What can I say to you after a gap of only a year? The OU continues its slow and deliberate evolution, as evidenced by the motions before this conference. Does that signal an uneventful year? Not for me. A major change has taken place in my life. I now live with an OU student and OUSA member. On Friday evening, as I was wondering what to say to you, she was at the other end of the kitchen table busy filling in PT3 forms and agonising over the mailing of her TMA .
Although I've spent 20 years in distance teaching universities and been a student in them myself, you get a different perspective by living with an OU student. When I see Kristin dashing off to self-help groups, putting in long hours of study at home, and packing her course materials when we go abroad, I feel very privileged to lead an organisation that generates so much commitment from so many people.
She took her OU course materials on a trip overseas last week to attend the conference of another organisation. I can't help drawing parallels and making contrasts between the two events. Like you, I have various involvements as a volunteer. I particularly enjoy my role as vice-president of the Council of the International Baccalaureate Organisation and I took holiday last week to go to its annual meeting in Switzerland.
The International Baccalaureate now organises curricula that run from the beginning of primary school to the end of secondary school. Best known is the two year programme, aimed at the 16-18 age group, that culminates in the International Baccalaureate diploma.
There are many parallels between the International Baccalaureate Organisation and the OU. Both are very idealistic. The IB aims to provide the best school curricula in the world, leading to a diploma that is accepted, often with advanced standing, by universities in nearly all countries. These are international curricula, aimed at fostering international understanding and world peace by ensuring that pupils combine deep roots in their own culture with understanding and empathy for other traditions.
The International Baccalaureate Organisation, like the Open University, believes that its work is creating a better world. Like the OU, the IB began in the late 1960s and was controversial, derided and fragile in its early years. Also like the OU, the IB has since become very successful, now taught in over 800 schools in 94 countries in many languages. It is growing at 20% per annum and will issue its 100,000th IB diploma in the year 2000.
The IB conference that I attended in Montreux brought together nearly 500 people: many head teachers from IB schools, a good number of IB pupils from all over the world, and some friends and well wishers like me. The IB conference was nothing like as well organised as your OUSA conference. There was no equivalent to your splendid yellow books of motions and reports. But similar concerns were raised.
The extension of the International Baccalaureate curriculum to the Primary Years and the Middle Years is relatively recent and has created rapid growth of the IB into new languages and countries - China being a notable example. Some, whose experience was mainly with the two-year diploma, offered in only three languages - all European - were worried that this extension was diluting the IB's image. Another concern was that the IB, because it insists on rigorous assessment and accreditation, is more costly to offer than national curricula.
All schools were urging the IB Organisation to get costs down. Some expressed concern that the IB was out of reach for ordinary schools in Africa or state school systems in Eastern Europe that would like to make the IB their national curriculum. I couldn't help noticing that those who made the arguments about access most stridently were from expensive private schools. I also observed that the access profile of the IB is actually improving rapidly, with the majority of new schools in most countries coming from the state sector.
You can see that the IB conference was a perfect preparation for joining you here at the OUSA Conference.
The similarity of concerns was beautifully summed up by your motion 24M(PO) which, in case you don't have it to hand, reads as follows:
"Conference believes that the Open University has strayed from the ideals of the founders and resolves that all measures be taken to restore those ideals".I'd like to explore that motion with you because it captures nicely the challenge I face in leading the OU in this era of New Labour and Cool Britannia. It underlines the triangle of forces in which the OU now works.
Conservatism in one corner. The wish to return to a supposedly better and more noble epoch.
Old Labour in another corner. The OU was never official Labour Party policy. But we are now identified, in the minds of the bright young twenty-somethings who have great influence on Ministers, as an expression of Old Labour.
In the third corner there is a set of ideals which have great power to inspire ordinary people of good will who don't expect to find a congenial, permanent home in any formal political grouping. Call them small-l liberals or small-r radicals.
I expect that last group includes a lot of you. It certainly includes me. I spent 3 months as a volunteer lecturer at the OU 25 years ago, was infected by its ideals, and have devoted my subsequent career to implementing them.
Let's look at the ideals of our founders and ask ourselves whether we have strayed from them.
We owe the clearest summary of those ideals to our founding Chancellor, Geoffrey Crowther. At the OU's inaugural ceremony, held in the week that the Apollo astronauts returned from the first moon landing in 1969, he made a short and eloquent speech. His speech gave us our mission statement: to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas.
What were the ideals that he linked to these four facets of openness? Let me quote him first on openness to people. He said:
"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 realise 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 harbour, "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 is 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.Four quick comments.
First, it is clear that the most controversial decision of the Senate in recent years, namely the decision to allow new students to enter at levels 2 and 3, flows with the grain of our founders' ideals.
Not for us the carefully regulated escalation from one educational level to
the next...
Anyone could try his or her hand, and only failure to progress
adequately would be a bar to continuation of studies.
We may contest the founders' ideal of having a go. We may feel it no longer fits an era when dirigisme in education seems to be on the increase after a more free-wheeling period. But we can't be accused of infidelity to the founders dream.
It is a complex issue. The conclusions of a just-published study of the results of 140,000 students in 1997 are relevant. I quote from them:
Many new students who start at level two and, but to a much lesser extent, level three are successful. There is a heavy drop out of new students which is of the same order of magnitude as the drop down from initial to final registration which prevailed with the former system.
