Open House - May 2000
VC's column
Who owns the University?
The dot.com frenzy is now abating, but at its height I half expected to be approached by a venture capitalist or a media company with an offer to buy the OU. Of course, the OU is not for sale. Meanwhile, colleagues in the Business School have done the interesting hypothetical exercise of trying to estimate the OU's value if it were on the market. In today's world not the least of the University's assets is that it is a community with nearly 100,000 members online.
Issues of ownership and value are now topical for all universities. Harvard University, for example, is worried that some of its high profile academics are making private arrangements to do video lectures for one or other of the new for-profit US universities. Harvard is trying to develop a policy on its faculty's external teaching activities. Other well-known universities are making deals with media companies to create well-funded teaching consortia.
We must follow these developments closely. The OU developed a policy on the ownership of the copyright in course materials thirty years ago and it seems to have stood the test of time. Our arrangements for distributing, within the University, the profits from the sale of course materials and rights appear to be well accepted. Institutions that have never had to face these issues before can find them divisive.
What must worry us greatly is any trend, following the example of Harvard, for universities to place restrictions on the freedom of their academic staff to do some teaching for other bodies. The OU depends critically on its 8,000 associate lecturers, many of whom have full-time appointments in other universities and colleges. From time to time there are rumours that a particular institution is threatening to prohibit its staff from working for the OU but so far these threats have never been carried through. I imagine this is for reasons of principle, pragmatism and pride. First, restricting an academic's right to teach is a serious infringement of intellectual freedom. Second, since few universities can match the training that the OU offers its associate lecturers, other institutions derive direct benefit from their staff's involvement with the OU, especially now that distance learning is on everyone's agenda. Third, I find that the national academic community feels genuine pride in the success
of the OU as a collective achievement of UK higher education. This perception of the OU as a kind of supra-university owned by everyone is an asset that we must not squander.
The growth of interest in distance learning threatens the OU with increasing competition but this threat is more than offset by the enhanced opportunities we face. Our unrivalled range of courseware and intellectual property attracts the interest of partners overseas and, more recently, of large employers who would like to reversion courses for use within their organisations. We must ensure that our policies for distributing the income that flows from these activities continue to attract the widespread support of the OU community.