Central and Eastern European Conference
TEN YEARS OF DEVELOPING MANAGERS IN
CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.
Milton Keynes
15 May 2000
Helping to create the civil society
Remarks by the Vice-Chancellor
Sir John Daniel
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to Walton Hall, the centre of operations of the Open University and to say how delighted I am that we are holding this conference to mark the tenth anniversary of the OU’s partnerships in Central Europe and Russia.
These partnerships began at exactly the time I became Vice-Chancellor, so I feel a very personal satisfaction at the splendid way in which they have developed. I was appointed Vice-Chancellor in November 1989, when I was a student at Canada’s National Defence College taking a one-year course in world affairs. All the students of that year felt that we were tremendously fortunate to be able to take time to travel and reflect on what was taking place around the world in that amazingly eventful year of 1989-90.
I remember being at home at Christmas that year and following the events in Romania as the Ceaucescu regime was overthrown. Then, in the second half of our year of study, we visited 24 countries in all parts of the world. I have very clear memories of the excitement of being in Prague in May 1990. The sense of newly won freedom was palpable and thrilling. People would wander around in Wenceslas Square joining the little groups that gathered spontaneously around various speakers. I had the sense of a society and a human community being recreated.
Then, in the middle of 1990 Kristin and I moved to the UK when I took up my appointment as Vice-Chancellor. One of the first functions that we hosted at our residence at Wednesden House was a dinner for the Budapest Platform.
This was a grouping of people who had come together in Budapest in the previous year united by their determination to ensure that distance education played its full role in the renewal of Central and Eastern Europe. Some of you were at that dinner in Milton Keynes in 1990 when we all realised what enormous potential there was for using distance education to change Europe for the better.
The Open University is very proud to have been associated, over the decade since that dinner, with the process of recreating societies and communities over a huge part of the Eurasian landmass. I like to think that we have helped you to create a civil society in each of your countries and to bring the vision of the Budapest Platform to reality. The Platform met again in Prague in 1991 and then in Budapest and Krakow. One the way it became EDEN, the European Distance Education Network. Under the inspired leadership of its early presidents, Gottfried Leibbrandt and Erling Ljosa, EDEN made a huge contribution to bringing us all together to increase the professionalism of distance education across the continent.
As you know, the close involvement of the Open University in offering programmes in your countries was your initiative. It began in Hungary, and then Czechoslovakia, Russia, Romania and Bulgaria joined the movement. I pay tribute to the pioneers from each of your countries who made those first contacts and am thrilled that many of you are here today. I also pay tribute to Brian Lund, the founding Director of the OU Business School. Brian has been one of the Open University’s great pioneers. Many of the initiatives that have made the OU Business School the great force for management and business education that it is today have Brian’s fingerprints on them.
It is also a pleasure to thank the UK government, which, through the Know-How fund and the British Council, helped us immeasurably in those early days. Without the support of the Know How Fund we would not have been able to implement the absolutely fundamental decision to teach our Certificate and Diploma programmes in your local languages.
That was a very important decision. We enormously admire the way that the people of Russia and Central Europe speak many languages and some thought that we should concentrate on teaching in English to those who could operate in English. But the first ambition of the Open University is to be open as to people. We decided that others could go into your capital cities and teach MBA courses in English to small numbers of the elites.
We wanted the Open University to be open to a much wider range of people and to follow its second basic principle, to be open as to places. So the decision was made to teach in local languages and to concentrate in the first instance on the certificate and diploma programmes so that we could reach large numbers of junior, middle, and senior managers, all over your countries, with basic business and management education.
The other two basic ideals of the Open University are to be open as to methods and open as to ideas. Here I must congratulate you, our partners, and the hundreds of people who have worked with you as staff members and tutors, for the wonderful way in which you embraced and developed our system of supported open learning.
