Sunday Posts

Universities in the UK face a number of different challenges, but none more serious than from a growing coalition of professional and vocational training providers, which are questioning the value of going to the university. Somewhat paradoxically, at the surface at least, these efforts are driven by the two-plank strategy of the government - of cutting university funding which will hit the middle tier universities hard, and on the other hand, putting money on Apprenticeship programmes and projecting these as the panacea of all the social ills in Britain - while the Government ministers, as their lives and discourses show, are deeply reverential of the Oxbridge model, of the great education that the top-tier British universities provide. The growing traction of this opinion stream, that a student loses nothing but his indebtedness by not going to the university, is evident in the number of mentions websites like www.notgoingtouni.co.uk gets in various news forums. This is joined by th...

A Great British Institution This essay is about the creation of The Open University [OU]. Bill Bryson, an American living in England, lists OU among the great, uniquely British contributions to the World, along with William Shakespeare, Christopher Wren, Chocolate Digestive biscuits and Pork Pies (Bryson, 1996). David L Kirp, a modern American commentator on Higher Education, compares the founding of OU with the opening of the land grant universities in the United States a century earlier, as “both developments provided serious and sustained learning opportunities for large number of people for whom Higher Education had never previously been available”. He also concedes, quoting Walter Perry, the first Vice Chancellor of the OU, that of the two events, OU’s story was more remarkable, as the land grant schools “took at least seventy five years to achieve a fully established place in the American society, while [OU] had to be brought into full-scale operation almost instantaneo...

For all the glory policy-makers want to claim, usually policy follows social realities and not the other way around. Indeed, I am in the middle of preparation for my dissertation on the Open University, and exploring how all the policy pronouncements about the University of the Air, that's how it was first named, were really a catch-up. The technology moved, social realities moved and all the Ministers were doing was a catch-up. It was no longer plausible to leave vast numbers of people in the country, 96% of the school leaving population at the time, outside the cycle of prosperity, hence the two bills of 1966, one to create the Polytechnics and the other to keep the Open University, though none acknowledged the other. There was usually sneers from all quarters: The Tories called the plan 'blithering nonsense' and newspapers, with the exception of The Economist, were universally hostile. There were jibes about 'even housewives may want to learn'. The one thing that...