to the
1998 ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF THE
ASSOCIATION OF OPEN UNIVERSITY GRADUATES (AOUG)
The Guildhall
Guildford, Surrey
28 November, 1998
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
It is a special pleasure to be at the Annual General Meeting of the Association of Open University Graduates and a great honour to be asked to give the Jean Posthuma Memorial Lecture.
My first memory of Jean Posthuma goes back to a post-exams party convened by the London Branch of OUSA on December 8, 1990 at the Westminster Cathedral Conference Centre. As I recall, much of the organisation revolved around Jean Posthuma. I was in my first six months as vice-chancellor and I remember thinking that a University that could inspire such devotion among its students – particularly right after exams – must be a very special institution.
Not very long after that I attended an AOUG function in London. Not only was Jean Posthuma at the centre of things again, but many of those present were people I recalled from the post-exams party. At that event I learned something very important about the Open University, namely that the distinction between students and graduates is rather fuzzy.
Seeing Jean Posthuma at the centre of both events made me adjust my thinking. At Laurentian University, the Canadian university where I was president before coming to the OU, you could make a clear distinction between students, faculty, and alumni. These three groups had clear and distinct interests and the role of the vice-chancellor in relation to each was clear.
As one American wag put it, the task is to provide sex for the students, parking for the faculty, and football for the alumni. The OU is not like that. All the categories are mixed up. Many of the students are graduates, many of the faculty and staff are also students, some of the graduates are staff, and many of the graduates are students. Furthermore, none of these groups expect the vice-chancellor to provide sex, parking or football – they are perfectly capable of satisfying their own tastes in these matters.
So Jean Posthuma taught me that in the OU community categories are fluid. The important thing is to be a member of the OU community. It is an immense privilege to lead a university which inspires such devotion and such energy in the tens of thousands of people, from all walks of life, who identify with it.
That is why it is a privilege to honour the memory of Jean Posthuma today. It seems to me that her life and her commitment were a good example of how OU people identify with the Open University. Her commitment to OUSA and AOUG was not just motivated by nostalgic memories of student life but also by an identification with the core values of the OU.
So my title today is ‘Have we been faithful to our founders?’ I want to ask whether those who created the Open University thirty years ago would be proud of the OU today.
I had tended to make a positive answer to this question for granted until I attended this year’s OUSA conference. Many of you are veterans of OUSA conferences and you know that they are one of the most intense expressions of democracy and participation still left in this world of spin doctors and message manipulators. Each branch of OUSA can send motions to the conference and get them discussed.
In preparation for attending the OUSA conference I read through the book of motions to the Conference to find out what was on students’ minds and was struck by motion 24M(PO) which read:
"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".
My first reaction, of course, was to assume that this was just someone bellyaching about the fact that fees have risen since 1971. But I quickly realised that such a dismissive attitude was unworthy and that the motion posed an interesting challenge.
I’d like to pose that challenge today. What were the ideals of our founders and have we strayed from them?
Let us start with the ideals? Who were the founders of the Open University and why did they create it? There is never any shortage of people to claim parental responsibility for a successful innovation. We must give due credit to those like Michael Young, now Lord Young of Dartington, who advanced some of the original ideas.
At the end of the day, however, it is always easier to talk about innovations in education than to create the framework in which they can become a reality. The real credit, in my view, must go to those who established the structures in which the ideas could flourish, and that means the politicians.
Before Harold Wilson launched the idea of the University of the Air into British politics in 1963 there were people with excellent ideas. After the Royal Charter was issued in 1969 there were brilliant staff who made the OU a reality. But in the six years between 1963 and 1969 it was the politicians – three in particular – who made possible the transition from ideas to reality.
First, of course, was Wilson himself. He new more about the reality of using technology in higher education than other politicians because he had studied experiments at the University of Chicago and elsewhere in the United States. He was motivated by two ideals.
First, he wanted to increase access to higher education. In the 1960s less than 10% of school leavers went on to university and Wilson wanted to give opportunities to those older people who had missed the chance.
Second, he was convinced that the new technology of television was far too powerful to be left entirely to the entertainers. I should be used to deliver education and to open the work of universities to public view.
If you are interested in the genesis of the OU you should read the account in chapters 10 and 11 of Patricia Hollis’ biography of Jennie Lee, which are devoted to the University of the Air and The Open University respectively (Hollis, 1997). What is striking, reading chapter 10 today, is how much Wilson’s vision had in common with today’s project of the University for Industry.