For all of you this was a completely new approach to teaching and learning, very different from the rather authoritarian pedagogy that was traditional in your countries for much of the last century. But we sensed that you seized on the principles of supported open learning as a powerful expression of the civil society that you wanted to create. You found liberating the ideas of group work, of participation, of the tutor as facilitator rather than professor. You were excited at the prospect of leading the students ask questions rather than forcing them to learn answers. You liked the idea of evaluating options and accepting that disagreement over the choice of the best option is perfectly legitimate.
In my visits to your countries I have been amazed and delighted to see how your tutors have embraced with such success the challenge of taking OU methods into your countries. I have often said and written that the best of your tutors in Central Europe are every bit as good as the best of our tutors in the rest of the OU system in the UK and elsewhere. I congratulate you and them.
During the ten years that we have been building these programmes together I have had the great pleasure of regular visits to each of our partners and I have some wonderful memories of those visits. The first trip was to Eurocontact in Budapest in September 1991. From there we travelled along the Danube into Slovakia. This impressed on me the role of that great river and made me appreciate the enormous difficulties it causes for all of your countries when the traffic on the river is disrupted by conflict as it is now. In Bratislava, on that visit, we held our first award ceremony in the Hotel Borik.
In 1995 Kristin and I visited each of the partners in turn. We began in Moscow and I remember being met at the airport so graciously by Edith Thorne, who has done such a remarkable job in helping LINK to achieve its present success. We had a little ceremony to award the first course certificates and it was thrilling and touching to see the immense pride of the Russian students in what they had achieved. From there we went on to Bulgaria and saw the fantastic work that our colleagues at the New Bulgarian University were doing in very difficult circumstances. While we were there the first e-mail link to the OU was established and we could see what a difference it was going to make to liaison with the OU.
Another highlight of our time in Sofia was a dinner on top of Mount Vitosa hosted by the steel company Kremikovtzi whose staff told us how this 60,000 employee company was being transformed by a small group of senior managers who had taken the OU’s certificate courses.
From there we went to Bratislava and held a moving award ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors in the Archbishop’s Palace on the beautiful central square in Bratislava. We met the President of Slovakia, the Mayor of Bratislava and the Speaker of the Slovak Parliament. This was typical of meetings over the years with senior political figures in all your countries who have given impressive support to the programmes you have built with us.
Then it was on to Prague to visit the new office in the Old Town Square and to meet the Mayor and the Deputy Premier. We were saddened by the break up of Czechoslovakia but it was clear that we needed to create a distinct operation in the Czech Republic.
Our next stop was Hungary where Tibor Dori took us to the headquarters of the Hungarian Church at Esztergom. I remember looking out from the top of the Cathedral Tower across the river there to Slovakia on the other bank. It is not a very wide river but the bridge there had never been repaired since it was destroyed in the Second World War, so communication with the Hungarian-speaking Slovaks on the other side was very limited. It struck me there what an important role our partners could play by sharing their courses so as to be able serve the language minorities in each of their countries. At first mutual suspicion made this a difficult idea but I hope that it will become a reality before long.
I have been particularly pleased to see the way that the partners have increasingly worked together as a group, sometimes to present a common front to the OU, but also to do things together in their vast region. I hope that The Open University of the Danube will play a significant role in the new century.
We finished that 1995 trip in Bucharest where we met the Vice-President and President of the Romanian Senate in Mrs Ceaucescu’s old office and heard how a law to give status to distance learning was going through the legislature.
All these trips have included some wonderful opportunities to get to know your countries. I recall our visit to the monasteries at Sergei Posad, formerly Zagorsk, just outside Moscow. I remember sailing on Lake Balaton, visiting the churches and monasteries of Bulgaria, and crossing and recrossing the Charles Bridge in Prague.
