Valedictory Lecture
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
President, The United States Open University
28 June 2001
Introduction
I am grateful to Professor Geoff Peters for suggesting that I should give a farewell lecture following my last official function as Vice-Chancellor. That final formal duty was Senate this morning. In two days time I join the United Nations system as Assistant Director-General of UNESCO for Education. This post at UNESCO had been vacant for some time when I was appointed last December.
The new Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, who has embarked on a major reform of UNESCO, wanted me to start straight away. The compromise that I offered was to use up my accumulated holiday leave and ask the OU to second me to UNESCO for a total of three months in the first half of this year.
I thank the University for agreeing to this arrangement. My colleagues in the VC’s Office have had to take on an extra load during this period and I am grateful to all of them - particularly to Geoff Peters who has been Acting V-C and Acting President of USOU for much of this year.
It has been said that the Vice-Chancellor is the shepherd of the flock and each Pro-Vice-Chancellor is a crook on which he leans. I have had to lean more than usual on all the PVCs this year and I thank them for their understanding. I won’t make any more wisecracks about PVCs lest they remind me that VCs are like chimpanzees: the higher they climb the more you see of their less attractive parts.
Over the last eleven years I have chaired some fifty inaugural or valedictory lectures here at Walton Hall so I know the format. Usually speakers start by commenting on their academic trajectory. They then deliver the substance of their lecture, comment briefly about how their work will develop, and finish by thanking their colleagues.
Being a holistic guy, who likes to make connections, I shall mess around with this conventional order. I won’t spend much time on ‘the story so far’ although I shall make some passing references. It has been an honour to serve the OU as Vice-Chancellor. To harness one’s professional effort to an inspiring mission and a noble cause is an unusual privilege. It is also pleasant to work in an institution that is hailed as very successful. However, dwelling on our past success risks encouraging complacency.
The question is how we can continue to be successful in the future. Hence my title, ‘Open to the Future?’
I shall also comment on the challenges that await me at UNESCO. Being pitched into a job that gives every appearance of being even busier and more complex than leading the OU will leave no time for nostalgia. There are interesting similarities of purpose, and depressing differences of practice, between the OU and UNESCO.
I also want to say ‘thank-you’. What makes the OU so special is the dedication and decency of the people who serve it. I have worked in ten universities in six political jurisdictions and two languages, so I can make some comparisons.
No other institution comes close to the OU in the way that staff are committed to the mission of the institution and the service of its students. Our staff number 11,000 and we have many different functions. But dedication to students links them all, from the care taken by the packers in our warehouses to the concern shown by our associate lecturers. Students and graduates repay that commitment with unique loyalty to the OU.
I have enjoyed my many visits to Regional Centres, to gatherings of graduates and to institutions accredited to us through OUVS. The tour of the regions that Kristin and I made in 1994 to celebrate our 25th anniversary is a particularly fond memory. Two graduate students constructed a large sixteen-piece jigsaw puzzle of the OU crest and colleagues, students and institutional partners added pieces at each stop. The last piece was inserted by Eurfron Gywnne-Jones, on behalf of the BBC, at a celebration ball held at Walton Hall. The event was broadcast live and ended with fireworks. It was a memorable evening.
The international reach of the OU has expanded steadily during my tenure as VC and it has been exciting to see new partnerships develop. I think particularly of the enterprising people who work with the OU in Central Europe and Russia. Their award ceremonies have been particularly proud moments.
My most unusual award ceremony took place in 1995 in Addis Ababa. When Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi defeated the Mengistu regime in the early 1990s he and his cabinet took the unusual step of registering for the OU MBA. When they completed their studies, Zenawi having done so with a distinction in every course, we held a special award ceremony in the cabinet room in the Government Palace. I believe that we are the only university that can claim as an alumnus a head of government who did a degree while in office as head of government.
One of the challenges of being VC of the OU – and it is getting progressively more of a challenge – is balancing the internal and external demands. When I inherited the job it was very internally focused. It still is, at least in comparison with the way American university presidents spend most of their time off campus. However, I have found that to be an effective ambassador it is essential to know the OU, and the people in it, in some detail.
