History of the OU

From 1971 the Open University in Wales, Y Brifysgol Agored, has been represented at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, which is conducted in Welsh. When a competition was organised for an englyn (a single verse of two couplets in strict metre) with the subject was ‘Y Brifysgol Agored’, Dic Jones, a chaired bard, won with the following entry:

Agored ysgol gwerin – I danio

Doniau’r dyn cyffredin,

Daeth y coleg i’r gegin

A chwrs gradd i chwi ar sgrin

This has been translated as:

An open school for the people – igniting

The gifts of the common man,

A college came to the kitchen.

A BA course to the TV screen.

Quoted in Mandy Ashworth, ‘The Open University in Wales. A Charter Celebration, April 1994’, pp. 12-13.

Obituaries of Jones appear here and here .

I was at an OU Graduation Ceremony at the Barbican a couple of weeks ago. In his address the Chancellor, Lord Puttnam, spoke briefly about the origins of the University, and in addition to the usual mention of Harold Wilson and Jennie Lee, paid tribute to Margaret Thatcher, who turned out to be a powerful supporter. Walter Perry, in his book “The Open University” recalls a meal with her: She suggested first that our main activity would be to offer courses on ‘hobbies’. I fear that I needle very easily […] The exchanges were sharp, short and furious. I am happy to say that , in spite of it all, we ended on a friendly note. […] When she became Minister of Education after the Tory victory in 1970 we had reason to be glad of that dinner.

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’.

Lord Mountbatton at Walton Hall

The University had moved to the site with the support of Milton Keynes Development Corporation in September 1969. At this point forty years ago it was doing its best to attract applicants by an August deadline to start in January 1971.

For David Sewart, at first the OU was:

like Athena springing fully grown and fully armed from the head of Zeus [it] appeared to have no mother and never to have had the opportunity to have been an adolescent, let alone a child … I began to realise that the UK OU was part of a world wide phenomenon – and a late entrant at that, to the world of distance education.

Review, Open Learning, June 1995, pp. 62-63, (p. 62). 

The tap-root of socialism was in working-class communities like the one in Bethnal Green… In the turnings of Bethnal Green the poor were helping the poor, looking after children of broken marriages and caring for the old, coming to the rescue of neighbours who fell on hard times having a whip round in the pubs, of which almost every street could boast one, in order to collect money for his widow whenever a man died.

Michael Young, ‘Education for the new work’ in Nigel Paine (ed.), Open Learning in transition. An agenda for action, National Extension College, Cambridge, 1988, p. 5.

Was former OU Tutor, and former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown more sympathetic to the OU?

With a new government in place, promising cuts in public spending, there may be some sense of deja vu at the OU.

Forty years ago, with the University created by a Labour government but no students yet studying, the election of Ted Heath’s Tory government posed a real threat to the newly formed institution. William van Straubenzee, appointed as junior minister for higher education, reported ‘I would have slit its throat if I could.’ He blamed the outgoing Labour education minister Ted Short for some ‘nifty, last-moment work with the charter that made the OU unkillable’. Student numbers were cut but the University survived.

Nine years later, another Conservative government, this time led by Margaret Thatcher, caused more problems for the OU. In 1980 the University had to cut expenditure by £3.5 million, nine per cent of its 1979 expenditure and the government effectively imposed a 46 per cent increase in the undergraduate tuition fee. Again the University survived, as no doubt it will again, whatever the new government chooses to throw at it.

Mass-Observation holding a diary day, see here. Diaries should be no more than 750 words and MUST be in electronic form – emails or email attachments.

This is an opportunity to share your OU day and make a contribution to history.

On 23 April 1969 the Royal Charter of The Open University was granted and the institution officially became a university. Indeed, this time a year ago the University was marking its official 40th birthday with futher celebrations throughout 2009. For more details see here.

The Charter stated that ‘the objects of the University shall be the advancement and dissemination of learning and knowledge by teaching and research by a diversity of means such as broadcasting and technological devices appropriate to higher education, by correspondence, tuition, residential courses and seminars and in other relevant ways’.

Uniquely, the University was also ‘to promote the educational well-being of the community generally.’

It was this obligation to the wider community that led to the development in the 1970s of the ‘Continuing Education’ programme with courses such as P911 ‘The first years of life’ and P912 ‘the pre-school child’.

It is this same obligation within the charter that informs continued University collaboration with the BBC on current popular programmes such as Bang Goes the Theory, Child of our time and Coast. For more information see here.

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