Introduction

I value the opportunity to set the stage at the beginning of this important meeting.  This is an exciting and demanding time for the United States Open University.

Exciting, because after the months and years of preparation our first students have just completed their first courses.  The USOU is no longer merely an idea.  It is a university actively engaged in teaching and learning.

Demanding, because this small start has shown us just how much there is to do and how tightly constrained we are by the resources available, most especially when it comes to letting the people of this huge country know about the tremendous opportunities we offer.

First may I commend the staff, both in the UK but most especially here in the US, for the hard and intelligent work that has got us to this point.  The USOU is enormously fortunate in the quality and dynamism of its staff here, both the core staff and its first band of associate faculty.

The OU in the UK can also be very proud of the way that many of its people have been inspired by this project and are giving of themselves to make it happen.  I thank the staff for their tremendous commitment and I thank the board for the two years of thinking and planning that have made the USOU a reality.  We now have students and we are soon going to have many more students.

My purpose in these remarks is to try to set the stage the for next phase in our development.  When all is said and done, the quality and the impact of what the United States Open University does and becomes will depend first on the quality and impact of our vision.

That will illuminate our mission which, in turn, will determine the style and scope of our operations as a university.  My purpose today is to review and renew that vision with you.

I shall do first by looking back and asking where have we come from.  Then I shall look with you at the present.  Where are we now?

Finally, we shall look to the future.  Where shall we go?  Where shall we take this exciting university in these demanding times?

If I may give you my conclusion in advance, it is that we are well on the way.  Through the work of the USOU and the OU staff, and through the discussions – often the blue skies discussions – that we have had in this board, we have begun to chart a course.

I shall show that pursuing that course will raise many interesting and difficult questions.  But the time has come to follow the course we have charted in a deliberate fashion rather than worrying that some other destination or some other transportation might be more attractive.

So let me begin by looking back.  I shall take as my reference point the vision that inspired the creation of the Open University in the UK thirty years ago and the way that it was expressed by Lord Crowther, the first Chancellor, in his inaugural address almost exactly 31 years ago today.  The USOU board reviewed this vision and extended it in important ways.

That leads us naturally to the present.  In asking ‘where are we now?’ I shall look at the excellent work that Chancellor Jarvis and his staff have done in a very short time.  In developing the curriculum, arranging articulation with other institutions, and planning study pathways for students, they have done a brilliant job in interpreting the Open University mission for a different context and a different time.

In so doing they have inevitably exposed gaps in the way that the Open University has implemented its mission in the UK.
By their progress so far the USOU staff have taken us into uncharted territory.  That is exciting and also demanding.
It poses the question of the future, ‘where shall we go?’.  I want to look at that question by posing it in a very down-to-earth way.  What will happen when the USOU starts to generate a surplus?

As you know, the status of our University is that of a private institution in support of a foreign charity – that charity being the Open University.  Obviously you can support the Open University by sending checks to it from time to time.  But you can also support it, more helpfully to my mind, by investing the USOU surplus in work that advances the mission for which the Open University was created.

During the 1990s the cash reserves of the Open University grew rapidly.  My former OU Council chairman, Sir Kenneth Berrill who was a former chief economist of the UK Treasury and chairman of the Securities and Investment Board, often used to remind us that we were a university, not a bank.  Beyond a certain limit our cash reserves should not be hoarded but used to further the educational mission of the Open University.

Please note that everything I shall say about the way we might use the USOU surpluses comes with the important caveat that I shall no longer be USOU President or OU Vice-Chancellor when this happy circumstance comes about.  Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to suppose that it would make sense to deploy these resources for purposes that advance the interests of both the USOU and of what Miles Hedges is teaching us to call the ‘OU group’.

This assumes, of course, and this is my fundamental point, that the USOU and the OU group will continue to share a common vision, to pursue a similar mission, and to use compatible methods.

That does not, of course, mean that vision, mission and methods must be identical.  Much of the value of the relationship comes from the differences in emphasis between the USOU and OU on all these dimensions.  We do however, need to share a similar view of the role of open universities in today’s world.

Where have we come from?

Which brings me back to the vision.  Where have we come from?  At the Open University discussions of vision and mission lead us back pretty quickly to Lord Crowther’s inaugural address, not because we are wedded to the past but because it remains the most timeless short statement of what we are about.