Wilson was not particularly concerned with degrees but with what we would now call further education courses and vocational training. He wanted to see people progress further up the educational ladder. Furthermore, in another parallel with the University for Industry project he seemed to assume that the University of the Air would function as a consortium of existing universities and colleges.
If you enjoy the ‘ifs’ of history ask yourselves if the OU would exist today if Wilson had charged someone less determined and single-minded than Jennie Lee with the task of getting it on the road. She gave it a tight focus on degrees and fought successfully for it to be an independent institution and not a consortium. She realised, as others did not, that if the university was to be open at entry, yet uncompromising on standards at exit, it would need very strong organisation and focus.
The Civil Service tried to water down the project and the press was hostile. Stuart Hood, writing in the Spectator and The Times, predicted that it would be ‘the most expensive method of inefficient further education ever conceived’. Others predicted that there would be no demand for it.
Reading the accounts of those years Jennie Lee stands out for her conviction that this had to be a university with a commitment to quality that would rank with the best. Viewed with hindsight almost all the others who helped to create the OU, even Wilson himself, had a rather condescending attitude to the project and those who would study through it. They imagined something very worthy, but not quite a university.
Jennie Lee had no truck with such a view. Neither did the final political founder I must mention, namely Margaret Thatcher. The Royal Charter had been issued in 1969 but by the time the Tories replaced Labour in the 1970 election the project was still small enough to be stoppable – and many of the incoming ministers wanted to do just that.
But Margaret Thatcher had briefed herself and as Secretary of State for Education she set off to the Treasury saying, ‘I do hope that somehow we shall be able to save the OU’. As Patricia Hollis puts it, ‘Jennie’s OU and Thatcher’s OU colluded’ (Hollis op.cit. p. 329)
What motivated Margaret Thatcher to fight for the project? She agreed with Walter Perry that it would generate much better teaching materials, especially in science and technology, than the existing universities. She also believed that it would help those who wished to better themselves, reinforce self-help, and aid the occupationally mobile.
She also assumed that the OU would cost less than other universities. That was important, because she could see that Britain was about to see a huge expansion of the university sector.
Those were the strands of political and practical idealism that led to the creation of the Open University. It was our first Chancellor, Geoffrey Crowther, who pulled them together in a short, eloquent and inspiring speech at the inaugural ceremony that was held on July 23, 1969. It was the week when the Apollo astronauts returned from the first landing on the moon. Everything seemed possible. 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.
How does that statement read today. Have we been true to those ideals? Let me make four observations.
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.”
But let me return to Lord Crowther.
My second point 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.
This year, for the first time in its history, the OU has found recruiting to its student number targets for 1999 a real challenge. By keeping registrations open until mid-November and advertising more intensively we have come closer to those targets than seemed likely two months ago, but it has been a salutary shock. It is ironic that at a time when the government’s desire to increase numbers – particularly part-time numbers - in universities has never been greater the demand has plateaued or gone down. The OU has done better than most universities in this slack market but it has made us think.
I believe that thinking will take us back to our founders’ ideals and generate the changes that will make us more open to people than we have been in recent years. Let me give an example.
Last month we had the first meeting of the Board of the Open University of the United States, the sister university that we have created in that country. The Board was invited to define the mission for the new institution and given Lord Crowther’s ‘four opens’ as a starting point. The American members thought they were a good basis for the mission of OUUS but suggested two other ‘opens’. The first was ‘open as to time’ by which they meant that American students would be less tolerant than British students of the timetables and the waiting periods that we take for granted in the UK.
I find it fascinating that only a month later, without knowing about the discussion in the United States, people across the OU are beginning to urge openness to time in a similar way. We have found that the autumn is a good time for student recruitment. We have realised that in today’s world people have more choices and are less prepared to wait.
The other day one of my senior colleagues visited the OU’s Regional Office in Edinburgh. It was November 17, the day after registrations closed for the undergraduate programme for 1999. He overheard one of our student advisors telling an enquirer – quite properly according to the OU’s rules and perfectly politely – that she was too late for study in 1999 and could not start until February 2000. Just hearing that exchange convinced my colleague that things must change if the OU wants to be open as to people in today’s world.