Thus it is only recently, because of the increasing demands to represent the OU externally, that I have begun to delegate some of the VC’s involvement in academic personnel matters. I am proud to have chaired most of the professorial chair committees in the last eleven years and all but two or three of the inaugural lectures.
These tasks have given me a good mental map of the intellectual geography of the University. One of my greatest satisfactions has been to observe my academic colleagues building up their international reputations as scholars and teachers. I am particularly grateful for the intellectual climate that you sustain in the OU and I shall miss it.
Northrop Frye once said that a university should be “a place where one can get a sense, which is so irreplaceable, of what life would be like if the intellect and the imagination were continuously part of it”. You make the OU such a place and I have relished it.
Off to UNESCO
I am in now the unusual situation of having been seconded to a new job before I have formally signed off from the old. This gives me the opportunity to compare two organisations, UNESCO and the Open University. It is not really a fair comparison. First, UNESCO is a multilateral UN organisation of some 180 member-states. That gives it a complex and highly political government structure.
Second, UNESCO is an organisation undergoing major reform under its current Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura. When he took over it had lost its way in terms of both purpose and process. Since it was the chance to work with Mr Matsuura on this reform that attracted me to UNESCO, I can hardly complain if it the organisation is still far from being a model of clear strategy and effective management.
Nevertheless, getting to grips with my new role has made me appreciate our good fortune at the OU. We may complain that our processes of induction and staff development are not perfect, but they do exist. Until Matsuura came along UNESCO had neither.
We also tend to complain about lack of teamwork and communication. Again, if you compare the OU to UNESCO, where years of confusion and insecurity have made people very individualistic and mistrustful, the OU really does look like a model of an effective modern organisation.
Both the OU and UNESCO are by nature interdependent organisations. I have come to realise that interdependence, without mutual trust, is a precondition for generalised hostility and fear. The teamwork and trust that generally characterises work at the OU is a rarer commodity than you think. Treasure it.
I pay a particular tribute to the OU administration as I grapple with an organisation where bureaucracy has gone mad. In most bureaucracies an administrator is someone who can turn an opportunity into a problem, but not here. At the OU the clash between the political will and the administrative won't does not stifle all new ideas.
You should also cherish our capacity to draft coherent documents. OU administrators and minute takers do seem to have taken to heart the instructions given to a young civil servant going to her first meeting as recording secretary: “not to write down what they said, nor what they thought, but what they would have said if they had thought.”
I had better not continue much longer in this vein or I may tempt you into complacency, or even into thinking that I am trying to take some credit for the OU’s current good state of organisational health. Perish the thought.
Nor do I wish to denigrate UNESCO. In today’s world its noble mission is more necessary than ever. Just as I have made a practice of referring us back to the ‘four opens’ of the OU’s mission, so I am already reminding my UNESCO colleagues of UNESCO’s constitution. It is an inspiring document. Let me quote a few extracts:
That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.
That the … war …was made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of inequality of men and races;
That the wide diffusion of culture, and the education of humanity for justice and liberty and peace are indispensable to the dignity of man and constitute a sacred duty which all the nations must fulfil in a spirit of mutual assistance and concern.
That a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not be a peace that would secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.
For these reasons, the States Parties to this Constitution, believing in full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, are agreed and determined to develop and increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives.
You can see that I have joined an institution that shares many ideals with the OU.
Open to people evokes my main agenda item for the next few years; the campaign to provide Education for All that was relaunched at a World Forum in Dakar last year. Despite the declaration in UNESCO’s constitution, this basic idea has made slow headway as population growth has overtaken attempts to expand education. Today there are 220 million children who get no schooling at all or not enough of it to give them basic skills. Then there are 900 million adult illiterates, one in four of the adult population of the world.
UNESCO’s commitment to the ‘wide diffusion of culture’ echoes our aim to be open to places, while our openness to methods is matched by UNESCO’s ambition of increasing the means of communication between peoples.