Whenever I re-read the speech I wonder at the manner in which he managed to capture, so eloquently and in only a few hundred words, what the new Open University was for.  Shades of Lincoln at Gettysburg - and a standing reproach to  my own verbosity.  Let me share Geoffrey Crowther’s speech with you.

After a short introduction about the honor of being named Chancellor he continued:
 

This is the Open University.

We are open, first, as to people.

Not for us the carefully regulated escalation from one educational level to the next by which the traditional universities establish their criteria for admission.  "We took it as axiomatic," said the Planning Committee, "that no formal academic qualifications would be required for registration as a student."  Anyone could try his or her hand, and only failure to progress adequately would be a bar to continuation of studies.

The first, and most urgent task before us is to cater for the many thousands of people, fully capable of a higher education, who, for one reason or another, do not get it, or do not get as much of it as they can turn to advantage, or as they discover, sometimes too late, that they need.

Only in recent years have we come to realize how many such people there are, and how large are the gaps in educational provision through which they can fall.  The existing system, for all its expansion, misses and leaves aside a great unused reservoir of human talent and potential.

Men and women drop out through failures in the system, through disadvantages of their environment, through mistakes of their own judgement, through sheer bad luck.  These are our primary material.  To them we offer a further opportunity.  Almost we can say, like the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.  I lift my lamp beside the open door."

But if this were all, we could hardly call ourselves a university.  This is not simply an educational rescue mission - though that is our first task and we do not decry it.  But we also aim wider and higher.  Wherever there is an unprovided need for higher education, supplementing the existing provision, there is our constituency.  There are no limits on persons.

That was his complete statement about  being open to people.  As we think about its relevance to the context in which the United States Open University operates I’m sure you were amused by his quote from the Statue of Liberty, even if it sounds a little grandiloquent for modern ears.  But what are his key points?

First, a rejection of the carefully regulated escalation of educational levels with the consequence that ‘we took it as axiomatic that no formal academic qualifications would be required for registration as a student’.

That removal of academic pre-requisites for entry was, I can assure you, very radical indeed for the Britain of the late 1960s.  I still marvel at the fact that the highly distinguished but relatively conventional academics who made up the planning committee made that decision.

With hindsight it is clear that the infant OU rested nearly all its claim to openness on this open admission policy – and, of course on its methods which allowed people to study wherever they were.

When the OU was launched in 1970 two advertisements in the UK’s equivalent of the TV Guide brought in 40,000 applicants.  The first 25,000 were accepted, on a first-come, first-served basis with some attempt at regional balance.  It was to be twenty-five years before the numbers of applicants roughly matched the places available.

What I am saying is that the demand generated by this one key aspect of openness was so great that the OU did not think it appropriate to worry about other aspects of openness, such as flexibility of start dates and study schedules.

This was a perfectly rational decision.  Working on other aspects of openness would have increased costs which would have meant either higher fees or fewer students accepted.  It made sense to go with the standard product.

The situation of the United States Open University is, of course, very different.  The fundamental difference is that in this country the move to open admissions, or at least to extreme flexibility about prior academic qualifications, was already made a long time ago by the community colleges.

There are several reasons why no open university was created in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s when many other countries were doing so, but the prior existence of the community colleges was a key factor.

So open admission to first year undergraduate study is already a massive reality in this country and it did not make sense for the USOU to duplicate that.  We decided, very early on, that the USOU would begin by offering upper division courses and consider only very limited offerings in the lower division – probably developed in conjunction with US community college partners.

But the rest of Lord Crowther’s statement does have meaning for the USOU.  When he talks about:
 

the many thousands of people, fully capable of a higher education, who, for one reason or another, do not get it, or do not get as much of it as they can turn to advantage

he resonates much better with the American context today, as he does when he adds:
 

the existing system, for all its expansion, misses and leaves aside a great unused reservoir of human talent and potential.
 

Lord Crowther also resonates with my vision for the USOU when he says that:
 

This is not simply an educational rescue mission.  We also aim wider and higher.  Wherever there is an unprovided need for higher education, supplementing the existing provision, there is our constituency.  There are no limits on persons.

I draw three conclusions from this brief analysis.

First, it is very important for the USOU to have a mission of openness to people.

Second, that mission need not be defined, as it is at the OU, as open admission with no prior collegiate experience.  That open access route is already there in the community colleges.