My third point concerns what Crowther called our primary material, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I meet plenty of them as I talk individually to well over 5,000 new graduates each year at our degree ceremonies in the UK and overseas.
I meet people who left school with nothing but a bad memory. I talk to people who struggled in dull jobs and difficult circumstances. They say the OU has changed their lives. The proportion of such people within the OU student body has grown steadily ever since we opened. We actually are doing more for our primary material than ever before. But we are not social engineers.
Jennie Lee herself poured scorn on those critics of the OU who complained that it attracted housewives as well as dustmen. In the early days there were purists who hoped the OU would be mostly a working class institution. Jennie Lee yielded to no-one in her determination to serve the working class. But at the end of the day people were free to choose to come through the doors of an open university or not.
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. This year, for example, we have launched a programme of Named Degrees and I would like to pay tribute to the tremendous input of the student member, Alison Kirk, and the graduate member, Jools Wallis, to the Implementation Group which I chaired.
So much for openness to people. I conclude that the OU has remained faithful to this part of its founders’s vision. Indeed, it is becoming progressively more open to people as the sellers’ market of its early days becomes just a memory. I fully accept that many of the new initiatives that have made the University more open have their origins in student pressure. But that is the point. The OU is also open to people in the extensive role that all members of the community, students, graduates and staff play in its governance. That is a great strength and a guarantor that we shall remain open to people.
Now let me turn to Lord Crowther’s second ‘open’. How did our founders' view the OU's geographical reach? To quote Geoffrey 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.
I find the actions and attitudes of the University in relation to this element of the founders’ vision particularly interesting. In this respect the OU community tends to share the ambivalence - some would say the schizophrenia – that seems to characterise Britain’s attitude to the world.
On the one hand we are a very international people. We are a trading nation at the centre of the land hemisphere and we put together the largest empire the world has known. Pro rata to population the British diaspora in the rest of the world must, in its extent, diversity and influence, have few rivals. Yet knee jerk insularity is never far from the surface. Ever since the war we have made a mess of our relations with the rest of Europe and xenophobia is a staple of both our tabloids and our broadsheets.
That’s rather like the OU. OUSA has tended to first oppose and then embrace the expansion of the University overseas. Some staff clapped when Sir William Stubbs, at this year’s Council lecture, implied that the OU should stay at home. Yet these same staff respond with enthusiasm to requests from foreign institutions to offer OU courses.
In the early days the OU set out consciously to implement the vision of intellectual exporter that Lord Crowther outlined. However, an attempt to take OU courses to the United States in the 1970s was not particularly successful. The consultancy service that the University ran during that decade did play a major role in setting up some of the forty other open universities that exist around the world today but did not make much money and was disbanded by the 1980s.
It has been said that Britain acquired an empire in a fit of absent mind. As a description of the development of the OU’s present international activities that would be a bit strong, but it is clear that we did not push our way overseas. We were pulled.
We were pulled most of all by OU students and graduates who moved overseas for work or personal reasons and wanted to continue study. That is now a significant phenomenon. At last month’s examination session special exams were held for OU students in nearly 100 countries. It was the spontaneous emergence of significant concentrations of OU students in Brussels that led to the decision to treat the whole of western Europe as our parish.
In eastern Europe various local institutions and individuals invited the OU to help them after the iron curtain corroded away. Today those schemes in Russia, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Romania account for over 10,000 OU students. I presided at an award ceremony in Romania two weeks ago and I can tell you that our diplomates there are just like OU graduates in the UK.
The origins of the Open University of Hong Kong, which now has some 7,000 students taking OUUK courses for OUHK credit, go back to a former OU Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor Don Swift, who set up the Hong Kong Open Learning Institute as a personal initiative. In Singapore it was the government of Singapore that invited the OU to help it create an Open University degree programme.
We took our latest initiative, the creation of the Open University of the United States, because the OU was being pulled across the Atlantic in several ways. More and more individual students were moving there, including those who had been transferred there by the multi-national companies that had sponsored them to take OU courses when they worked in Europe, and a growing list of US universities were seeking partnerships with us. Faced with these trends the OU Council took the decision to create a distinct sister institution, the Open University of the United States, that would have its own board and would seek accreditation as a US university. It happens that the accreditation team, from the Middle States Association of Universities and Colleges, is flying over today to hold their assessment visit at the OU next week.
