The Open University
Open Day and Alumni Weekend 2000
June 23
Reflections on the Nineties and the Noughties
Address to the Alumni Dinner
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The significance of Open Day
I’m delighted to have this chance to talk to you this evening. Thank you for the support you are showing to the OU by coming here for this Open Day. There is always a very special buzz when OU people get together to celebrate their University. Graduates and alumni feel particularly warmly about this University and value their link with it. Perhaps it would have been appropriate to have begun our dinner with the grace attributed to Scotland’s proud McLeod clan: “Lord, make us worthy of the esteem in which we hold ourselves”.
For our alumni, of course, esteem for the OU is not usually associated with a feeling for this campus because most of them never set foot here. Yet, as you can see, Walton Hall is a lovely working environment of which we are very proud. Every two years, when we throw the campus open as we are this weekend, up to 10,000 people come to enjoy it.
Maybe some OU alumni associate their OU experience with the campus where they attended an OU summer school. One student said of summer school “this is the week in the year when I feel really me”. They are memorable occasions.
I too have some good memories of visits to summer schools, not least of the OU’s attempts to specify every last detail. I think for instance, of a sign in the student residence at UMIST that said: “Please use the water in the toilet to fill the kettle”. I had to think about that for a moment.
My tenth anniversary
These biennial Open Days have a special significance for me because the 1990 Open Day coincided with my first day as Vice-Chancellor. Kristin and I came to the OU from Canada, where we had been living for 21 years. We flew in to Heathrow on a Friday morning, on Saturday we attended Open Day, and on Monday I got my feet under the desk in the VC’s office.
That was ten years ago so this Open Day weekend is my tenth anniversary as Vice-Chancellor. They have been ten exhilarating years serving a wonderful institution. Because this is an anniversary I’ve entitled my remarks this evening “From the Nineties to the Noughties”. Of course that’s noughties spelt with an ‘o’ not an ‘a’.
You might, of course, might prefer me to talk about naughties with an a because this is an after dinner speech. As VC I give plenty of speeches – you can find them all on the OU website. But I still find the after dinner genre particularly challenging. You may know the story of the early Christians being made to fight lions in the Roman Coliseum to amuse the emperor Nero. The Christians had been led into the arena, the crowd was in an uproar of anticipation, and the lions were let in and charged toward the Christians. One of the Christians was seen to step forward and say something to the leading lion, whereupon all the lions laid down in the sand. The crowd roared and booed but the lions wouldn’t budge. Finally the Emperor Nero called the Christian over to him and asked him, “What did you say to the lion?” “I told him there would be speeches after dinner”, replied the Christian.
When I get up to speak after dinner I also think of Samuel Johnson’s line that one of the disadvantages of wine is that is makes a man mistake words for thought. The challenge for the after-dinner speaker, I find, is to stay a little behind - but not too far behind - the average consumption of wine in the room so that speaker and audience mistake words for thought in the same way.
If you get that judgement wrong you remind people of the question ‘what is the difference between a camel and a vice-chancellor?’ The answer being that a camel can work for a week without drinking whereas a vice-chancellor can drink for a week without working.
Actually, life as a VC is not really like that and I’m going to play it straight this evening. To begin with I shall say a few words about why being the Vice-Chancellor of the Open University is such a privilege. Then I want to look briefly at how the OU has grown and developed during my ten years at the helm, in other words to look back on the nineties. Finally I shall look ahead over the next decade, the noughties, and identify some of the key opportunities and challenges that the OU will face.
The job of Vice-Chancellor
Why is being the VC of the OU such an extraordinary privilege? First, because you are leading a large, vibrant and successful community that reaches around the globe. Over two million people have studied with the OU and you find them everywhere. Wherever I speak in the world I invariably find someone in the audience who has been an OU student, who knows an OU student, or who has been an OU tutor.
In any other institution that might be a two-edged sword but OU alumni are particularly supportive of their University, grateful for what it has done for them, and admiring of its methods and effectiveness. Time and again, in the question period after I’ve made a speech, someone with a link to the OU will get up to support a point I’ve made or to set straight any questioner who had the temerity to make a critical remark. Those spontaneous testimonials impress my audiences more than anything I could say myself.
Second, this is an institution with noble aims. The mission given to us by Lord Crowther, to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas, is as inspiring today as it was at the OU’s inaugural ceremony in 1969. It is a timeless mission, but it is also a mission that has to be interpreted afresh in each new era. That’s what is so exciting. The challenges of being open to people, places, methods and ideas in the noughties will be different from those that Walter Perry faced in the 1970s.
