Description
News round-up. Excerpts from the Manchester graduation ceremony. Interview with Harold Wilson in which he talks about the OU. Two students continue their visit to Walton Hall. They talk to Peter Gi...rling and Jeremy Chapple.
Subtitle Number Time In Time Out Subtitle Text
100:00:00,00000:00:01,000Open Forum 6 1974 00525/7040
100:00:00,00000:00:01,000Open Forum 6 1974 00525/7040
200:00:01,00000:00:04,000(Naomi McIntosh) To present anyone for an honorary degree is a difficult task…
200:00:01,00000:00:02,000(James Barber) Prime Minister, first congratulations on your honorary degree.
300:00:03,00000:00:04,000(Harold Wilson) Thank you.
300:00:05,00000:00:09,000..to present a Prime Minister is a daunting one. In the first place…
400:00:05,00000:00:07,000(James Barber) You know over the period you’ve had many honours heaped upon you,
500:00:08,00000:00:11,000Is there any way in which an Open University honorary degree will stand out?
400:00:10,00000:00:13,000..one can, indeed one must, assume that his biography…
600:00:12,00000:00:15,000(Harold Wilson) Yes it’s very special because it’s at the beginning of the conferment...
500:00:14,00000:00:17,000..his political and intellectual achievements are so well known…
700:00:16,00000:00:21,000..not of the first graduates but of the first of the main stream of graduates...
600:00:18,00000:00:23,000..as to make their recapitulation blatantly a work of supererogation.
800:00:22,00000:00:26,000..as the Vice Chancellor said they are the first of the many…
700:00:24,00000:00:27,000Thus I am denied all the usual material for this citation.
900:00:27,00000:00:30,000..and I felt very proud to be with them and to see so many from…
800:00:28,00000:00:33,000What then can I say of this man, who at the early age of thirty-one…
1000:00:31,00000:00:32,000..I won’t say from all over the country because, quite rightly…
1100:00:33,00000:00:37,000..these ceremonies have been done by region, over a very wide area of the North.
900:00:34,00000:00:37,000..became the youngest Cabinet Minister of modern times, and who...
1000:00:38,00000:00:42,000..ever since has lived in a positive blaze of publicity, sometimes not...
1200:00:38,00000:00:40,000(James Barber) Mr Wilson you were in at the birth of the University...
1300:00:41,00000:00:44,000..in fact you’ve, it’s been suggested you were its father.
1100:00:43,00000:00:46,000..as he has made clear, of his own choosing.
1400:00:45,00000:00:47,000You’ve also seen it now grow and establish itself and it's well accepted within…
1200:00:47,00000:00:50,000Mr Wilson, before that time, had followed an academic career…
1500:00:48,00000:00:52,000..the educational field generally, but let’s look to the future, what sort of role
1300:00:51,00000:00:55,000..and had studied and taught in a rather older OU.
1600:00:53,00000:00:55,000do you see it playing in the future development of education in this country?
1400:00:56,00000:01:01,000Indeed since the new OU did not then exist, he could be held to have been…
1700:00:56,00000:00:59,000(Harold Wilson) Can I say first it’s gone far beyond even my wildest dreams.
1800:01:00,00000:01:03,000I did the first outline plan of it one Easter Sunday morning in 1963.
1500:01:02,00000:01:08,000..if not educationally deprived, at least educationally constrained.
1900:01:04,00000:01:07,000I’d been studying abroad some ideas I was playing with.
2000:01:08,00000:01:10,000I wasn’t even Leader of the Party, the Opposition then...
1600:01:09,00000:01:13,000My Lord Chancellor we did not, in the Senate, ask the Prime Minister…
2100:01:11,00000:01:15,000..but by this time in 1963 I’d become. I’d come back from Chicago...
1700:01:14,00000:01:18,000..to accept an honorary degree, we asked Harold Wilson to accept it…
2200:01:16,00000:01:19,000..where I was studying this when Hugh Gaitskill died.
1800:01:19,00000:01:22,000..for it was offered last December. It was offered because it was he…
2300:01:20,00000:01:23,000And after church that morning I wrote the outline plan.
1900:01:23,00000:00:26,000..who gave the concept of a university of the air...
2400:01:24,00000:01:26,000It seemed to be daring to those who heard it when I made it in a speech,
2000:01:27,00000:01:31,000..later to be translated into The Open University, a political reality.
2500:01:27,00000:01:31,000In fact from the outset those who planned it, the organising committee…
2100:01:32,00000:01:35,000Harold Wilson is a man already honoured by many academic institutions.
2600:01:32,00000:01:34,000..and then the kind of shadow administration of the University were…
2700:01:35,00000:01:37,000..much more daring than I’d been. For example
2200:01:36,00000:01:40,000We honour him for the same reasons that they did but as I have tried to show…
2800:01:38,00000:01:40,000..I hadn’t dared to suggest that it should award its own degrees...