Here I note that UNESCO attaches a high priority to distance learning. With the arrival next week of Abdul Kahn, formerly VC of Indira Gandhi National Open University, as Assistant Director-General for Communications and Information, UNESCO will have former open university heading two of its five programme sectors.
Finally, openness to ideas is picked up in UNESCO’s strong commitment to their free exchange. You may be wondering how all of UNESCO’s member states which, now that the UK is back in, include nearly all except the USA and Singapore, reconcile themselves to these strong statements. Surely, there are many unsavoury regimes whose commitment to human rights, objective truth and the free exchange of ideas is less than wholehearted?
My answer is threefold. First there is, of course, a let-out. The constitution contains a cop-out clause.
With a view to preserving the independence, integrity and fruitful diversity of the cultures and educational systems of the States Members of the Organisation, the Organisation is prohibited from intervening in matters which are essentially within their domestic jurisdiction.
We had an example of this a few months ago when the Taliban destroyed the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. UNESCO led the campaign to dissuade them. Although it was unsuccessful we did line up all the other Islamic states to condemn the action. Perhaps more importantly for the longer term, we commissioned work from top Islamic scholars which showed that nothing in the Koran justified such action.
My second response is that, like human beings, states have their light and dark sides. The UK supports poverty eradication through the Department for International Development, yet is an aggressive international seller of the arms that feed the regional and civil wars that keep people in poverty. Likewise France is proud to have UNESCO located in Paris and working for a culture of peace. But my new office looks out over the Ecole Militaire to the Eiffel Tower, reminding me of other French priorities.
Which leads to the third answer. Since all the but the most benighted states like to claim some association with the nobler ideals of the human spirit, most are sensitive to pressure to be consistent with the constitution that they have signed. This gives us leverage behind the scenes.
A recent example of this happened at this month’s meeting of UNESCO’s Executive Board. Israel and Palestine agreed to ask for UNESCO’s help in revising the textbooks used by each community with a view to achieving a balanced account of history that will not stoke future hatreds. It sounds like a tall order, and I’ve no illusions that it will be a quick process. However, UNESCO successfully performed a similar function in the past for Germany and Poland, so it can be done.
Two weeks ago I had a delegation from South Korea asking me to push for the revision of some recent Japanese history texts that have given offence in Korea and China. I had to explain that UNESCO couldn’t get involved unless both countries request it, and Japan has not. However, the Japanese government is clearly embarrassed and is addressing the issue behind the scenes. This is an example of our leverage in making people more open to ideas.
Open to ideas
In reflecting on whether the OU is open to the future I shall review the four opens of our mission in reverse order, starting with openness to ideas. Here we start from a position of strength. Our strength is that we have a tradition of asking questions and making students ask questions. Questions are at the heart of the academic endeavour and the key to openness to ideas.
As Abelard said, “The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning... for by doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.” Long before Abelard, Socrates worried that writing would drive out discussion and leave only one point of view. Today’s media present the same danger but I believe that by working in course teams we usually avoid it. The student who remarked, with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration, that after doing an OU degree he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question, expressed it perfectly.
I’ve been reflecting on this at UNESCO. The Education Sector includes a new division for the promotion of quality education. Once countries have addressed the basic problem of access to education they worry about its quality. This group now includes some states that we usually consider as having better education systems than the UK.
After a number of years in the kingdom of Woodhead, where quality is mostly about outcomes measurement, I have been surprised to find that UNESCO’s judgements about quality in education focus more on content. Will the content of the curriculum lead pupils to adopt a culture of peace, respect human rights and promote sustainable development? I believe the key to sustainable intellectual development lies in teaching people to ask questions rather than suggesting a set of answers.
The cultivation of an attitude of systematic scepticism, quite the opposite of random cynicism, is something we do well at the OU. Our habit of training students to evaluate different perspectives is partly responsible for the string of excellent subject reviews of which I am very proud. Congratulations to Politics and Religious Studies for their recent ‘excellents’. Thirty years after the OU was dismissed as ‘blithering nonsense’, to have reached number ten in the quality rankings is very satisfactory.
