programmes (e.g. law, criminology, creative writing, architecture) is restricted.
Victoria had the highest average research grade in the New Zealand Government's Performance-Based Research Fund exercise in 2012, having been ranked 4th in 2006 and 3rd in 2003.Victoria has been ranked 229th in the World's Top 500 universities by the QS World University Rankings (2015), an increase of 46 from the 2014 ranking.
Victoria is named after Queen Victoria, as 1897 was the 60th anniversary of her coronation. There was initially a dispute as to where to site it, and it opened in temporary facilities in Thorndon. It was eventually decided to place it in Kelburn, where it still has its primary campus. This decision was influenced by the Cable Car company's offer of a donation of £1000 if it were located in Kelburn so students would patronise the Cable Car from the city.The foundation stone of the historic Hunter Building was laid in 1904. The original name was Victoria University College, but on the dissolution of the University of New Zealand in 1961 Victoria or "Vic" became the Victoria University of Wellington, conferring its own degrees.
An extramural branch was founded at Palmerston North in 1960. It merged with Massey College on 1 January 1963. Having become a branch of Victoria upon the University of New Zealand's 1961 demise, the merged college became Massey University on 1 January 1964.
In 2004, Victoria celebrated the 100th birthday of its first home, the Hunter Building.
In recent years, Victoria has had to expand out of its original campus in Kelburn, and new campuses have been set up in Te Aro (architecture and design), Pipitea (opposite Parliament, housing the law, and business school) and Karori (education) – the Wellington College of Education, established in 1880, merged with the University to become its revived Faculty of Education on 1 January 2005.
In 2015, Victoria opened a new campus in Auckland to service the growing demand for its courses and expertise.
Its main campus is in Kelburn, a suburb on a hill overlooking the Wellington central business district, where its administration and humanities & social science and science faculties are based. The law and commerce and administration faculties are in the Pipitea Campus, near Parliament Buildings, which consists of Rutherford House, the restored Old Government Buildings, and the West Wing of the Wellington Railway Station. A smaller campus in Te Aro is the base for the architecture and design schools. The Faculty of Education is in the Karori campus. The newest facility, the Victoria University Coastal Ecology Laboratory supports research programmes in marine biology and coastal ecology on Wellington's rugged south coast.
Day-to-day governance is in the hands of the University Council, which consists of 20 people: four elected by the Court of Convocation, three elected by the academic staff, one elected by the general staff, two appointed by the student union executive, four appointed by the Minister of Education, four selected by the Council itself, and the Vice-Chancellor. The Court of Convocation is composed of all graduates who choose to participate. Charles Wilson, at the time the chief librarian of the parliamentary library, was a member of the original council and its chairman for two years.
For New Zealand residents entry to most courses is open, with a few exceptions. Performance Music requires an audition. There is selection for entry into the second year in degrees such as the LLB, BArch and BDes. BA in criminology and creative writing is also based on selection.
It is one of only three institutions (University of Auckland and Unitec being the others) to offer a degree in architecture in New Zealand.
In conjunction with Massey University it owns the New Zealand School of Music.
The library was established in 1899.The collections are dispersed over five locations: Kelburn Library, Law Library, W. J. Scott Education Library, Architecture and Design Library and Commerce Library. The library is also has a collection of digital resources and acquires full text material online. In addition to electronic resources, printed books and journals, the Library also acquires works in microform, sound recordings, videos and other media consistent with the University's academic programme needs.
The library holds approximately 1.3 million printed volumes. It provides access to 70,000 print and electronic periodical titles and 200,000 e-books. It is an official Depository Library (DL-296) of the United Nations System (DEPOLIB), one of only three in the country. The J. C. Beaglehole Room is the official repository of all archival and manuscript material, and provides a supervised research service for Rare Books, for fine or fragile print items, and for 'last resort' copies of University publications.
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) is a digital library of significant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials, and is arranged according to the library of Congress classification system. The library has two online repositories: the ResearchArchive is its open research repository, which makes the university's research freely available online and the RestrictedArchive, which is the university's private research repository and is accessible only to Victoria University staff and students.
Between April 2003 and February 2010 the Library was home to two locally famous residents, Tessa Brown and Sandy Rankine, a pair of library cats.
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