History of the OU

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

The Open University encourages a 1,000 flowers to bloom

With today’s technology, harnessing observations from a mass of volunteers to contribute to a body of knowledge has become more common.

The Open University has received plaudits for its recently ugraded ispot site which encourages users to post images to help name the flower, plant, insect or animal seen and share observations with others. When put together a broader picture of the wildlife of the country will be created. Changes over time will become apparent as data accumulates. This is linked to a new introductory course, Neighbourhood Nature, which includes iSpot as a field based activity.

Another OU based project is Creative Climate, which will present and archive a body of stories of people’s experiences and experiments with environmental change over a ten year period (from 2009).

But these projects have echoes from the University’s past. Forty years ago today an OU press release announced ‘Home-degree “army” to attack air pollution’. The University was in the process of recruiting its first students for a 1971 start and proclaimed that the 8,000 students taking its first year science course would be carrying out a ‘never-done-before “blanket” analysis – from air samples taken on their doorsteps.’ It claimed ‘the mass tests are expected to provide government and local authorities with vital data needed to overcome pollution hazards as they may exist district by district… A survey of this magnitude has not been possible before because of the heavy cost and organisational problems involved in setting up such a field task force.’

The press release announced that students would be supplied with ‘home experiment kits’ to carry out the pollution probe: ‘the country-wide data will be processed by automatic document reading and computer facilities at the University and passed on to official agencies dealing with air pollution who have welcomed the plan.’

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: Read the rest of this entry »

A 1974 edition of Open House, the Open University’s staff magazine, discussed the prospects of 12 members of OU staff standing for election at the forthcoming general election.

Two were successful. Professor Gerry Fowler became Minister of State at the Department of Education and Skills and Geoff Edge became MP for Aldridge-Brownhills.

Of course these were only the first of many OU staff members to seek public office, most famously the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown is a former tutor.

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’.

S357 Revision Weekend, York 2004

 Source

Creation

The White Paper on the University of the Air, 1966, proposed that the teaching provided via correspondence television and radio ‘will be reinforced by residential courses and tutorials’. The Report of the Planning Committee, 1969, stated: We recognise the great advantage that can accue from face-to-face meetings, which will be provided for by the short residential courses proposed’. An early Senate made attendance at residential schools compulsory and reinforced that decision in 1970 when it was questioned by the Faculty of Technology. Read the rest of this entry »