As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” I believe that it has become a habit and I congratulate you all on succumbing to the addiction of excellent subject reviews.
Asking the right questions is the key to good research, which we usually turn to when debating the OU’s mission of openness to ideas. OU research has developed in an impressive way over the decade since we joined the unified funding system created by the 1992 HE reforms. I well remember the palpable feeling of achievement around Walton Hall when the results of our first RAE were announced just before Christmas in 1992.
We have just made our RAE submission for 2001 and it includes 20% more people than last time, including, I am proud to report, the Vice-Chancellor and all the Pro-Vice-Chancellors. We hope that we shall rise again in the league tables. But what is our long-term ambition? Is our aim to become a research-intensive university? Here we have a challenge
I make presentations about the OU in many settings, and I find that even those most friendly to the OU do not see this as an appropriate ambition. We can dismiss this and say that the great and the good have always underestimated the OU. But they may have a point. Even if we can continue to climb in the tables - and we are now into exponential territory that requires a doubling of effort for every five places gained - we might pay too high a price in loss of concentration on the rest of our mission.
The answer, it seems to me, is to break with the orthodoxy in setting goals for research just as we have for teaching. We have made the opportunity to study available throughout the country. Can we now do the same for research? By taking on the PhD programme of the Council for National Academic Awards when we created OU Validation Services we doubled the number of OU research students. Research in sponsoring institutions continues to grow steadily without much encouragement from Walton Hall.
Now that we are integrating the activities of OUVS and OU more fully through the Research School we have an opportunity to grow our PhD programme substantially. Could we not envisage, as constituting an international OU research community, the part-time students being supervised by OU staff, the students in the sponsoring institutions, and the full-time students here on campus. Some of this activity does not show up in the RAE, but we would be faithful to our mission of openness to ideas if we broke down the link between quality and exclusivity for research just as we have for teaching.
Open to methods
I turn now to the challenge of being open to methods. What does this mean for the future? It means, first, being open to ideas about methods.
The last two years have been instructive. I admit that I was seriously rattled by the dot.com frenzy that raged between the autumn of 1999 and the spring of 2000. Had it not been for Diana Laurillard’s confidence and calming influence I might have been panicked into believing that the OU was indeed, as critics then called us, ‘legacy distance education’. This carried the implication, of course, that just like software that was due to catch the millennium bug; the only solution was to replace the OU approach with a brand new system.
The net was going to replace everything that had gone before and attempts to graft the new onto the old were doomed to failure. It was going to be like the older man who asked his doctor for a prescription for Viagra and was told that he shouldn’t try to put up a new flagpole on a condemned building.
Today the dot.com frenzy seems long ago. The OU has been successful with evolution rather than revolution. With 120,000 students on-line we are the pioneers of Internet use in higher education at industrial strength. Some of those new providers of web-based education who were confident of knocking us off our pedestal are now more diffident. They are finding it expensive and they are finding it difficult to scale up.
The longer I observe the OU at work the more I believe that our key methodological innovation is simply the division of labour. We divide the act of teaching and the provision of service to students into their component parts and focus specialised effort on each part. Our key breakthroughs are the course team and the associate lecturer. The course team creates quality, but it could not do so without economies of scale, which are underpinned by the associate lecturers. This combination allows us to combine quality with scale in a way that is rare. We have broken, as I often say, that insidious link between quality and exclusivity.
This combination also allows us to combine virtual technologies and real people in a way that students seem to prefer. Technologies by themselves can easily lead to the lack of questioning that Socrates feared with books. Combining technology with tutors means that questions are asked – and that there is substantial material to ask questions about.
We have developed a powerful approach to organising and supporting academic work but we must not be complacent. The skills required in course teams, in associate lecturers and in the numerous professionals who support them are changing rapidly. In earlier days the BBC took much of the work of media production off our hands. We cannot delegate the preparation and delivery of teaching material on the web in the same way.