Third, the route to the USOU’s mission of openness lies in supplementing the existing provision in intelligent and student-centered ways.  I shall return to this when I come to the next section of these remarks: where are we now?

But before that let me complete my reflection on the Crowther statement.  He continued:
 

We are open as to places.  This University has no cloisters - a word meaning closed.  Hardly even shall we have a campus.  By a very happy chance, our only local habitation will be in the new city that is to bear two of the widest-ranging names in the history of English thought, Milton Keynes.  But this is only where the tip of our toe touches ground;  the rest of the University will be disembodied and airborne.  From the start it will flow all over the United Kingdom.

But it is already clear that the University will rapidly become one of the most potent and persuasive, and profitable, or our invisible exports.  Wherever the English language is spoken or understood, or used as a medium of study, and wherever there are men and women seeking to develop their individual potentialities beyond the limits of the local provision (and I have defined a large part of the world), there we can offer our help.

This may well prove to be the most potent form of external aid that this country can offer in the years to come.  The interest of those all over the world who are wrestling with the problem of making educational bricks without straw has already been aroused, and before long the Open University and its courses, electronically recorded and reproduced, will be for many millions of people their introduction to the riches of the English language and of Britain's heritage of culture.

There are no boundaries of space.

It’s interesting to look back on that statement thirty years on.  The OU certainly flowed quickly all over the UK.  Interest in the Open University approach to teaching and learning was certainly aroused all over the world and many of the forty or so open university projects that were started in the last decades of the last century had significant OU input.

To the extent that these open universities, taken together, enroll many millions of students, Crowther was right.  But this has not happened, in general, by the use of electronically recorded OU courses from the UK.

Someone once remarked that Britain acquired an empire in a fit of absent mind.  As a description of the international outreach of the OU that would not be quite fair, but it is a fact that OU policy for its overseas activities has always been running to catch up with the reality of the 30,000 students taking its courses outside the UK.  I will come back to this in my last section: where shall we go from here, because I believe that the OU and the USOU together will be a powerful international combination.

But to go back to Crowther.  He then said:
 

We are open as to methods.  The original name was the University of the Air.  I am glad that it was abandoned, for even the air would be too confining.  We start, it is true, in dependence on, and in grateful partnership with, the British Broadcasting Corporation.

But already the development of technology is marching on, and I predict that, before long, actual broadcasting will form only a small part of the University's output.  The world is caught in a communications revolution, the effects of which will go beyond those of the industrial revolution of two centuries ago.

Then the great advance was the invention of machines to multiply the potency of men's muscles.  Now the great new advance is the invention of machines to multiply the potency of men's minds.  As the steam engine was to the first revolution, so the computer is to the second.

It has been said that the addiction of the traditional university to the lecture room is a sign of its inability to adjust to the development of the printing press.  That, of course, is unjust.  But at least no such reproach will be leveled at the Open University in the communications revolution.  Every new form of human communication will be examined to see how it can be used to raise and broaden the level of human understanding.

There is no restriction on techniques.

I find that a remarkable statement.  First, any one of us could put his statement about the communications revolution in a speech today and it would seem perfectly appropriate, even visionary.

Second, the Open University has examined every new form of communication to see how it can be used to raise and broaden the level of human understanding – and continues to do so.  This is an area where the experimentation being carried out here at USOU is, first, entirely congruent with the OU mission and, second, very helpful to the whole OU group as a contribution to its R&D.

This is how Lord Crowther finished his inaugural address – and I should explain that it was given in the week that the Apollo astronauts returned from the first landing on the moon in 1969:
 

We are open, finally, as to ideas.  It has been said that there are two aspects of education, both necessary.  One regards the individual human mind as a vessel, of varying capacity, into which is to be poured as much it will hold of the knowledge and experience by which human society lives and moves.

This is the Martha of education - and we shall have plenty of these tasks to perform.  But the Mary regards the human mind rather as a fire which has to set alight and blown with the divine afflatus.  This also we take as our ambition.

What a happy chance it is that we start on this task, in this very week when the Universe has opened.  The limits not only of explorable space, but of human understanding, are infinitely wider than we have believed.  I am reminded of Milton's description of an even greater return from Outer Space with mission accomplished.  "The Planets in their stations listening stood, while the bright Pomp ascended jubilant. 'Open ye everlasting gates,' they sung, 'Open ye heavens your living doors.  Let in the great Creator, from his work returned; Magnificent, His six days work, a World.'"

