Word.ws English Dictionary

plate-glass university

plate-glass university noun: any of several universities founded in the United Kingdom in the 1960s in the era of the Robbins Report on higher education.

Noun

plate-glass university (plural plate-glass universities)

  1. (UK) Any of several universities founded in the United Kingdom in the 1960s in the era of the Robbins Report on higher education.
    • The new “red-bricks” of Hull, Exeter and Leicester were followed in the 60s by mass expansion as the “plate-glass universities”, such as Warwick, York and Sussex, came into being.2014 October 12, Julian Coman, “Have England's universities been privatised by stealth?”, in The Observer, →ISSN
    • Keele is historically important as the first ‘Plate Glass University’, but also for the vague carelessness of its planning and architecture, which made it a cautionary example, leading to the much more coherent masterplanning and landscaping at the Universities of Sussex (p. 238), Essex (p. 190)...2022, Owen Hatherley, Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer, Penguin UK, →ISBN

Forms of plate-glass university

pluralplate-glass universities
alternative formplate glass university

Origin of plate-glass university

Modelled on red brick university, from the use of plate glass in modern architecture. Coined by British barrister Michael Beloff in 1970.

Questions about plate-glass university

What does plate-glass university mean?
Plate-glass university means any of several universities founded in the United Kingdom in the 1960s in the era of the Robbins Report on higher education.
What part of speech is plate-glass university?
Plate-glass university is a noun.
What is the plural of plate-glass university?
The plural of plate-glass university is plate-glass universities.

Words near plate-glass university in the dictionary

  1. plate wheels
  2. plate-carrier
  3. plate-carriers
  4. plate-glass
  5. plate-glass universities
  6. plate-glass university
  7. plate-out
  8. plate-spinning
  9. Platea
  10. plateable
  11. Platearian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plate-glass university (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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