Open University Alumni Dinner
Pomona, California
23 April 1999
Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
Alumni of the Open University, guests and colleagues: today is a very special day.
April 23 is St George’s day, which is important to those of you who are English. It is also Shakespeare’s birthday, which is important to all of us who speak English. But what is most significant for this evening’s gathering is that April 23 is the date that Queen Elizabeth granted a Royal Charter to the Open University in 1969. So today is the OU’s 30th birthday.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to celebrate this event with you. May I express our particular thanks to Oliver Boyd Barrett for his crucual role in organising tonight’s event. Oliver was on the faculty of the OU for nearly twenty years, during which time he contributed to many courses on socio-linguistics, educational management and mass communications. He is now here at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and has been the key local presence in making the arrangements for tonight.
I begin by bringing you all greetings from our Chancellor, Betty Boothroyd, Speaker of the House of Commons. She is the perfect Chancellor for the Open University and is hugely admired by OU students for the way she has risen from humble origins to one of the highest offices of state in the United Kingdom. She takes a particular interest in Open University activities in the United States because she began her political career as a political assistant in the Kennedy administration and has great affection for this country.
Thirty years ago our first Chancellor, Lord Crowther who, as Editor of the Economist was another great internationalist, launched the Open University with an inaugural address that was both brilliant and succinct.
In his inspiring message he gave us the noble mission that still inspires us today. He embedded that mission in a vision of the future that was so prescient that his inaugural address could have been given yesterday.
In particular, Lord Crowther would not have been in the least surprised to see the Open University celebrating its thirtieth anniversary with an alumni dinner in California. Let me quote from his inaugural speech:
He said: “We are open, first, as to people.
“The first, and most urgent task before us is to cater for the many thousands of people, fully capable of a higher education, who, for one reason or another, do not get it, or do not get as much of it as they can turn to advantage, or as they discover, sometimes too late, that they need.
“These are our primary material. To them we offer a further opportunity. Almost we can say, like the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the open door.
“But this is not simply an educational rescue mission. We also aim wider and higher. Wherever there is an unprovided need for higher education, supplementing the existing provision, there is our constituency. There are no limits on persons.”
Each graduate in this room has their own story to tell about how the OU was open to them - and my colleagues on the staff can testify how much that charge of openness to people still stands as the bedrock of our mission.
Lord Crowther continued:
“We are open as to places.
“By a very happy chance, our … local habitation will be in the new city that is to bear two of the widest-ranging names in the history of English thought, Milton Keynes. But this is only where the tip of our toe touches ground; the rest of the University will be disembodied and airborne. From the start it will flow all over the United Kingdom.
“But it is already clear that the University will rapidly become one of the most potent and persuasive of our invisble exports. Wherever the English language is spoken or understood, or used as a medium of study, and wherever there are men and women seeking to develop their individual potentialities beyond the limits of the local provision (and I have defined a large part of the world), there we can offer our help.
“The interest of those all over the world who are wrestling with the problem of making educational bricks without straw has already been aroused, and before long the Open University and its courses, electronically recorded and reproduced, will be for many millions of people their introduction to the riches of the English language and of Britain's heritage of culture.
“There are no boundaries of space.”
How accurate and farsighted were those words. Today there are 30,000 people taking Open University courses outside the UK and at our main examination session last year students wrote their exams in 111 countries.
Becoming ever more open to places has come about, as our first Chancellor predicted, because of the great interest shown by individuals, institutions and governments around the world in the values and methods of the Open University. It was not the result of a master strategy for international expansion – indeed, it has been a constant struggle for the OU to keep up with overseas developments.
Students were the first to take the OU outside the UK. Most OU students are in full-time employment and some have work which takes them to other countries. As you heard, Constantin and Armineh Ohanian are very good examples of such travelling students. The earliest mobile students asked to be able to continue to study when they moved outside the UK and we made this possible.
In the next phase various governments decided that the methods of the OU were the answer to what Lord Crowther called the challenge of “making educational bricks without straw”. This led the OU to provide advice and help in the creation of many of the forty open universities that now exist around the world.
