Former AL notes significance of OU
Gordon Marsden, MP for Blackpool South and Shadow Minister for Further Education, Skills and Regional Growth is a former Editor of History Today and a former Open University tutor. He mentioned the OU in a recent speech, made to mark the re-opening of Ruskin College, which recently moved to a new location in Oxford. Below is an extract:
Principal, distinguished guests, friends, brothers and sisters, comrades … It’s a great honour and privilege to be with you today to celebrate the start of a new chapter in Ruskin’s history in your splendid new home and to be invited as shadow minister for Further Educations and Lifelong Learning to give a wide-ranging speech marking the occasion … One of the most moving events I attended, as a former Open University tutor, in the garden of No. 10 Downing Street in the last year of Gordon Brown’s Premiership, was one celebrating the 40th anniversary of Harold Wilson’s great achievement, with Jennie Lee, the launch of the Open University – an event made the more touching by the presence of Mary Wilson, Harold’s widow. The Open University – not just now a great British institution, but a great British international institution for life-long learning, using forty years of personal commitment from staff, teachers and students alongside the latest cutting edge research, presentation and technology to achieve that accolade in scores of countries across the world.