Exhibition: PhD Pioneers

The Graduates

Professor Bill Morris

Bill was one of the first OU PhD graduates in 1974 with a Life and Earth Sciences PhD entitled “Palaeomagnetic Studies in The British Caledonides”. Studying at the inception of the discovery of plate tectonics, Bill was swept along with the excitement of that, almost revolutionary, time in the field of Geology. It was a long way from his childhood in Lancashire where he went on to Thomas Linacre Secondary Technical School in Wigan after a local primary education. The school had a very strong science focus of which Bill was able to take advantage and achieved a higher-than-average number of O and A levels, supported by his mother, despite no family history of higher education. He chose to study Geology at Leeds University which had a great reputation for geology at the time. He vividly remembers a pivotal field trip to Scotland in his final year, when he realised his knowledge was too general and that he needed to specialise to become expert. His passion for hands-on analysis of rocks led him to one of many influential fortuitous contacts he made in his career, Professor Jim Briden, who supervised his PhD research. Whilst studying at the OU, he found the transformative effect on students he taught at the OU summer school very inspiring. This experience led him to pursue his lifelong academic career. Bill started a post-doctorate appointment in Canada at the University of Western Ontario, before completing his PhD. He had to fly back for his thesis defense. He has remained in Canada ever since, finding his niche at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in 1989. He started as an Associate Professor in the department of Geology making his way up to Chair of the department in 1994 and then became a Professor of Geography and Earth Sciences in 1998. In 2015 he became, and remains today, an Emeritus Professor of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster. Alongside his prolific authorship of books and journal articles and supervision of PhDs.

 

 

 

Professor Stephen Potter

If you cut Stephen in half, it would say “Open University” like a stick of rock all the way through him. In 1977 he was one of the OU’s youngest PhD graduates of the 1970s, with his then, cutting edge and timely thesis “The Transport Assumptions Underlying the Design of Britain's New Towns”. From his beginnings as a working-class North London boy, he did not take the usual route to higher education as he failed his 11+ and went to a state modern secondary school. Happily, he describes himself as a late bloomer who surprised his headmaster by being one of the few pupils who went to university- in his case University College London doing Economics and Geography.

Like many of this cohort, his route to the OU was via an advert, in this case for a studentship studying New Towns. As the first OU Social Sciences PhD student, Stephen threw himself into the cauldron of excitement and tumult that was the OU in its adolescence and thrived on it, finally graduating after an exhausting viva, as one of only eight PhD graduates at the 1978 Alexandra Palace ceremony, presented by the OUs first and founding vice-chancellor, Walter Perry. 

He was involved in many extra-curricular activities; writing for the OU’s in house magazine, Open House, and helping with writing new OU undergraduate courses, which many PhD students in the 1970s found themselves doing. 

Ally Pally featured again in Stephen’s life as he was filmed there again by the BBC in one of his first academic roles as Urban Studies lecturer. He moved away from the OU for a short time to work on community transport in London, but returned to the OU’s Technology faculty, eventually becoming Professor of Transport Strategy. A prolific author and Emeritus Professor, he has also contributed to several groups about sustainable transport and the environment and has been instrumental in developing the link between the OU and the Milton Keynes Low Carbon Living programme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Ken Richardson

Ken gained his Life Science PhD “Changes in Protein Synthesis in Rat Brain Regions During Exposure to a New Visual Experience” in 1974, only the second graduation year for the OU. Ken’s childhood seemed a long way from the academic career he pursued in adulthood. Living in a pit village in County Durham with no gas or electricity and an outside toilet, sharing the one bedroom with his family of five until moving to a council house at aged 12. He started work at 15, and at 17 he joined the RAF. Eventually he was encouraged to take O and A levels and then a BEd at Manchester University with the main subjects in Chemistry and Biology. To his surprise he was offered a PhD attached to a scholarship with Professor Steven Rose at the OU after applying through an advert in the New Scientist. He went on to be part of the original Brain Research Group set up by Professor Rose and was thrilled to be involved in this cutting-edge neuroscience and be involved in the politics of the IQ debate. Ken’s life-changing academic career continued with a first job at the National Child Development Centre in London followed by a job at the OU’s School of education after his PhD, becoming the first acting director of its Centre for Human Development.

Meanwhile Ken was engaging in prolific research and writing, becoming expert in the brain’s intelligence systems and their evolution. Ken’s passion for scholarship and scholarly values and its innate democratic process, and his subsequent disillusionment with how he felt that universities had been made to prioritise finances over scholarship led him to take early retirement in 2003 and focus on the pure scholarship that he loves. He has since written about 40 papers for scientific journals about the evolution of intelligence systems. He describes his OU PhD as transforming his life from that of a passive student to one of an active scholar, and that he has tried his best to maintain these values throughout his life.