The Open University
Launch of the Open University Research School
December 1, 2000
Remarks by the Vice-Chancellor
Sir John Daniel
It is a great pleasure for me to offer some closing remarks. I thank you all for making this such an excellent event. Professor Bassindale has explained to you the thinking behind the creation of the OU Research School and our aspirations for it. Professor Susan Greenfield has inspired us by sharing the tremendous excitement of the best research and its importance to humankind. Professor Bob Burgess has drawn on his own wealth of experience to show us how we can use the Research School to develop further our graduate and research culture.
As well as expressing my gratitude to our speakers I thank the representatives of our Sponsoring Institutions who have come here this afternoon. In my ten years as Vice-Chancellor one of the most significant milestones in the University’s development has been the integration of the former Council for National Academic Awards as OU Validation Services. This created a relationship, with huge and exciting potential, between the core Open University and a rich network of associated, accredited and sponsoring institutions.
As far as research and graduate work was concerned the addition of the CNAA’s research degree programme doubled the number of students doing PhDs under the authority of the OU and greatly diversified the disciplines in which they are working. However, with research degrees, as with taught degrees, we did not rush the process of integration with the wider OU systems, but let things proceed in an evolutionary manner. I pay tribute to Dr Derek Pollard and his colleagues for the way that they have multiplied and strengthened the links with the OU on this campus and in our regional centres over the last eight years.
We are now ready for the next stage of integration and the creation of the research school will be an important catalyst for that process. There is far more synergy between the research work in the sponsoring institutions and in the rest of the OU than we have even begun to exploit. The Research School gives us the opportunity to achieve a quantum leap in positioning research and graduate study within the Open University.
I must also say that the creation of the Research School is a new stage in the growth of activity whose seeds were planted at the moment the OU was founded thirty years ago. Walter Perry, our founding Vice-Chancellor, was absolutely clear that the OU would be a research university and he appointed the first deans, professors and academics with that in mind.
Research activity took some time to build up. Each faculty and school had first to develop a brand new teaching programme on a large scale. Furthermore, since we were funded directly by the Department of Education and Science for the first 23 years, the OU did not have the same access to research funds as other universities. But we developed it anyway and when we moved into the national funding system in 1992 it was hugely liberating. All of us who were on campus in December 1992 can remember the announcement of the results of the first RAE in which the OU participated.
You could almost see OU colleagues walking six inches taller because the results put us right in among the old universities and identified research of international calibre in each of our faculties and schools. We did even better in the 1996 RAE and we shall be submitting 25% more people for the 2001 RAE. The Research School comes into being as we move OU research into a new phase of intensity, volume and quality.
I should also point out that the OU brings something different to the much talked about relationship between teaching and research. Not only do we teach on a very large scale, which gives us the obligation to get our courses both right and up to date, but we have given ourselves a greater ambition. Over thirty years we have created a situation where the academic community, both nationally and internationally, looks forward to the arrival of a new OU course because they expect it to be a stimulating, challenging, rigorous and thoroughly topical statement of academic thinking in the area. All that, but presented in a very clear and accessible manner.
We are able to do this because of the quality of our staff, their roots in research, and the fact that they work in teams. The latter is where we are so different. When asked what was the most important innovation that the OU brought to higher education Walter Perry always identifies the course team. The course team brings over into teaching some of the culture of research. Moreover, by discussing collectively the academic state of play in the topic of each course, OU colleagues often identify promising and important lines of research. So OU teaching influences OU research as much as the other way round.
I hope that the Research School will be a mechanism for developing further that very special OU link between teaching and research through teamwork in both activities. We have talked a lot about improving and formalising research training, but I hope that we can think even wider than that.
For the last five years I have had the privilege of being a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation, the world’s oldest educational think tank. At the Carnegie Foundation we are embarking on a 5-year, $5 million study of the PhD. Our driving concern is that universities are not ambitious enough about this degree. Yes, it must include research training. Yes, it must include original research. But there is more.
Even with the development of the Institute for Learning and Teaching, the basic training course for the next generation of university teachers will be the PhD. Furthermore, it is through the PhD that each discipline will create its leaders of the future. Those who will protect the integrity of the discipline and will understand the special nature of its intellectual discourse at a deep level. This is not to build walls around the disciplines. On the contrary, I believe that true interdisciplinary work can only arise when people understand their own discipline well enough to appreciate the distinct discourse and assumptions of another. That is when synergy can start.
I suggest that the OU, through the Research School, is uniquely placed to deliver on this more ambitious agenda for the PhD. We can expose students to modern methods of multiple media teaching rather than simply asking them to give lecture courses in a repetitive fashion. We can let them have the experience of the intellectual teamwork by which the OU develops its teaching. The OU is already a major provider of PhD graduates. We must aim to ensure that our PhD graduates are among the best equipped for their future professions, whether they become university teachers, professional researchers, or work in other areas.
Another great asset of the OU is its national and international reach. We already exploit this, as in our new national observatory of everyday cultures, where we take advantage of the spread of OU students and associate lecturers to undertake research that covers the whole country. Furthermore, as our partner institutions in the rest of the world mature. I am sure that they too will find the OU Research School an attractive feature of the relationship with mutual benefits.
Finally, our core mission is to be open to people and to open people up to ideas. When Harold Wilson created the OU he did not just want to get more people into university study. He did not just want to use television to bring teaching into people’s homes. As an academic himself he also wanted to open up the workings of the academy to public view. I see the Research School as a further step in that direction.
I have not done a systematic survey, but from talking to tens of thousands of OU undergraduate students over a decade I suspect that each year more OU undergraduates publish books than all the rest of the UK’s undergraduates put together. Many of our students join the OU to help equip themselves for a personal research project about which they are passionate. Maybe in the fullness of time the Research School will add value for them too.
All of which is to say that something very important is beginning here today. I thank those who have organised the day, I again thank our splendid speakers, and I thank you all for coming. Let’s wish Wendy Stainton Rogers and the Research School every success and lets go off and celebrate.