Robert Gordon University house academic departments which had been at the City Centre campus. The first phase was completed in summer 2013 with the opening of the Sir Ian Wood building (then known as Riverside East, and formally opened and renamed in July 2015), after which the City-Centre campus closed apart from the Administration Building on Schoolhill. RGU is now a single-campus university. RGU operates a single campus in Aberdeen, in the south-western suburbs at Garthdee. As of August 2017 all academic and administrative departments are located at Garthdee. The Garthdee campus is the university's main campus, where all academic departments are located
Robert Gordon University future of UK higher education recommended major expansion, which led to the renaming of the institution to Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology to suggest its increasing role in higher education rather than further education. As well as new "plate-glass" universities, reforms following the report created the polytechnics in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It also created the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) to allow non-university institutions (like the polytechnics and Scottish central institutions) to run programmes that graduated students with CNAA degrees. The Institute's first CNAA degree programmes began in pharmacy in 1967, then in engineering, chemistry and physics