In summary then, the OU has been pulled overseas at an increasing rate and we have reacted to this trend by creating Open University Worldwide to manage and maintain these activities. We have followed through on Lord Crowther’s vision. That is important for the reasons he outlined and also for two reasons he did not mention.
First, our overseas activities enhance the academic quality of the OU’s work by making us less insular. When I see course teams going through their work challenging any British assumptions of normality or British turns of phrase that would jar with people in other countries I rejoice that the intellectual acuity of our work is being improved.
Second, now that education is becoming a global business and distance learning is the fashion of the decade, I believe that the OU would eventually lose its reputation, even in the UK, if it did not position itself as the world leader in open learning. Which brings me to the third of the four ‘opens’.
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 the integration of new forms of human communication into OU study has always been a core challenge for the OU’s leadership. I should also say that arguing about technology – especially about its impact on access – has also been a staple of OUSA conferences for years. I remember the OUSA conference five years ago when my address to the conference 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. The students obviously appreciate this too, and OUSA is playing a superb role in running many of the computer conferences that have so enriched the OU. We shall begin the 1999 academic year with over 50,000 students on line from home, making the OU probably the world’s largest cybercommunity.
OU students now exchange nearly 200,000 messages every day through the 6,000 computer conferences in which they participate. Furthermore, we are completely changing the principles on which the OU Library operates. Previously it has existed to serve staff preparing courses. Henceforward it will also serve students by giving them electronic access to the huge resources now available on-line.
One of my main concerns this year has been 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 have introduced new ways for all these groups to stay in contact. I am delighted with the success of the special OU supplement, Open Eye, that is published with The Independent on the first Thursday of every month. Already The Independent achieves its highest monthly sales on that day, so the OU community is buying the paper to read Open Eye. Increasing numbers of people are joining the OU On-line community, The Link, which went live this Spring. It can provide you with a free personalised home page on the Web and an e-mail address for life. These measures will further reinforce AOUG's own communication network with those who have the most profound links with the OU - our graduates.
I conclude, therefore, that Lord Crowther’s enthusiasm for technology was fully justified. In particular, the technologies of the Net and the Web, which he could hardly have imagined, are removing the two historic weaknesses of distance learning, namely the difficulty that students have in communicating with each other and the difficulty they have in accessing the intellectual resources held in libraries and museums.
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 graduates you are better qualified than I to say whether OU courses set minds alight. From my contacts with new graduates at degree ceremonies and elsewhere I know that OU courses do 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. We live in an era when the press and the politicians want instant answers to every problem and instant solutions to every challenge. They look to specialists to provide them.
But this is not a mature attitude. Asking questions is often more important than answering them. Doubt is often a more sensible posture than certainty. The interdisciplinary approach that the OU does so well is more likely to get to the heart of contemporary issues than specialist analyses.
In Patricia Lunneborg’s excellent little book OU Men she records a graduate saying with exasperation that ever since he studied with the OU he has been unable to see less than six sides to any question. I think that is wonderful. That is what our founders meant by openness to ideas. That is a wonderful contribution that the OU is making to a free, democratic and civilised society.
So I end this lecture in memory of Jean Posthuma by saying that 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 a meeting of OU graduates like this one. The dedication and enthusiasm of the OU graduate body, so powerfully expressed by those of you who devote time and enthusiasm to AOUG affairs, is sui generis. Only institutions with inspiring values and noble ideals generate that kind of commitment.
Thank you for inviting me here and for all your work in support of the University. I learned just the other day that the latest telethon, in which graduates contacted graduates, raised over £300,000. That is an absolutely remarkable achievement. That money will go straight back to support the mission of the Open University that I have talked about this afternoon. Most of all it will go to further the central ideal of openness to people. Thanks to the concern and generosity of graduates more of those who are disadvantaged financially or physically will now be able to study with the OU.
And all the evidence, some of it here in this room, is that OU study has an extraordinary potential to change lives for the better and to allow people to discover a new community of congenial people to which they can belong for the rest of their lives.
References
Hollis, Patricia (1997) Jennie Lee – A Life, Oxford University Press, pp. 297-351
Lunneborg, Patricia (1997) OU Men, Open University
Note
The full text of Lord Crowther’s speech of 23 July 1969 is reproduced in:
Daniel, John (1995) What has the Open University achieved in 25 years? In D.Sewart, Ed One World, Many Voices, Qualty in Open and Distance Learning,ICDE/the Open University, pp. 400-403