Let me say here how grateful I am for the BBC partnership and for the media training and awareness that the BBC has given us. I myself enjoyed acquiring some rudimentary TV presentation skills under the tutelage of Chris Palmer. We all now have to acquire some additional skills for the world of the web.
The partnership with the BBC also opened the University to the whole population through radio and TV broadcasting. I am delighted that our agreement with the BBC has recently been reinvigorated for the future. On the OU side of the house we now have to decide whether we now intend to use the net to broadcast material to the world in the same way that the BBC broadcasts us to this nation.
Should we apply to our web-based course material the principle of open source that Linus Torvalds brought to software with his Linux operating system? The idea would be make this courseware available for anyone to use or adapt, provided that their adaptations were, in turn, made available free.
Whether to adopt open source is a complex issue and I am glad that discussion of it is now engaged. Our BBC broadcasts brought the OU to the attention of the nation and vastly increased our potential for recruiting students. I believe that making our courseware available on the net would bring us to the attention of the world and have a similar effect on our international potential.
I must declare an interest. Too many modern technological developments result in a net transfer of wealth from the poorer to the richer nations. Copyright legislation and royalties will have this effect on the use of courseware by people in developing countries as they join the net. I would like the OU’s courseware to reach them as a free resource. I am sure that it would lead us to new local institutional partners who would work with us to offer the whole supported open learning package and not just the web-based courseware.
Meanwhile, I am pleased that our evolving use of methods can rely on a superb R & D infrastructure. The Institute of Educational Technology, which took the risk of taking me on as an unpaid intern thirty years ago, continues its excellent work. The impact of the Knowledge Media Institute has exceeded my wildest expectations and its development has been a special thrill. Today, through COROUS, we are gaining expertise in a new area. I feel that we are well set for the future.
Open to places
A word or two about being open to places. I again make the obvious point that being open to ideas and to methods will help us be open to places.
Most of our students do most of their study at home. However, the workplace is becoming a more significant place for OU study. Some of our new programmes, like the Diploma in Social Work, integrate work and study. Also, as course components become more portable, and laptops become ubiquitous, more students study on the move. I’ve made thirty trips through the Channel Tunnel since I got involved with UNESCO and I write my TMAs on Eurostar, which is an excellent study environment.
This morning at Senate the Regional Directors presented a paper on the implications of regionalisation in the UK. I am glad that we are engaging systematically with the issue. So far I believe that we have made the right moves in relation to Scotland and Wales. The challenge, of course, is to be both national and local, or rather global, national and local.
We must never forget that we operate best at scale. The OU has grown into a large institution over the three decades of its existence. That is a basis for financial strength however the funding mechanisms for higher education evolve. This is essentially unpredictable, since any sensible government should change funding mechanisms regularly so that universities can’t get too good at playing the system.
Thanks to the foundations laid by David Murray and the excellent work of Geoff Peters and his team, the OU has done extremely well out of the funding system that followed the with reforms of 1992. However, this graph also shows the danger of being very dependent on a single source of funds. In 1996/97 the government slammed on the funding brakes and made warning noises about a dismal future. So we projected the trend line that you see here. You can see that there is a difference of more than £40 million between where that trend would have taken us today and where we actually are. £40 million pays for hundreds of staff.
Back in 1996 we should have been building two Berrill buildings, not one, but I would have been dismissed as crazy if I had suggested it. The lesson is that we must diversify our funding and not believe too much in government funding trends, even if we have to act on them. Like death and taxes, change in funding arrangement is certain.
It is plausible to argue that the total of our state grants will drop if the new government is serious about more private sector involvement in education. It is also plausible to argue that some of the grants will be moved from HEFCE to regional bodies. Both are plausible. Either may or may not happen. But we can cushion the effects by drawing on resources from more places. I don’t just mean money; I mean people, courses and services as well.
Our activities outside the UK are an example of diversification. I am sometimes given the credit for our steady expansion overseas, which now accounts for some 30,000 people studying OU courses outside the UK. My own view is that I simply tried to organise a phenomenon that would have taken place anyway. Indeed, I think I should be criticised for having had too weak a strategy for international expansion.
