The Cambridge Society of Sheffield warmly invite you to their Annual Dinner in February, with special guest speaker Professor Peter Mandler. 

Date: Friday, 23 February 2018
Time: 7pm for 7.30pm
Venue: Whirlowbrook Hall, Ecclesall Road, South Sheffield S11 9QD 
Price: £36

Professor Peter Mandler was born in the USA in 1958, educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities, and has taught in Britain since 1991 and in Cambridge since 2001, where he is now Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey College Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College.  He writes on the cultural, social and intellectual history of Britain since c. 1800 and on the history of the humanities and the social sciences in the English-speaking world.   From 2012 to 2016 he served a four-year term as President of the Royal Historical Society.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  

Professor Mandler’s topic will be “Not the Age of STEM:  What Students’ Subject Choices Tell Us About British Education since 1945”.  He observes that the expension of higher education from 5% of the population in the 1950s to nearly 50% today has not witnessed, as is often suggested, “the Age of STEM”.  To the contrary, every wave of expension in the higher education system over the past half century has seen a further drop in the proportion of students taking science subjects.   

This talk shows this to be the case, explains why, and asks whether recent developments, which may be reducing higher education participation, might also be reversing the “swing away from science”