Exhibition: PhD Pioneers

Being Isolated

The lack of students on campus at the OU and the associated limited established research culture of the early 1970s at the OU, meant that, as Neil Wynn describes in his video clip here, our cohort, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, often met no other PhD students during their studies; "in fact I was the first postgraduate student, I think, in the Faculty of Arts altogether". They also had to find external supervisors for their topics if there was no lecturer on the staff of the OU that specialised in their thesis subject, and because PhD supervision was not consistently managed in the UK until the late 1980s, they may have only met with these supervisors once or twice a year. In the second video on this page, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, then a media student, describes feeling that he was on his own trying to make sense of the information on which he was working; "that lonely feeling of heavy burden of responsibility". The fact that there was not a full library at the OU for most of the early 1970s meant that PhD students reported having no research study training often associated with library inductions elsewhere. They did, however have an internal OU supervisor to support them, but academically this was not always a real solution to their feelings of isolation.  

The fact that the key components of Milton Keynes New Town were not completed until the mid-1970s meant that Walton Hall could sometimes feel like the middle of nowhere to PhD students and the lack of “student digs-style” areas to live at that time meant that socialising with other students was very difficult.