But we are where we are. Someone once said that Britain acquired an empire in a fit of absent mind and you could apply that to the OU’s expansion overseas. I am pleased that we have made impressive new leadership appointments to a number of OU areas that are involved in international work such as OU Worldwide, OU Validation Services, Marketing and Business Development. The times are now propitious for developing a clearer strategy.
If the analogy with the empire has any validity, I would extend it by suggesting that we should now move to a commonwealth model. Indeed, this is already happening. We are encouraging our partners in Central Europe and Singapore to move to a validation. USOU is already more a member of a commonwealth than a colony.
The name Commonwealth of Learning is already taken, otherwise it would be a nice descriptor for the network of OU-related institutions that is emerging. The trick for us here is to abandon the arrogance of empire, with its highly controlled trading relationships, and open ourselves to the co-operation of commonwealth, with freer and mutually beneficial academic links and trading relationships. We are, of course, brilliant at everything we do, but it is just possible we may not always know better than the natives how to adapt our philosophy, values, methods and programmes to their environment.
I am very pleased to note that despite the few hiccups that come from being divided by a common language, USOU is providing a model for the future. American and UK colleagues have done an outstanding job in getting USOU to national accreditation in record time. It is the first new, not-for-profit, American university of the 21st century and that is an important symbol.
In my new job at UNESCO I often hear talk of the Arab Open University, which is a very important project for the whole Arab world. I am particularly pleased to hear people tell me that the UK Open University seems really well organised and purposeful in its contribution to the project and I congratulate all the colleagues involved. I apologise for the fact that the guy who beats you down in negotiations about price, Dr Bubtana, is one of my new UNESCO staff members, but there is poetic justice in that.
Twelve years ago, before I had any idea of coming to the OU, I chaired the planning committee for the Commonwealth of Learning. One of my roles as chairman was to give a hard time to the member from the UK government, who told us that the UK would not be contributing funds to directly to the project, but would instead give money to the OU to provide services to the project.
Of course, shortly after expressing outrage at this perfidious approach I found myself at the OU and the happy recipient of these funds, so life has its ironies. The lesson is to be nice to people on the way up because you might meet them on the way down.
Open to people
Let me move to the central statement of the OU mission and comment on the duty of being open to people. Once again, we must bring to our attempts to be open to people all the other varieties of openness: to ideas, to methods and to places.
Much activity is underway to make the OU even more open to people as students and I shall not try to summarise our initiatives for widening participation and improving retention.
But I do enter a plea that we trust students a bit more to know their own minds. I think often of a remark I found in an OU academic planning document from last year. I apologise to Professor Marwick for not noting down this primary source so I could find it again, but I did note down the phrase: “The question was whether we should respond to student demand or whether the courses should have some academic integrity.”
This dichotomy is too stark. It seems to me that we should listen very carefully to student demand and then work at meeting that demand with offerings that do have academic integrity. There’s a nice phrase of Mao’s which sums up what I mean: “We must teach the masses clearly what we learned from them confusedly.”
We are doing this already. Students wanted courses in voluntary sector management and in developing a programme we changed the paradigms for thinking about management in that environment. Students wanted occupationally related courses in the area of health and social welfare and we have developed programmes of strong academic integrity that take the OU into their workplaces. Students wanted courses in information technology and T171 takes them beyond the basic instrumental skills they thought they were looking for to a reflection on the new world of ICT.
There are many other examples. It seems to me that responding to new student demands with academic integrity is a more exciting challenge than the take it or leave it approach implied in my OU quote.
I shall say little about being open to people as staff. Obviously the OU cannot match the diversity of UNESCO, where the 20 people with whom I work most closely, are of 14 nationalities. However, the OU leaves UNESCO in the dust when it comes to having proper staff policies – in which context I am delighted to see IIP recognition now breaking out all over the OU.
