History of the OU

Today Open University scientist are regularly seen in all forms of news media and are currently most often seen providing high level comment on Iceland’s volcano cloud. Thirty years ago, a more controversial issue hit the headlines that also affected its close relationship with the BBC.

In 1980 the BBC cancelled a lecture on nuclear arms by the Dean of Science Michael Pentz. The BBC told the University that is was ‘inappropriate and unsuitable’. The lecture had already been filmed and the cancellation prompted an outcry including an emergency motion in the Senate. The BBC was at the same time facing criticisism for its decision not to screen The War Game, a film about nuclear war made for the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 1965 but not shown until 1985.

Pentz was a well known peace campaigner, a member of CND Council and Chair of the Milton Keynes Peace Campaign but he explained: ‘It is not appropriate in an educational lecture to indulge in polemics, but it is appropriate for the relevant facts to be drawn to public attention. I’m not a complete nit-wit and I realised that I had to be very careful.’

The lecture entitled Towards the final abyss? A scientist’s view of the nuclear arms race was the third in an Open Lecture series. It was finally broadcast in February 1981 on condition that it was followed by a studio discussion (see Sesame, 70, January/February 1981).

Mike Pentz, the Open University’s first Dean of Science, died 15 years ago this week. An obituary can be read here.

Openness at the OU is not as simple a matter as it appears, but one which requres critical understanding. There are hidden connections with what seem to be the opposite of openness – conventional processes of selection that supposedly hve been abolished and closure of access to occupations … In effect a selection policy has been developed.

David Harris, ‘Openness and closure in distance education’, Falmer Press, London, New York and Philadelphai, 1987, pp. 14-15.

Was this the case then? Or now?

Openness was always about more than access, but the framework has shifted with the spread of the web as Terry Foote of  Wikipedia noted when he said: ‘Openness: imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.That’s what we’re doing’.

Disputes about the content of a number of courses raged during the 1970s and 1980s. (more…)

The Times Educational Supplement, 1966:

“Mr Wilson’s pipe dream of the University of the Air, now adumbrated into a White Paper as vague as it is insubstantial is just the sort of cosy scheme that shows the Socialists at their most endearing but impractical worst.”

Quoted in Walter Perry, Lifelong learning in a non-traditional setting, in A Tuijnman and T Schuller, Lifelong learning policy and research, Portland Press, London, 1999, p213.

Did the Tories strike a duff note when they criticised the OU?

In 1965 Christopher Chataway a Conservative MP who had worked in news and current affairs for both ITN and the BBC, quoted Education which suggested that the topic about which most nonsense was talked was educational television. He went on to call the notion of a university of the air: (more…)

In 1984, after being told that a social science course showed a Marxist bias and offered a critique of monetarism, the Secretary of State for Education, Keith Joseph read ‘all the relevant teaching materials’.  He then visited the Walton Hall campus in July 1985 and ‘seemed greatly impressed’ (according to his biographers, Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett, Keith Joseph: A Life, Acumen Press, 2001, p. 387. See also Sunday Times 1 July 1984; The Times 13 September 1984).

Interviewed in 1995 (for Dalgleish, Tim, (ed.) Lifting it off the page. An oral portrait of  OU people, Open University, 1995, pp. 43-44) Anastasios Christodoulou, the University Secretary, 1968-1980, recalled that Keith Joseph ‘didn’t like the OU at all ─ it was politically motivated, ideologically unsound and its standards supect ─ and I’m almost quoting.’ He also remarked that ‘Arnold Kettle, the Professor of Literature was dead keen on the nineteenth century novel.  He was a Marxist, with Marxist interpretations of the novels.’

In the 1990s the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips expressed her concerns about bias. She described Open University course books for a post-graduate teaching qualification as:

‘not so much educational texts as ideological tracts, characterised by an emphasis on teaching “correct” attitudes to race, sex and class and an overt hostility to the Tory government and the new Right… Under the guise of an educational imprint the Open University has to some extent been reduced to pumping out crude ideological propaganda, hijacking the curriculum to “correct” faulty thinking and brazenly enlisting the children in the classroom in the political struggle against the government.’

In case readers do not recognise these texts from the description (found in Melanie Phillips, All must have prizes, Little, Brown and Co,1996 pp. 42-43) the books to which she was referring are:

Pollard, Andrew and Bourne, Jill, (eds.) Teaching and Learning in the Primary School, Routledge/Open University, 1994

Brindley, Susan, (ed.) Teaching English, Routledge/Open University, 1994

Slinger, Michelle, (ed.) Teaching History, Routledge/Open University, 1994

Melanie Phillips went on (p.80) to claim that Stierer, Barry and Maybin, Janet, Language, Literacy and Learning in Educational Practice, Multilingual Matters/Open University, 1994 had a ‘hidden agenda’ was a ‘highly politicised book’ and included ‘a stream of opinionated and highly questionable assertions’.