24 November 1999
Remarks by Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, the Open University
It is a great pleasure to be with you this evening. Durham is a very special place. I feel that everyone in England who is involved in academic life should come here regularly to pay homage to the memory of the Venerable Bede. I have managed to make the visit to Durham most years since I returned to the United Kingdom ten years ago and I thank you for giving me the opportunity again this year.
The Open University is proud of its link with New College Durham and very grateful for the active role that colleagues here play in the life of the OU. Some 550 students of the College are registered in programmes validated by the Open University. Our confidence in the work of the College is such that after the last institutional review in 1995 we gave the College full delegated authority for its validation and review program. You have impressed the OU colleagues who have attended your validation and review events by the seriousness and rigour that you bring to them.
May I express my gratitude to the College and to your Vice-Principal (Academic), Peter Connell for his very helpful and committed role in the wider work of the Open University? He is an active member of the Open University Validation Board and in that capacity he takes part, sometimes as panel chairman, in accreditation, validation and review events at the other institutions that form part of the OU’s accreditation network. We also appreciate the contribution of other colleagues at New College Durham to these review events.
I am sure that colleagues here must think it is just as well that New College Durham is good at quality assurance because there is a lot of quality assessment about. With the breadth of your Higher Education and Further Education provision and the number of different validating and funding bodies that you have to deal with there is always some review current or in the offing. I wish you well with your Teaching Quality Assessment for Community Health and Podiatry and with the visit from the Further Education Funding Council next April.
I am particularly pleased that Peter Connell hopes to publish a comparison between the methods of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and the Further Education Funding Council because this will be of great interest to all institutions with a dual accountability.
It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the good work of John Lowe, your Academic Registrar, who deals with the administrative side of our relationship in an unfailingly cordial and constructive manner.
I began by mentioning the great example of the Venerable Bede, the first person to write history in the English language and therefore our country’s pioneer scholar and academic. It was only several centuries after Bede that there began to be references to academics and scholars in our literature.
One of the first such references to an academic is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The character in question is referred to by Chaucer as the Clerk of Oxenford, who must have been an Oxford don not long after the creation of that university.
Chaucer tells us that the Clerk of Oxenford would rather have twenty books in his bedroom than nice clothes and that he was not a rich man. Some would say that little has changed in the academic community over the last six centuries! Chaucer then says about the Clerk of Oxenford:
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.
I have always felt that to be the best one line summary of the ambitions that we should harbour as students, scholars and academics. First, what we do should be done gladly. We should be pleased that our community values the academic mode of thinking, that great triumph of the human spirit, enough to support us to be people of learning.
Second, I like the order of the words. And gladly would he learn and gladly teach. Reminding us that learning comes before teaching and that the good teacher is always a learner.
That is the attitude that you try to foster at New College Durham, learning and teaching with gladness, and I congratulate you for sustaining that atmosphere of study, reflection and scholarship.
It is for all these reasons that it is such a pleasure to be here this evening and to congratulate the new graduates and award winners whose success we have celebrated. We are proud of you, and you should be proud to carry with you the name of New College Durham.
I hope that those of you receiving Open University degrees will also treasure that association. Many consider that the Open University is the most important innovation in higher education that has been seen anywhere in the world in the century just ending. It is a wonderful example of how the experts can get things wrong.
When the Open University was created in 1969 the press and most of the educational establishment said that it would never work. They said that you couldn’t expand higher education that way and, even if you could, it would not be education of quality.
How wrong they were. Today there are more students in the Open University alone than there were in all UK universities combined in the year that Harold Wilson first launched the idea. Furthermore, the OU is now ranked in the top 10% of English universities for the quality of its teaching. It is one of only a small elite of universities that has most of its programmes ranked as excellent - I am pleased to say that Durham University is also in that top group.
So the students doing Open University validated programmes here at New College Durham should think of themselves as belonging to a world-wide community of hundreds of thousands of OU students and graduates and part of one of the most successful innovations of our times.
Finally, on your behalf I also thank the families that have supported you during your studies and the staff of the College who have guided your learning. Learning is both an individual and a community activity. I congratulate you on your individual success and I commend the community that has supported you.
I thank you for studying with New College Durham and I wish you every success in the future.