SCOTTISH DEGREE CEREMONY
EDINBURGH
1 May 1999, afternoon
Members of Senate and Council, Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen.
What a pleasure it has been to celebrate the success of our graduates this afternoon! I bring greetings and congratulations to you all from our Chancellor, Betty Boothroyd.
In five days’ time Scotland votes. The new Parliament will be responsible for education and will be a major influence on the universities. The Open University looks forward to its role as a full member of Scotland’s academic community under the new arrangements.
In one of its last acts before Scottish Ministers went into election purdah, the Government announced it had agreed to our proposal that the funding for OU students in Scotland should now come from the Scottish funding council. This will put the OU at the centre of Scottish higher education and encourage even stronger partnerships with other Scottish institutions.
The Open University has been rooted in Scotland ever since Jennie Lee, as a Minister in the Wilson government in the 1960s, was charged with making the OU a reality. Our first Vice-Chancellor, Walter Perry, came from Edinburgh and brought Scottish traditions to the fledgling University. He drew his inspiration for the OU's academic structures from the Scottish universities and that legacy has served us well. Right from the start the OU has captured the imagination of the Scottish people and today it is built into the fabric of Scottish life.
Last week the Open University reached its 30th anniversary. The new arrangements in Scotland symbolise the beginning of another era. Over thirty years each new development has increased the scope and scale of our work - but always in a spirit of loyalty to the OU’s mission.
Our first Chancellor, Lord Crowther, articulated that mission and its underlying values in a brilliant inaugural address which, though it was delivered 30 years ago, could have been given yesterday. He began:
“This is the Open University.
“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.
“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 here has their own story to tell about how the OU has been open to them. Some of the comments you have made to Professor Peters and me this afternoon have been heart-warming. Lord Crowther’s charge to be open to people remains the bedrock of our mission.
He continued:
“We are open as to places.
“our … local habitation in Milton Keynes 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 and profitable of our invisible 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, 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. From Shetland in the North, where we have the highest recruitment per capita in the United Kingdom, to Dumfries in the South, where our community education project is stimulating parental involvement in the life of schools, the Scottish people have joined us in ever greater numbers. Next year we shall move from two to three degree-ceremonies here.
The OU is both Scottish and international. There are now 30,000 people taking Open University courses outside the UK and last year students wrote their exams in 111 countries.
You are members of an academic community spanning the world. This year we have created a sister institution, the United States Open University. By a nice coincidence USOU had its first formal event on the evening of our 30th birthday last week. A small group of OU graduates met for an alumni dinner in California and I was able to present degrees to two American OU graduates, husband and wife, who had never yet managed to get to a degree ceremony.
Lord Crowther went on:
“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. 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.
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.”
Today our openness to methods combines new and older technologies. We broadcast twenty hours a week on BBC2 and some OU programmes reach over two million viewers. Last year we sent out 1.1 million audiocassettes, 340,000 floppy disks and 130,000 CD-ROMs to students. This year 50,000 students are on line from home and each day they exchange 200,000 messages on 6,000 computer conferences.
The importance of the OU as a 20th century innovator is on display for all to see round the corner from here, in the new Museum of Scotland. There, some of our graduates have chosen their OU degrees as one of those developments that have made “a major impact on 20th century life in Scotland”.
I suspect those graduates believe that the most important new method introduced by the OU involved people, not technology. I refer to the work of our very dedicated associate lecturers located all over Scotland. They are sincerely committed to our mission, deeply involved in the deployment of new technologies, and thoroughly engaged in their own professional development. Some associate lecturers have received their own accreditation through SEDA, the Staff and Educational Development Association, here today.
I know that today's graduates feel indebted to all the OU people who have supported them, especially when they were discouraged. Let's show our appreciation for their work.
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I expect there are other people to whom you, as graduates, feel grateful. It is wonderful to see in today's gathering so many of your family members, relatives and friends. We're delighted you are here.
Success in the Open University depends on the tolerance and support of others. All of you who have had OU students in your home or in your circle of friends are aware of the impact of OU study on family and social life. I expect you are now helping your graduate rediscover forgotten aspects of real life.
Help is now at hand for redecorating the house and cleaning the car! But before you explore that I ask the graduates for a round of applause for the support of your families, friends, and colleagues.
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I return to Lord Crowther’s concluding remarks:
“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.”
Over thirty years the Open University has opened many minds. Sometimes those minds are set alight by the ideas, sometimes they just enjoy grappling with them. I particularly enjoyed the graduate who exclaimed, with both satisfaction and exasperation, that after doing an OU degree he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question.
Please keep in touch with the OU. You are automatically members of the Alumni Association and I encourage you to join the Association of Open University Graduates.
You can get OU news in Open Eye, which appears as a supplement to The Independent on the first Thursday of every month and there is a range of services on the alumni website that now receives a thousand visits per day.
Consider yourselves lifelong members of this unique academic community. It was founded with the inspiring ideal of being open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas. You are evidence of the fulfilment of that ideal.
Last month I received a letter from Prime Minister Tony Blair. He wrote:
“The Open University has been one of this country’s success stories, both for technical innovation in education and in the way you have opened up opportunities for learning to large numbers of people who have been able to advance their careers and enrich their lives by studying with the Open University”
The Prime Minister and I wish you all success as graduates and thank you for being part of the Open University.