To be true to that mission the OU and the USOU have to be open, not only to ideas, but to idealism.  As my colleagues in the USOU have fought to get the show on the road in the last year I doubt that regarding the human mind as a fire to be set alight was uppermost in their thoughts.

They probably did not grapple with the minutiae of launching a new institution keyed up by the notion that the limits of human understanding are infinitely wider than we have believed.  That is quite understandable.  But these ideas are part of the Open University package of values and I know that they will be for the USOU too.

Where are we now?

Let me now turn to the present.  Where are we now?  In the year preceding Richard Jarvis arrival in office as Chancellor, colleagues from the OU had done some useful groundwork on accreditation, on curriculum, and on developing relations with the rest of US higher education.

We have discussed that groundwork in various sessions of the board.   In one very important board decision, we added the aims of being open as to time and open to the world to Lord Crowther’s four opens.  I shall return to those aims.

Meanwhile, I am sure that board members and OU colleagues would be the first to agree that in a very short time Richard and his US colleagues have transformed the groundwork that they laid into a solid foundation on which a robust structure is being built at considerable speed.  It is a pleasure to pay tribute to them.

I also observe that they have done this during what I shall call the university dot.com phenomenon, which has been a bizarre period for higher education generally.  This gave the small USOU team two types of challenge.

First, in very practical terms, they had to spend lots of time talking to dot.com entrepreneurs who desperately wanted to work with USOU and offered all sorts of deals to get alongside us.  This reached the OU as well, of course, but the OU has more people to deploy in such discussions so they were less distracting.

Second, the dot.com craze made us all doubt our assumptions.  Maybe it was true that every medium apart from the net was now obsolete.  Maybe it was true that public higher education would be flattened by a stampede of new for-profit institutions.  Maybe it was true that students would desert institutions and simply pick and mix through the new higher education portals.

Now it has all come down to earth with a bump.  A particularly aggressive dot.com that was threatening, before last Christmas, to buy the Open University outright if we didn’t play ball with them is now rewriting its business plan for the nth time and is up for sale.

Sanity has returned and in higher education, as in all other forms of business, the realization is dawning that successful existing organizations that know their business, and use the net to conduct that business even better, are likely to survive and prosper better than those who know of nothing but e-commerce.

Looking on the bright side, I see now that although it was painful at the time, it was probably helpful for us to have to develop a philosophy for USOU in this overheated crucible of debate about a dot.com revolution in higher education.  Notably, it has led us to reaffirm that the USOU will aspire to the highest values of a public university.

It will seek to serve the collectivity in a socially useful way as well as the individual in a personally useful way.  It intends, in time, to be a university in the fullest sense of the word, engaging in teaching, service and research.  To begin with it intends to pursue that intention by offering a broad curriculum that addresses cultural and human interests as well as career and professional advancement.

In preparation for joining a meeting with my fellow trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching later this week I have been perusing a new book edited by Thomas Erlich entitled: Higher Education and the Development of Civic Responsibility.

One phrase in particular caught my attention.  He writes of a cultural climate where there is a ‘growing sense that Americans are not responsible for or accountable to each other; a decline in civility, mutual respect, and tolerance; and the pre-eminence of self-interest and individual preference over concern for the common good’.

The Open University has always been concerned for the common good – our Royal Charter enjoins us to ‘promote the well-being of the community generally’ and it is good to see the USOU adopting the same stance.  That the current climate, which sees university education primarily as a private benefit, makes it more difficult to promote it as a public good is all the more reason for committing ourselves to the wider view.

It’s easy to dismiss the development of an institutional philosophy as the easy part – although actually it is not easy at all.  But we express an institutional philosophy in concrete actions.  Later on Richard and his colleagues will describe to you in some detail their curriculum plan and the program they are developing for working with the community colleges.  I must not steal their thunder but let me make a few comments.

First, the idea that the USOU should work closely with the community colleges is as old as the USOU itself.  What is new is the careful and thoughtful work, based on many discussions with senior figures in the community colleges, that Richard and his colleagues have done to anchor these relationships in mutually beneficial arrangements.

The aim is to make the USOU the first choice transfer institution by offering three levels of agreement: Core-to-core and general transfer; Dual Admission; and what we are calling Premier Partnership.

