OPEN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ASSOCIATION
CONFERENCE 2000
UMIST, Manchester
April 16, 2000
Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
It’s a great pleasure to be with you again. Thank you for arranging your programme to accommodate me in what has been a busy weekend. This year, in response to indications that new graduates might welcome it, we are holding some degree ceremonies on Fridays.
Two weeks ago on Friday April 7 we held the OU’s – and the world’s – first virtual degree ceremony. It was a strange sensation to sit on stage in full academic dress in front of an almost empty hall. The graduates, the first from the new Masters programme in Open and Distance Education, took part from all over the world via the web, as did their guests. The honorary graduate, appropriately, was Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. He was in a studio at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Thanks to the skill and hard work of our colleagues in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute all the connections worked flawlessly and those of us who took part had a sense of history in the making. Certainly the media saw it that way, because as well as making the TV news in this country, this OU ceremony was featured in the World News on the ABC TV network in the United States.
Last Friday, the day before yesterday, was another first. It was a conventional ceremony but a new venue, Cheltenham. We are constantly trying to find the best and most convenient venues for the growing number of ceremonies and the South West presents a special challenge because it is such a long region. This year, to try to deal with that, we’ve held ceremonies at each end of it, in Torquay and Cheltenham. Then yesterday we held two ceremonies in Portsmouth.
If I count ceremonies overseas and at our accredited institutions, I’ve officiated at ten ceremonies already this year and I have at least ten more to go. But as I’ve said before at OUSA conferences, I greatly enjoy these events because of the enthusiasm of the graduates and for what I learn about how OU study has benefited them in their lives and work. Hearing personally from nearly two thousand new OU graduates, as I have in the last sixteen days, helps to keep me firmly anchored in the central reality of the OU, which is the student experience.
That’s what I want to reflect on with you today. Last time I addressed this conference, two years ago, I chose as my theme one of the motions before the conference:
Conference believes that the Open University has strayed from the ideals of its founders and resolves that all measures be taken to restore those ideals.
I’m sure I convinced all those present that the motion was nonsense and that if Harold Wilson, Jennie Lee, Peter Venables and Geoffrey Crowther came back today they would be immensely proud at how the OU has grown and prospered for thirty years while staying true to their founding ideals.
This year again I’ve read through all the motions and I will comment on them later. However, it was not in the motions that I found my title and theme, but in two other documents. My title is Mere Consumers? and is taken it from the final paragraph of Alison’s presidential report. Let me read the relevant sentences:
The University will continue to develop the sophistication of its surveys, its research, and its communications with students. That is something we should welcome, not fear. However, if we fail to understand the difference between communication and the power of independent organisation, we should not be surprised if OU students become mere consumers (or not) of OU products rather than setting the agenda for the future. I sincerely hope that OUSA will continue to take the high road, and I very much hope that during my Presidency no one has been in any doubt where we stood.
First let me say that I absolutely agree with those sentiments and I’d like to broaden out the contrast between communication, independent organisations and consumers and look at the OU as a whole in those terms. Before I do, however, I would like a pay tribute to Alison’s leadership of OUSA over the last two years. As vice-chancellor I’m very aware that it is not usually helpful to an OUSA president for me to say anything too nice about her during her term of office. It can simply create the suspicion among other OUSA officers that their president has gone native and has become too biddable by the VC and his staff.
But now it is a pleasure for me to say publicly that Alison has done a superb job. We have indeed been in no doubt where OUSA stood on the issues. While I have very occasionally heard colleagues draw parallels between OUSA’s stern internal discipline and Josef Stalin’s Russia, the clarity of view has been enormously helpful. Those of you who have attended Academic Board and Senate will know that academic bodies are not known for forming crisp, digital views on issues - especially when the issues are the least bit subtle, like, say, compulsory residential schools or combined studies degrees.