In terms of performance as measured by TMA scores and examination pass rates there appears to be little difference between the results of new and continuing students.
On average new students who enter at level one achieve higher retention rates than those who enter at higher levels. The University's promotional literature should include stronger warnings to new students about the need to ensure that they have an adequate background to register on post level one courses.End of quote and back to Crowther.
Point two is that the expansion of the OU over the years is absolutely consistent with the founders' ideals. Looking at the OU from Canada in the 1970s and 1980s I simply couldn't understand why OU people boasted about the University's openness while thousands queued at its doors. Today we've pretty well eliminated the queues. That may be uncomfortable for our planning. It may cause volatility in numbers on different courses. But queues are not what our founders meant by openness to people.
Third point, what Crowther called our primary material, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I met some of them yesterday when I talked to each of nearly 500 new graduates at the Harrogate degree ceremony.
People who left school with nothing but a bad memory. People who struggled in dull jobs and difficult circumstances. They said the OU had changed their lives. The proportion of such people within the OU student body has grown steadily ever since we opened. We are doing more for our primary material than ever before. But we are not social engineers. Another of our founders, Jennie Lee, vociferously attacked those critics of the OU who complained that it attracted housewives as well as dustmen.
That is my fourth point. Crowther said that the OU was not simply an educational rescue mission. It must supply unprovided needs. We're doing that and steadily adding new areas and levels of study, nearly always with OUSA's strong support - at least for the 'what' if not always for the 'how'. I would like to pay tribute, for example, to the very valuable input that Alison Kirk has made to the Named Degrees Implementation Group, whose work is proceeding very well indeed thanks partly to her informed input.
Next, how did our founders' view the OU's geographical reach? To quote Crowther again:
"We are open as to places...
... 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.
There are no boundaries of space.End of quote.
That doesn't require much comment. The OU's expansion overseas has often occasioned lively debate at OUSA conferences. The Executive has usually begun by opposing each new extension abroad but then given enthusiastic support as a new student constituency emerged. That pattern seems to be repeating today itself as we move into the United States.
What then, about openness to methods?
Crowther again:
"We are open as to methods... 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 levelled 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.End of quote.
What a remarkably topical statement! Grappling with new forms of human communication in OU study has been a staple of OUSA conferences for years. I remember the OUSA conference five years ago when my address was sandwiched in the middle of a largely hostile debate about home computing. When I walked to the lectern and opened my laptop, as I usually do, it seemed clear that I was taking sides.
I guess I have taken sides. I believe there are enormous opportunities to use technology for academic advantage. In particular it can greatly increase communication between students and it can put students in touch with a great range of learning resources. You obviously appreciate this too, and OUSA is playing a superb role in running many of the computer conferences that have so enriched the OU. I thank you and I assure you that none of that work takes you away from the ideals of our founders.
One of my main concerns this year is to improve our communication with that huge diaspora of people who have had some contact with the OU. Our graduates are a large global OU community. We want them to keep in touch with the OU. A much larger number of people have taken a course or two without pursuing a qualification. They also feel good about the University and some would like an informal link with our community. It might encourage them to come back. Then you have a vastly greater number who are regular viewers of OU television and want to know our TV schedules.
We are introducing new ways for all these groups to stay in contact. They can read the special OU supplement, Open Eye, that will be published with the Independent on the first Thursday of every month starting next month. They can join the OU On-line community which goes live this month and can provide them with a free personalised home page on the Web and an e-mail address for life. These measures will further reinforce OUSA's own communication network with those who have the closest links with the OU - our students
So, finally, to ideas - the raison d'être of all universities. A final passage from Crowther:
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.It is a fact that in the last decade research at the Open University has advanced dramatically in quality and quantity. But does this feed through into courses that are intellectually lively and up to date? As students you are better qualified than I to say whether OU courses set minds alight. Fresh from my contact with the new graduates in Harrogate yesterday I know that OU courses frequently intrigue, excite and motivate people.
They also, I believe, do much to develop that stance of systematic scepticism that protects the educated person from propagandists and spin doctors. I have brought some of that scepticism to bear on motion 24M(PO). The evidence does not support the claim that we are abandoning the ideals of our founders.
If Harold Wilson, Jennie Lee, Peter Venables and Geoffrey Crowther came back today they would be amazed and pleased to see that the OU has achieved national eminence and international fame by implementing effectively the ideals they articulated.If they had any remaining doubts I would simply bring them to this conference. The dedication and enthusiasm of the OU student body, so powerfully expressed by those of you who devote time so enthusiastically to OUSA affairs, is sui generis. Only institutions with inspiring values and noble ideals generate that kind of commitment.
I could go on, but my time is up. You must get back to the important work of processing your motions and giving vitality to the ideals and values of the OU in a new era.
I conclude by thanking you for inviting me here and for all your work in support of the University. I owe a particular thank-you to Helen Banyard, your outgoing President. It has been Helen's bad luck to have had a term of office that began two years ago just as a financial squeeze hit the University, and which ends now just as the Funding Council has loosened the purse strings somewhat.
In these tough circumstances she has done a first rate job of being robust in public fora, constructive in private session and unfailingly courteous in personal contacts. She has served you well by ensuring that the OU cut expenditure intelligently. Her successor, Alison Kirk, now has the task of seeing that the OU spends its new money equally intelligently.
I wish Alison well with that task and I look forward to working with her.