I find this approach exciting and convincing and it is absolutely congruent with the OU mission as articulated by Crowther.  It also means that in designing the curriculum and teaching methods for its upper division curriculum the USOU faces a different set of constraints from the OU.  The OU takes people into freshman courses.  Indeed, in the early days all students, even those with several degrees already, had to begin with what was then called a foundation course.

These courses introduced students to a broad subject, such as the whole of the humanities, and also served to give them the training necessary to be successful distance learners.  More tutorial support was built into these foundation courses than into second and third level courses, although I should note that face-to-face tutorials are, and always have been optional for the student at all levels.

The key point is that for the USOU student this introductory work has been done elsewhere, notably in the community colleges.  The USOU will need to train its students in the particular skills of its distance learning system but in the wider context of study it will need to work with the grain of the skills and study styles the students have already acquired.

This may mean somewhat different approaches from the OU itself.  One example, to make this concrete, is that the OU emphasis on three-hour, closed-book examinations at the end of every course may need rethinking.  Richard Maidment will talk about this and other examples.

Let me make the important point that in all cases where the USOU feels it must rethink certain aspects of the OU approach we find that the OU has, independently, started doing so itself.  That goes for example, for the OU’s developing interest in links with the UK’s Further Education colleges, the equivalent of the community colleges here.

It goes for examinations, which are being replaced by projects and final open-book assignments in many courses.  It goes for face-to-face tutorials which in some courses are now entirely replaced by computer conferences of the tutor and the group.

In a similar way the USOU board’s espousal of the aim of being open as to time struck an immediate chord in the UK, where course start dates are now proliferating and the ability to carry partial credit from an unfinished course forward to the next offering of the course – previously unheard of – is now a reality.

All this is to say that neither the board nor OU colleagues should be alarmed when the USOU explores new approaches within a broadly common framework of values.

The core value is summed up in the statement that the proudest achievement of the Open University has been to sever the insidious link between quality of output and exclusivity of intake.

This is still a radical concept, perhaps especially here in the United States where, notwithstanding the generally egalitarian spirit of the nation, people still judge the quality of universities by the severity of their admissions process.

The USOU must not fall into that trap.  For many in US higher education the automatic credit transfer from the community colleges that Chancellor Jarvis will outline will seem just as radical and dubious as open admission to undergraduate programs did to the British educational establishment of the late 1960s.  But we must stick to our principle that the quality of the output is what matters.

Where shall we go?

I will say no more about the present because Richard and his team will engage in discussion on that in detail.  Let me conclude by looking to the future.  Where shall we go with the USOU?

Clearly the first and overriding objective is to ensure that the University continues to develop steadily and strongly.  That means growth in student numbers, it means gaining regional accreditation, it means staying faithful to the vision.  None of that will be easy, but if progress is steady and in the right direction the Open University will be supportive.

We chose to create the USOU the difficult way by going for accreditation from scratch.  I notice that some of the new for-profit entities get round this by buying a failing university in order to gain instant accreditation.

I am glad we didn’t do it that way, not just because it seems faintly disreputable, but because the requirement of explaining to the Middle States Association what we stand for and how we operate has been very valuable.

Later the board will review the first business plan that has been developed entirely by the USOU’s staff here.  They have done an excellent job.  I am confident that with the board’s support I can use this to get the Open University to make a bigger loan investment than it first envisaged.  But I do need your consistent support for the plan that Richard and his colleagues have proposed.

Let me now look further ahead.  What happens when the USOU goes into surplus?  Will that surplus be siphoned off or can it be used to speed up developments here?

With the caveat that I mentioned earlier, that I am now into my last two years as President and Vice-Chancellor,  I believe that the OU will be happy to agree the reinvestment of surpluses in developing the USOU, provided that it sees benefits for the wider OU group.

I mean benefits not just in terms of growing the USOU faster and making it even stronger financially, but developments that help the OU family fulfil its mission and develop its activities.  What might such developments be?

I shall identify three areas.  Two are a little tentative because we are still feeling our way.  But part of the purpose of creating the USOU was to help us feel our way forward more quickly and more securely.

The first element of this vision for the future is the creation of the world’s first genuinely multi-national university.  The OU has 30,000 students taking its courses outside the UK and partnerships of one kind or another in some 40 countries.

