Exhibition: PhD Pioneers

The Graduates 

Dr Alfred Vella  

Alfred graduated with his Mathematics PhD “Epimorphisms Between Groups Given By Means Of Generators And Defining Relations” in 1977, just a week after getting married. Living in inner city Birmingham as a child of two Maltese parents he lived in council maisonettes in Duddeston Manor and later, Leebank, for most of his childhood and experienced some tough times with racism and bullying throughout his schooling, however his aptitude for maths first asserted itself at school. In Primary School he experienced corporal punishment by his teachers to “cure” his left handedness. Despite these challenges, Alfred passed his 11+ and went to grammar school where in his second year an amazing teacher brought him out of his shell and he began to shine academically, culminating in going to Royal Holloway University of London to study maths and chemistry. It was a computing module on his degree that was to be the basis of his future career. His application to study a PhD at the OU was successful. He found it a friendly and democratic institution and was involved in many extra-curricular activities, notably performing in the iconic “Ballad of Walton Hall”.  

His first job was a research programmer at the OU in 1978-81 before moving on to a varied career, lecturing at Oxford Brookes and North Staffordshire Polytechnics and then at Cranfield University. He arrived at the University of Luton in 1995, first as Head of Department before he became Associate Dean, Computing Research and Development, University of Luton in 1998 until 2000. From 1992 he came back to the OU as an associate lecturer and continues in that role. From 2008-15 he was a lecturer at Liverpool University online and he also teaches online and examines for London University External Degrees. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Joan Whitehead 

Joan graduated with her PhD “Motives For Higher Education: A Study Of The Academic Motivation Of Sixth-formers” from the OU in 1979. Joan was born into a working-class family in Lancashire but brought up in Yorkshire and was the first in her family to go onto higher education. One of the early cohorts of children in England to go through the comprehensive school system from start to finish, she very much enjoyed her secondary school days, and her parents, who had been denied their own educational opportunities, were very keen that she should take advantage of her education. Her school also encouraged its students to go onto higher education, and Joan went on to study Pyschology at University College of North Wales, Bangor, fully intending to work in the field of Educational Psychology. However, after a fulfilling year working in the US, she decided upon an academic career and was one of three in this cohort who studied for their PhD whilst being an OU staff member, a research assistant in the newly formed Faculty of Education. She remembers with fondness that during the three-day week, her group of OU friends and colleagues would pile round for dinner to the house of whichever of them had electricity that day. 

Joan describes herself as a bit of a geek, who loves analysing data, and was very excited to be at the cutting edge of the study of the psychology of motivation for her PhD. At the same time as writing up her PhD, she started on her career as a psychology lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University. During her time at Cambridge she was also Senior Tutor of Wolfson College from 2000-2004 and was for over 12 years President of the Cambridge branch of the AUT (now UCU).  Joan was also active in university politics, campaigning for and writing the Universities first Equal Opportunities Policy in the 1980s. Following her official retirement in 2012, she was then elected as Labour County Councillor for the Abbey Ward in Cambridge city until her final retirement in 2020. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Neil Wynn 

Neil has the distinction of being the very first graduate of the OU to be awarded his PhD in 1973. A history thesis called “The Afro-American and the Second World War”, the study was the start of a career that took him across the Atlantic and introduced him to involvement in radio and TV documentaries.  

The child of a British army family he was born in The Netherlands but moved around to England and Germany until the family settled in Scotland. He went to a state secondary school in Edinburgh and found a perverse inspiration in proving his teacher wrong and succeeding in getting into Edinburgh University to study history. He was the first in his family to complete an undergraduate degree, achieving an MA in History specialising in American history. It was there he met his mentor and one of the founding academics of the OU, Arthur Marwick, who asked him to become his postgraduate student, which Neil describes as lifechanging. Like many of this cohort, the PhD experience was sometimes a bit lonely as there were so few of them at that time, so Neil made friendships with university staff and got involved in writing undergraduate courses, teaching at OU summer schools and making appearances on OU TV programmes. He spent an inspiring year as a research assistant at the University at Buffalo, New York in the United States as part of his PhD, able to see first-hand the consequences of race riots and racial prejudice in the US. He speaks with reverence about his nervous realisation that his graduation was going to be filmed by the BBC and of his extreme terror on the day, not least his memory of sitting with Baroness Jennie Lee. 

He continued his passion for delivering higher education to a broader range of students by working at the, then, new Glamorgan Polytechnic, now the University of South Wales, teaching history and American Studies until moving to the University of Gloucestershire in 2003 where he remained until his retirement as an Emeritus Professor in 2017.