I believe that we are also a model for openness to student participation in governance and this is partly due to the extremely high quality of the OUSA reps. involved. I express particular thanks to the succession of very able OUSA presidents, represented by Ann Gall today, with whom it has been my privilege to work.
Of the advances made during my tenure as VC I am particularly proud of much stronger links we have created with alumni and graduates and with the huge progress in the development function generally. Kitty Chisholm has been an inspiration of all of us in driving this forward.
Let me say some ‘thanks you’s’ before I conclude. I have already had opportunities to thank some colleagues, so please don’t be upset if I don’t do the whole roll call now. It has been a pleasure to work with you all. But I must mention a few names.
First the two chancellors, with different functions, with whom I have worked in recent years. Betty Boothroyd, is a wonderful asset to the country and the University and the Milton Keynes degree ceremony that she conducted this week was a magical occasion. It was also a tremendous thrill to celebrate USOU’s accreditation in New York three weeks ago with Richard Jarvis. Two extraordinary people.
That adjective also applies to the two University Secretaries that I have worked with, Joe Clinch and Fraser Woodburn. Two very different colleagues, each excellent and each right for his times.
It also describes my two Pro-Chancellors, Sir Kenneth Berrill and Sir Bryan Nicholson. The OU is wonderfully fortunate in the quality of the lay officers it attracts.
I would also like to thank Liz Nelson, who retires as Vice-Chairman of Council this summer. At my first meeting with Liz at the Visiting Committee eleven years ago I insulted her with an unfavourable comment about market research, not knowing that she is one of the country’s most distinguished market researchers. But she forgave me and we have enjoyed working together ever since, particularly as the two Members of the USOU Corporation.
Let me again thank the current and past Pro-Vice-Chancellors who have put up with me over the years. I was very touched that all fifteen of them came to our farewell party at Wednesden and I promise never, ever, to make jokes about Pro-Vice-Chancellors again.
I have been blessed by having wonderful colleagues in my personal office. First, I thank the person with whom I have spent most time at close quarters in my eleven years at the OU, George Claxton. Together George and I have put a quarter of a million miles on a succession of office cars and George’s lightning reflexes have saved us from accident on several occasions. He is tremendously reliable and always willing to work the ungodly hours that the VC’s job requires.
As regards the VC’s office itself, I challenge anyone to find another enterprise with a quarter of a billion pound turnover that has such a small personal staff working to the chief executive. The OU manages it because of the superb competence, commitment and productivity of Steph, Rachel and Sheila. Steph is without equal in her ability to remember where things are and when things happened, Rachel brings cheerful efficiency and looks after the Chancellor with style.
Sheila has been an absolutely outstanding support, taking everything in her stride as the VC’s job has grown and grown and the travel schedule has taken me further and further afield. I shall miss them all very much. I wish they could come with me to UNESCO but that might blow the UK quota!
Fortunately Kristin is coming with me to Paris. I want to say publicly how splendid and vital her support has been here. I sometimes think that she would rather attend an OU degree ceremony than go to the cinema. She has been a tireless volunteer worker and ambassador for the University and her example of conscientiousness has often spurred me to greater efforts.
A few final words before we go and celebrate.
It has been an enormous privilege to lead this Open University for eleven years and I thank you all for making it such an exhilarating job.
Over the last eleven years I have officiated at one hundred and fifty OU degree and award ceremonies in ten countries. At those events I have talked with some fifty thousand graduates. I often wish that all of you could hear what I have heard on those occasions.
Time and again, graduates have told me that OU study has changed their lives. Sometimes this means progress or change in their careers. But more often they refer to a deeper effect. They say that OU study has given them greater confidence to develop their own lives and to contribute to the world around them.
This impact on lives is what makes leading the Open University such a privilege. The noble mission of the OU, to be open to people, to places, to methods and to ideas, is as powerful today as it has ever been.
That is why I am confident that the OU is open to future.
Our main enemy is complacency so let us end by making our own the grace of Scotland’s proud McLeod clan: “Lord, help us to be slightly worthy of the esteem in which we hold ourselves.”