Some of these children have now grown much bigger than their parents. Three years ago, during a short period of leave, I was able to study these large open universities and coined the term mega-universities for those that enrol more than 100,000 students a year.
There are now twelve mega-universities and between them they teach over three million students. They represent the most important development in higher education in the century now ending.
In a third phase other universities and corporate bodies began to seek partnerships with us to offer OU courses, either for their own academic awards, as in the case of the Open University of Hong Kong, or for OU credit, as in Singapore and the countries of the former Soviet bloc. These partnerships now account for most of the 30,000 students taking OU courses outside the UK.
Today we enter a fourth stage in the development of the Open University as an academic community spanning the world. We have now created a sister institution, the United States Open University and that is what makes it so apt that we celebrate the OU’s 30th birthday this evening in the United States.
Since this is the first time that graduates have been presented for their degrees on US soil we can consider that today is the official launch of the United States Open University. That will allow us, in future, to celebrate the anniversaries of both universities on the same day.
Within the United States it is especially appropriate that this launch should take place in California, because the developments that have led to the establishment of USOU are most closely intertwined in this great state.
First, as your presence shows, there are individual OU students and graduates here.
Second, the California State University system and many of its campuses wanted to work with us to bring OU methods to California.
Third, the government of California, seeing in these methods an answer to the huge challenge that the state faces in training enough new teachers, has allocated funds for a new program, CalStateTeach, that will enrol its first intake of five hundred students in June of this year.
This CSU program has been developed along the lines of the OU’s Post-Graduate Certificate of Education with intense OU involvement. It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge the work of our colleagues at CSU and particularly of Chancellor Charles Reed. Charlie and Kathy Reed cannot, unfortunately, be with us this evening but he sends you all his best wishes.
I am delighted that President and Mrs Suzuki of California State Polytechnic University can be here. Working with the Chancellor and the Presidents of the CSU system has been a wonderful experience for me, just as our colleagues in the School of Education have enjoyed working with the dynamic education faculty of various CSU campuses.
This project of CSU and the OU has attracted much interest in other states and it may well be that USOU can be a vehicle for making it more widely available across the country.
I am delighted that Richard Lewis, the Acting Chancellor of the United States Open University is with us today. Richard has taken on the demanding task of readying USOU to take its first students later this year and establishing our first small office in Wilmington, Delaware.
Meanwhile, our US-wide search for a full-time Chancellor has attracted a strong field of candidates and I hope to recommend an appointment to the USOU Board when it meets in Washington, DC on July 1.
But let me come back to the United Kingdom Open University and to Lord Crowther’s words thirty years ago. He continued:
“We are open as to methods. The original name was the University of the Air. I am glad that it was abandoned, for even the air would be too confining. We start, it is true, in dependence on, and in grateful partnership with, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
“But already the development of technology is marching on, and I predict that, before long, actual broadcasting will form only a small part of the University's output. The world is caught in a communications revolution, the effects of which will go beyond those of the industrial revolution of two centuries ago.
“Then the great advance was the invention of machines to multiply the potency of men's muscles. Now the great new advance is the invention of machines to multiply the potency of men's minds. As the steam engine was to the first revolution, so the computer is to the second.
“It has been said that the addiction of the traditional university to the lecture room is a sign of its inability to adjust to the development of the printing press. That, of course, is unjust.
“But at least no such reproach will be levelled at the Open University in the communications revolution. Every new form of human communication will be examined to see how it can be used to raise and broaden the level of human understanding.
“There is no restriction on techniques.”
I came here today from a huge conference on technology in education organised by the Community College Foundation of California just up the road in Ontario, California. When I addressed the 3,000 delegates yesterday morning I was able to illustrate with figures the way that the OU is now using every new form of human communication.
Last year we sent out to OU students 1.1 million audiocassettes, half a million hours worth of viewing on videocassettes, 340,000 floppy disks and 130,000 CD-ROMs. We broadcast twenty hours a week on the BBC and some of those programmes have over two million viewers.