The most energetic episode was a walk in the Carpathian Mountains north of Bucharest with Ionel Chera. We took a cable car up the mountain, walked along the top and then went down the wrong valley. This made for a very difficult walk back in the melting snow and we caught the last cable car of the day with only a minute to spare. I acquired from that walk a reputation in Romania for being very fit for my age – and they know my age there because was in Bucharest for my birthday in 1995 and you put on a wonderful party for me.
I think also of the 1998 ceremony at the Opera House in Bucharest, followed by an outstanding concert by the chorus and the state symphony orchestra.
Finally, I look back on the gathering earlier this year in Sofia where I presented certificates and diplomas to the students and the New Bulgarian University was kind enough to confer an honorary degree on me.
Those visits have also helped me understand the context in which you work and to share your ambitions and frustrations. They have also given me a tremendous admiration for what you have achieved. It’s hard to remember now how small and fragile your organisations were in the early days. Yet by 1997 LINK, for example, had achieved national recognition as a higher education institution. I congratulate Sergei Schennikov and Andre Shuinov on that achievement. The New Bulgarian University now has much better quarters, both for the main university and the OU programme and I compliment Professor Bogdanov and Professor Alkaly on that progress.
The programme in Bratislava has always been strong and innovative and I recall many discussions with Dr Jan Morovic as we explored new approaches, including the move to the validation of programmes. The programme in Romania is particularly dynamic and colourful. I’ve never visited CODECS twice in the same building and I always feel very underdressed alongside Catalin Ionescu and his splendid wardrobe of colourful suits.
In all this we have been indebted to the many OU people who have acted as country representatives. On my visits I’ve always been hugely impressed by their dedication, their understanding of your environments, and the way they encouraged you to progress and develop. I didn’t meet all of them on my visits, so when I say thank you and congratulations to Edith Thorne, Allan Clarke, Arthur Lyttle, Terry Morris, Eion Farmer and Milo Shott I include all my OU colleagues, including especially those in the Examinations and Assessment area, who have worked so hard to make this a success.
Today we look back and we look forward. Since we began our partnerships in 1990 the Open University has continued to develop. In 1992, after our partnerships were under way, the OU was asked by the UK government to take over the work of the Council for Academic Awards and become a validating institution as well. In a way the OU has since become the UK’s supra-university with a range of activities and responsibilities that no other university tries to match.
However, the great diversity of the OU’s academic activity in the UK and the rest of the world all takes place under one authority and that is the Royal Charter of the Open University. Whether degrees and awards are awarded by validation or by direct teaching and examination they are all Open University degrees and awards.
We are asking you to move your partnerships with us to a validation and accreditation arrangement for several reasons. First, as I said, your institutions have matured impressively and you are ready to take more responsibility for your programmes. Second, your societies are evolving rapidly and you need more flexibility to adapt OU courses to local needs. Third, the present direct teaching arrangement are complex, cumbersome and costly and will limit the future growth of your programmes.
I fully understand your nervousness at this change in the relationship and I hope that the discussions at this conference have reassured you that the validated awards you will give with the OU are awards under the OU’s Royal Charter just as much as at present. What we are creating together is a world wide confederation of institutions that share the same values of open learning and the same commitment to the student. You are valued and early members of that confederation and we want you to stay with us as we develop the notion of the global open university for this new and exciting century.
It is therefore with great pleasure, with a proud sense of achievement, and with many excellent memories, that I celebrate our ten years of work together. We have had an immense impact on management education in your countries through the 70,000 people who have studied with you already the 12,000 who are studying this year. But the achievement is not simply and not mainly in numbers of students. It is in the way that we have liberated the potential of those people to develop and prosper in a new environment and in the way that those people are helping to transform your countries for the better both as managers and as people who believe in the civil society.
May I end by asking you to raise your glasses and toast each of our partners in turn:
In Hungary: Euro-contact
In Russia: LINK
In Slovakia: Nadacia City University of Bratislava
In the Czech Republic: Nadace OU
In Bulgaria: The New Bulgarian University
In Romania: CODECS
And finally:
The Open University.