Third, it is both inspiring and humbling to head an institution that has such a positive influence on people’s lives. We’re coming to the end of this year’s season of twenty-nine degree ceremonies. I will have officiated at eighteen of them. That has given me the opportunity to hear individually from literally thousands of new graduates about what the OU has meant for them. It is deeply moving to be told how doing an OU degree changes lives. Changes them not just - even not mainly - in career terms, but through the new confidence and zest for life that OU graduates have acquired.
Finally, I find that in the OU staff and students are a more seamless community than in most universities. It’s not just because staff and students span the same age range. Another manifestation is the large number of OU staff who enrol as students themselves. I speak to you proudly as student R7525708, having done T171 last year. Two of my pro-vice-chancellors are students this year and you find staff at all levels similarly engaged. That keeps us fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the OU’s teaching and learning system.
The OU in the 1990s
It certainly keeps us aware of how it is changing. Let me now reflect on the 1990s. They were good years for the OU. First in a negative way – but one that is very important for the Vice-Chancellor – the 1990s were good because there were no serious crises. That was not true in the 1980s when students rallied magnificently to the OU’s defence as it suffered political attacks and swingeing cuts in its grant. Both Lord Perry and I agree that of the OU’s three vice-chancellors Sir John Horlock was dealt the most difficult hand.
But I’m very grateful that I’ve not had to rally the university through a crisis. The guidance you can get from politicians for such a challenge is not usually very helpful. I mean, for instance, John Major’s cry that “when you’ve got your back to the wall you must turn round and fight”. Or the immortal words of the African leader Sekou Touré when he said, “two years ago at independence our country stood at the edge of the abyss. Since then we have taken a giant step forward”. Happily, during the 1990s the OU neither had its back to the wall nor its front to the abyss.
In 1992 a wholesale reform of higher education severed our direct funding link to Whitehall and integrated the OU into the same funding structure as the other universities. Thanks to the very astute liaison work of Pro-Vice-Chancellor Geoff Peters the new arrangement has been very good for us, especially when the funding methodology favoured efficient institutions by inviting them to grow. The OU is very efficient so we grew. In 1989 the University’s budget was £107 million; in 1999 it passed the £250 million mark. In 1989 there were 71,000 undergraduate students; by 1999 that had grown to 138,000 – and we’ve had another 10% increase over that figure this year.
Another manifestation of this growth is, of course, a steady increase in the number of graduates. We awarded our 100,000th degree in 1989, the year before I arrived. This year the number topped a quarter of a million, so as graduates here this evening you represent a very significant community.
Some numbers have changed even more dramatically. In 1989, for example, there were 2,700 students registered on taught higher degree programmes. By 1999 there were 50,000 people taking courses leading to taught higher awards. In 1989 there were fewer than 1,000 students taking OU courses outside the UK; today that figure is more than 30,000.
Of course, numbers go down as well as up. In 1989 we sent out 321,840 floppy disks to students but by 1999 that had dropped to only 80,000. You can guess why. In 1999 we sent out 200,000 CD-ROMs to students. The figure for 1989 was zero because CD-ROMs didn’t feature in those days.
Another figure that has gone down is the number of packs sold. Packs are study materials that don’t carry any assessment or credit and we sold 61,000 of them in 1989. By 1999 that was down to 44,000. The reason is that we have moved more and more to credit-based courses that are part of award-bearing programmes. One of the most successful curricular developments of the 1990s was our Health and Social Welfare programmes. Under the careful guidance of Dean Linda Jones the School has moved from offering only packs to providing a number of very popular award-bearing programmes in health, nursing and social work.
This is just one example of the tremendous curriculum development that took place during the1990s under the able and energetic leadership of Pro-Vice-Chancellor Ann Floyd. Much of that development was in direct response to the wishes of OU students. I mean, for example, the introduction of programmes in Law and Modern Languages. Or the offering of the BSc degree alongside the BA, which was obviously needed because the BSc now outdraws the BA. More recently still we have started offering named degrees. Then there has been the steady increase in the number of postgraduate offerings. Ann Floyd steps down as Pro-Vice-Chancellor next month and I pay tribute this evening to the outstanding job she has done.
