public university sector, and their plans to integrate most of MUP back into the public university. Gilbert declined to comment on the actions of his successor. The building originally intended for MUP, and now a part of the public university, has been named the Alan Gilbert Building. Gilbert attracted the ire of both students and staff. A staff strike took place on 22 October 1999 over lack of clarity over pay and conditions; administrative offices were occupied by students protesting the introduction of fee-paying places in 1997, and again in April 2001 when there were 70 arrests. In the book Off Course: From Public Place to Market Place at Melbourne University, Gilbert was accused of making the university a "quasi-privatised institution in the corporate mould". University of Manchester Gilbert left the University of Melbourne to be appointed president and vice chancellor of the new University of Manchester in England, an institution established in October 2004 by the merger of the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST. He was quoted as saying he had "no plans for a private university of Manchester", although he is said to advocate performance-related pay, a position thought likely to put him in conflict with the university lecturers union, the UCU. Gilbert's plans for the new university were ambitious: Our aim is to make the University of Manchester one of the top 25 research-led universities in the world. It will be an educational and research powerhouse that is at home in England's North-West and committed to regional as well as national and international agendas. Without seeking to emulate the social cachet of Oxbridge or America's Ivy League, it will take its place confidently alongside those virtuoso institutions in its research capability and performance, in the quality of the students and staff that it attracts and in the reputation for scholarly excellence that it secures. According to the university's strategic plan (largely a copy of his earlier and now abandoned Melbourne Agenda (2002)) the university aims to have five Nobel Laureates on its staff by 2015, at least two of whom will have full-time appointments, and three of which it is intended to secure by 2007. During Gilbert's tenure as vice chancellor, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, was appointed the head of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at Manchester, and Sir John Sulston was appointed to a chair in the Faculty of Life Sciences.