As chair of those two bodies I know how helpful it has been for OUSA to step into each debate with a clear view. Very often it carries the day. I am aware, of course, that not all 170,000 students necessarily share the view that OUSA puts forward on a particular issue but I compliment you on having an efficient consultative structure that allows you to be confident of having captured the majority position. I also congratulate you on going with the majority view as OUSA policy even when there is a substantial disgruntled minority. You may not all like the comparison but in this respect OUSA is like the CBI, which also takes clear policy stands even if they make a minority of members uncomfortable. Creating such discomfort is the price of effectiveness for a body that represents a large and diverse membership.
I have also seen Alison at work in less prominent but equally important groups like the Committee set up to review the Academic Board structure and the Working Group on Named Degrees. In these instances and many others her professionalism and clarity has been exemplary and all students are in her debt.
Presidents of organisations cannot choose the issues that they will be dealt during their term of office. It was Helen Banyard’s bad luck to be OUSA president when the funding council cut our grant and Alison’s good luck come in as president just as the money started to flow again. But it was Alison’s bad luck to be president when the OU Council felt it had to reduce the number of members of Council to conform to current government orthodoxy. I can assure you that she left Council in no doubt that OUSA did not want student representation scaled down to match.
Let me repeat once again that the decision to scale down the numbers of all stakeholder bodies in no way represented any lack of support, on Council’s part, for the student presence of Council. Anyway, what’s done is done and I’m sure that the two student members of Council will make the student voice heard effectively. With fewer people round the table there will in fact be more chance to speak.
But let me come back to my title, Mere Consumers? In the changing world of higher education two trends seem particularly important at the moment. One is the emergence of for-profit universities and the pressure, even on public, not-for-profit universities to see serving business and the economy as their primary function. The second is the growing role of information and communication technology or to use shorthand, the emergence of the e-university.
The effect of both these trends is to give greater currency to the idea of the student as consumer. Thinking of universities as businesses, whether for profit or not, leads to the idea of the customer or consumer as sovereign. It is easy to argue that the learning transaction for the individual is the only thing that matters and that institutions simply get in the way. The student pays money and should get the credits or award they are buying. Talk about institutional identity and academic community is, from this perspective, just so much flannel and special pleading by the paid employees of the university.
The emergence of the e-university need not, in principle, lead you to the notion of the student as consumer but it is becoming so mixed in with the business approach that it tends in that direction. People see e-learning as a branch of e-commerce and construct a simple model of higher education where the student simply consumes information that is fed down the internet pipe.
In reality, for all the claims to modernity much of the dot.com world operates on two very old ideas. Some people, the students, pay fees to access a product on the computer screen while other people, the advertisers, pay money to bring their products to the attention of the first people. Nothing very new about that model.
What the implications of this for OU students, the OU and OUSA?
First, it provides a good opportunity to do what universities are meant to do and use our brains to analyse the issues. Let’s concentrate on the e-university trend rather than the growth of for-profit institutions. The OU will always be a not-for-profit, public university and proud of it. Our mission is to be open to people, not just people who can pay. Student numbers are about 10% up this year and many of you will be aware that thanks to new state support for students on benefit the OU is substantially more open this year in socio-economic terms than it was last. 14,000 new undergraduates, 22% of the total are receiving financial assistance this year compared to 3,000, or 6% of the total last year.
Of course, I’m well aware that this still leaves some students struggling – there is always a poverty trap. But thanks to the state support we can direct more of the OU’s own funds to those people, funds which are coming increasingly from the generosity of OU graduates.
The one comment I will make about the business agenda in higher education is that being a public university is no excuse for not being thoroughly businesslike and effective in serving students. I note that most of your motions this year are about the nuts and bolts of the functioning of the OU system. I entirely accept that there are no excuses for errata, late mailings, foul-ups in tutor allocation and suchlike and I apologise for those that occur.
This year, due to a concatenation of circumstances, some 5% of students had problems of one kind and another during the course starts in February. That is far too high and we intend to bring it down next year, partly by addressing one of the circumstances that concatenated - which was the many thousands of late registrations by continuing students. Too many students got mixed up between the OU and Lastminute.com.