This year 50,000 students are on line from home and today, a typical day, they exchanged 200,000 messages on 6,000 computer conferences.
The point of this is not to boast that we are the world’s largest online academic community, although I’m sure we are. The reason that OU speakers are so much in demand at American conferences on the use of technology is that we are perceived as having fulfilled Lord Crowther’s dream of using technology “to raise and broaden the level of human understanding” and not as an end in itself.
Our first Chancellor concluded:
“We are open, finally, as to ideas.
“It has been said that there are two aspects of education, both necessary.
“One regards the individual human mind as a vessel, of varying capacity, into which is to be poured as much it will hold of the knowledge and experience by which human society lives and moves. This is the Martha of education - and we shall have plenty of these tasks to perform.
“But the Mary regards the human mind rather as a fire which has to be set alight and blown with the divine afflatus. This also we take as our ambition.”
In thirty years the Open University has set alight the fires of many minds. I am sure some of them are here tonight.
Each year the OU holds more than twenty degree ceremonies and it is my great privilege as Vice-Chancellor to officiate at most of them. I make a point of having a brief conversation with all the graduates who are presented to me and in the last eight years some 40,000 graduates have told me what OU study has meant to them personally.
Various themes recur again and again. They say an OU degree is hard work but they add that it has been supremely worthwhile. Some say they have enjoyed every minute of it – and they hold their ground when I suggest that cannot really be true.
To the question ‘which course did you enjoy most’ I have had responses covering every offering in the prospectus. Even when our staff feel that a particular course did not represent their finest hour as academics it always proves to have been the divine afflatus that lights the mind fires of some students.
But two statements occur repeatedly in these conversations. Many graduates say that OU study has given them confidence. Thousands have told me that it has changed their lives.
To receive these heartfelt testimonials is one of the great privileges of being the Vice-Chancellor of this University. National surveys of graduates confirm that OU graduates are special. To a much greater extent than graduates of other universities OU graduates say that study has changed their lives.
Nearly all say that it has helped them greatly in their work and careers, but most agree that the more important impact has been at the personal level. Minds have been opened to ideas. Sometimes they are set alight by the ideas, sometimes they simply enjoy the challenge of grappling with them.
I particularly enjoyed the graduate who exclaimed, with a mixture of satisfaction and exasperation, that after doing an OU degree he could no longer see less than six sides to any question.
That is what it is all about. We have been very touched by the very warm welcome that the Open University has received in this country, and this at a time when American universities are feeling rather put upon by the creation of a whole raft of new institutions: corporate universities; virtual universities; online universities; for-profit universities.
While it is deeply sceptical about many of these newcomers, the American academic community has greeted the creation of the USOU very warmly. I believe that this is because we are perceived, rightly, as an authentic university, a university deeply committed to that great triumph of the human spirit, the academic mode of thinking.
The academic mode of thinking, which I contrast to the dogmatic or ideological mode of thinking, uses reason, makes hypotheses, judges them by assessing the evidence, and keeps an open mind. It is a spirit of systematic scepticism that has motivated real universities and real academics since the creation of the University of Bologna 911 years ago.
We have been welcomed into American academe because we are seen to live out in practice our mission of being open to ideas.
But there are also great expectations of the US Open University because of our mission of being open to people.
For too long, even in this country where mass higher education was invented, the quality of a university has been defined in terms of its exclusiveness. It is the proud boast of the Open University to have severed that insidious link between quality and exclusivity.
People are waiting to see whether we can establish in this country, as we have in other parts of the world, an academic community of quality that is also open to people, open to places, and open to methods.
As we strive to fulfil that mission and meet those expectations the support of all OU graduates resident in the United States will be of enormous encouragement to us. That is why your presence here today is so important.
So to celebrate thirty years of success of the Open University of the United Kingdom and to launch the great new academic adventure of the United States Open University I ask you to be upstanding and raise your glasses to the worldwide Open University.