I do realise, of course, that talking about our curriculum developments may create a bittersweet taste for those who graduated before they were introduced. I can sympathise with those who wrote to me about the 360 point honours degree and those who wanted to convert their degrees retrospectively when a new award became available. But I’m sure you appreciate that the University needs to be continually developing its curriculum in order to fulfil its mission in new circumstances. And do remember that we are always here if you want to study some more and take advantage of these exciting new programmes!
I said that the higher education reforms of 1992 moved the OU from the periphery to the centre as the UK’s national university. The reputation of your own degrees has benefited greatly from the national system of quality assessment of which we are now a part. Official data place the OU in the top 10% of UK universities for teaching quality - and when we beat Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial to become the only university to achieve the top score of 24/24 for our teaching of General Engineering, people really sat up. I am immensely proud of the performance of OU students and staff that makes such rankings possible.
Another source of pride, as I look back over the 1990s, is the much increased communication with our alumni that has led to this first Alumni Weekend. Over the 1990s, under Kitty Chisholm’s leadership, the Development Office has become what its name implies – a motor of development for the OU. It does this through the funds it raises, the networks it creates and the ideas it generates. The assets in the OU Foundation have increased fourfold and pledged gifts are now running at £2 million annually. I thank you all for your generosity to the University that has raised alumni giving from £50,000 in 1991 to £600.000 this year.
That performance reflects much better communication with you, the alumni. That process was energised by the enthusiasm of the OU Council, at its residential meeting in 1996, for developing our contacts beyond the student body to that great diaspora of people associated with the OU: the tens of thousands of graduates, the hundreds of thousands of former students, and the millions of people who watch OU TV programmes.
That led to the creation of the OU Link, our Alumni Association; it inspired the launch of Open Eye; it encouraged us to publish OU TV schedules in O-Zone; and it gave us the basis to hold this first Alumni Weekend. I thank you all for responding so enthusiastically to these initiatives.
And this is only a beginning. A University of the size, scope and importance of the OU has the potential to do much, much more on all these fronts. I hope you will encourage us in that. Kitty has built up a superb team to support such ambitions and what particularly pleases me is that under her leadership the Development Office does much more than build communication networks and raise funds. Her group is also the organising spirit for new initiatives such as the Knowledge Media Institute and now the Corporate Universities Project.
Looking ahead to the noughties
There is much more that I could say about the nineties but time is short and I want to end by looking forward. What are the opportunities and challenges that we shall face in the decade ahead? I shall identify just four. Under openness to people our major opportunity is to be the national leader in the introduction of the Foundation Degree that the government announced earlier this year. In fact the OU was working on this programme, a 240-point award that combines academic foundations, occupational competencies, and core skills, long before the government thought of it.
We intend shortly to introduce a range of these Foundation Degrees, both by validation in Further Education colleges and through direct teaching. This will be the OU’s next major contribution to widening access to higher education.
Under openness to places the challenge is to create a more deliberate framework of policy to maximise the benefits to students of our many overseas programmes. Those range from our longstanding relationship with the Open University of Hong Kong, through our partnerships in the former Soviet bloc that count 12,000 students this year, to the brand new United States Open University that enrolled its first students in February. We are increasingly viewing these partnerships as a world-wide confederation of institutions sharing similar values, joining together to enrich the experience of their students, and creating a world-wide OU community.
Under openness to methods the key agenda item is the e-university. This is another OU development that has been recently sanctioned by a government initiative. The OU has always taken advantage of promising new technologies for teaching and learning that people acquire for their homes and the internet is clearly a major development in this category. 80,000 OU students are now using the internet in their studies and for 50,000 of them internet use is built into the course.
The OU may in fact be the world’s largest university user of online technology but for this very reason we are less starry-eyed about it than those who talk vaguely about a dot.com revolution in higher education. We are getting on with the job and spending significant money to ensure that the OU is a leader in the effective application of the internet to e-learning, e-administration and e-alumni relations. We intend to ensure that these technologies help the disabled and the disadvantaged rather than penalising them further and your financial support of those efforts has been particularly important.
Finally, in the domain of openness to ideas the challenge is simple. It is to continue to develop our research activity so that an increasing number of OU groups acquire an international reputation. We are investing in the future with that in mind and the recent expansion of our space science group is just one example of this policy.
So the noughties will be just as exciting as the nineties and throughout this new decade your University will have many opportunities continue to grow in scale, scope and reputation. Alongside those developments we shall continue to develop the OU Link and all our services to alumni. As alumni of the OU you are special people associated with a special university. Your support is vital. Please spread the word about the Open University so that we can continue to fulfil our noble mission: to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas.
Thank you for being here this evening.