What about the e-university and the e-world generally? The first thing we all have to do is to challenge the glib technological determinism which assumes that the internet will sweep away many familiar landmarks. This fatalism takes two forms, endism and what has been called 6D vision.
By endism I mean the view that the internet spells the end of all sorts of things:
- the end of newspapers, television and mass media because the internet takes information direct to each individual according to their choice;
- the end of brokers and intermediaries for the same reason;
- the end of firms, bureaucracies and organisations because they are unnecessary intermediaries;
- the end of universities because they are merely bureaucratic organisations;
- the end of politics because we can hold electronic referenda on every issue;
- the end of government because business, aided by the internet, can runs things better;
- the end of cities and regions because why would people want to congregate when they can create their own community on the net;
- and the end of the nation-state because it’s all one cyberworld, what my colleague Geoff Peters calls Windownesia.
These predictions are a consequence of what John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid call 6D vision in which the ‘D’ stands for contemporary buzzwords like demassification, decentralisation, denationalisation, despacialisation, disintermediation and disaggregation. This vision is based on the supposed logic of the rapid movement of information between individuals. But this logic ignores the more practical logic of humanity which will always reassert itself.
False predictions based on an abstract logic of information flows have been around for a long time. The paperless office was forecast back in the seventies but paper is still doing very nicely thank you. What is newer is that the logic of information is being used to predict the end of organisations and particularly the end of organisations which have some sort of democratic base like OUSA and the OU.
In reasserting the practical logic of humanity and the value of institutions like the OU and associations like OUSA, the OU and OUSA can help each other greatly. From the University’s point of view I would like to congratulate you on two OUSA initiatives in particular. First, you are doing an extraordinary job in using the web, the very technology that some think spells the end of intermediaries and large associations, to increase community feeling among OU students, to increase the role of OUSA as an intermediary and to build an even stronger association.
A lot of nonsense is talked about cybercommunities. Being able to send a message to the president of the United States and get a reply from an expert system does little to create a real community. But the computer conferences that OUSA runs for 150 OU courses and the many other conferences that it organises for OUSA business and social purposes are genuine communities. Just when the community feeling in many other universities has dissipated because students spend less time on campus, you have brought OU students closer together.
And it is not just computer communities. Your work at residential schools, the support for tutorials evidenced in your conference motions, and this conference itself, shows that you are in little danger of becoming mere consumers.
The second initiative I applaud is the one you launch today, your Person to Person recruitment campaign. This is a wonderful idea. We know that word of mouth recommendations bring many new students to the OU and we know that one in four of the UK adult population knows someone who has experience as an OU student. I wish this initiative well and I look forward to the activity generated by the competitive spice.
This is a time of year when I am made to feel particularly good about the students and graduates of the OU. I noted earlier that in the last sixteen days two thousand new graduates have spoken to me individually about their experience of OU study in seven degree ceremonies. Their enthusiasm for the experience of OU study, their accounts of its positive impact on their lives, and their pride in the institution reinvigorate me. These are not mere consumers, these are people whose lives have been changed by membership of a great university and identification with its ideals.
Also last week I visited the current telethon campaign being run by OU graduates to raise money from OU graduates. It is always an impressive experience. In the last three weeks they have been raising more than £10,000 every evening for students with disabilities and student support generally. I expect the campaign as a whole to top a quarter of a million pounds. The professionals who help us organise the campaign and provide the telephone facilities say that the OU is the client they like most, because they know of no other organisation whose members speak so warmly about it and are so ready to talk to another person who has shared the experience.
Those of you here today in Manchester are a tiny proportion of the 170,000 OU students in degree courses this year – only a fraction of one percent. But OUSA and its conference have an importance out of all proportion to your numbers. I urge you to remain a student association, not a consumer association. I for my part will ensure that the OU remains a university, not an information producer.
Thank you all for your contribution to the life of our University. Congratulations to Alison on an exemplary term of office and my very best wishes to your new president Ann Gall as she assumes the leadership of this remarkable association.
Reference
John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid (2000) The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School Press