But I have to say that until the USOU board proclaimed the goal of being open to the world the OU had tended to see those partnerships in separate compartments.  Suddenly you made the OU see that exciting opportunities for synergy and enrichment of the student experience were being missed.

In this context the partnership between the OU and the USOU is quite different from the other OU partnerships.  First the OU played a direct role, rather than merely a supportive role, in getting the USOU going.  That makes it quite different from say the Hong Kong Open University, where students also study OU courses for local awards.  Second, the USOU was conceived as a distinct American university, awarding its own credit and degrees.  That makes it different from the Singapore Institute of Management, which does not have degree awarding powers.

The strength of all these partnerships is the academic glue that binds them together.  In her new role Professor Floyd will be devoting her full-time attention to making that glue as strong as possible in all the partnerships.  Nevertheless, the USOU is again quite different in the intensity of involvement of OU staff working with colleagues here.

It seems to me clear that a world-wide partnership of institutions sharing the same open university ideals will be a very powerful force, most especially if, within the group there is the possibility of offering both British and American qualifications.

In order to get there from here it is essential that the USOU and the OU maintain an open dialogue and work together on the development of an international strategy.

These days there is a lot of loose talk about global universities.    Our OU colleague Robin Mason published a book about the phenomenon last year.  She found it was mostly smoke and mirrors.  Most attempts to be global were merely the offering overseas, without modification, of courses designed for the home university’s national clientele.  We can do better than that.  That is what I mean by creating a genuinely multi-national university.

The next element of my vision is very embryonic and originates in a conversation with John Naughton.  John, who is one of the OU’s most creative and energetic faculty members, is the dynamo behind T171, the course that has 12,000 people enrolled in the UK at this moment.

He is also the author of the best-selling book A Brief History of the Future: A History of the Internet. John is deeply committed to the open source software movement, the system by which software is developed collaboratively by volunteers and made freely available.  The best example is the Linux operating system.

His idea is that it would be absolutely consistent with Open University values to launch an open source courseware movement.  Courseware would be made publicly available on the net so that participating institutions could improve it, adapt it and extend it, provided the results stayed in the public domain.  These participating institutions could also offer the course to their students and provide their own support system for it.

In John’s thinking, this helps to get around the T171 problem, which may seem only a dream for my USOU colleagues but which is very real for him.  This year he got 19,000 applicants for T171 with minimal advertising.  He believes that if we advertised we could get ten times that – but the OU would not then be able to cope.  Imagine trying to find 8,500 tutors all at once.

So why not put the courseware out there and spread the challenge of supporting students around many institutions.

Clearly, such an idea needs thinking through in detail but that could be a very appropriate joint project for the OU and the USOU.  If we could make it work it would be consistent with our core value of academic openness and would also counter the disturbing and anti-academic trend to make knowledge proprietary.

Many institutions might find an open source courseware movement deeply threatening.  That is the attitude of some software firms to open source software, yet other firms have embraced the movement and done well by doing so.

For the moment this is just an idea.  I outline it simply as one example of the way that the OU and the USOU could work together.  Maybe we could try it out by working with some community colleges to develop a few lower division courses as I mentioned earlier.

Another idea, which I don’t have time to explore at all, is the synergy that might arise from the OU’s recently created Research School.  Most of the OU’s 1,400 Ph.D. students engaged in full-time are in sponsoring institutions, not on the OU campus.  These sponsoring institutions are mostly distinguished research laboratories in the UK and overseas.

The program allows the full-time research staff to work towards doctorates alongside their research work.  This might provide a way of getting the USOU engaged in research faster than might otherwise be possible.

Conclusion

I’m afraid that is a rather longer exposition than I intended of where the USOU has come from, where it is now, and where it might go.  I hope that it has been helpful as a backdrop to the reports that Richard and his colleagues will be giving to you.

We are engaged in a very important endeavor.  It will not be easy but we are making solid progress.  I urge that we bend our energies to implementing the plans that are being proposed.  There is plenty to discuss about the implications of those plans and that is where we should focus our attention.

May I thank you all once again for your involvement.  I thank the board members for agreeing to guide the destinies of this new venture and the Chancellor and his staff, in both the US and the UK, for the energy, commitment and intelligence that they are devoting to ensure that the most exciting initiative in higher education of the 20th century continues to set the pace in the 21st.

2000-07-11

Back to Speeches