No pampered public schoolboys or Corbyn crazed snowflakes. The Open University MUST be saved

Of ALL the great monuments to the optimism, aspiration and social mobility of the Sixties, the Open University stands tallest.

Since it opened for business in 1969, the ‘University of the Air’ as it was originally known, has educated more than two million students, including hundreds of thousands who missed out on university the first time around.

Some were held back by their backgrounds; others were let down by their schools; still others were plain unlucky, or just never thought they stood a chance of getting a degree.

for almost half a century, then, the OU has deserved its reputation as the University of the Second Chance. And in a society where politicians love to proclaim the values of hard work and aspiration, you might think that its star would never have been higher.

Tragically, however, as the Mail revealed yesterday, the OU finds itself engulfed in the greatest crisis in its history, its very existence threatened by financial mismanagement, bureaucratic cant, academic stridency and plain, oldfashioned incompetence.

Opportunity

And precisely when the OU could have become one of the world’s greatest educational institutions, tapping the enormous international appetite for British education and the potential to deliver it online, an unholy menagerie of administrators and academics is allowing its potential to dribble into the sand. So what on earth has gone wrong?

Well, first, a bit of history. The Open University was the brainchild of the social reformer Michael Young, who convinced Labour’s Harold Wilson that, through ‘TV and radio statesponsored correspondence courses’, a brand new university would ‘provide an opportunity for those, who, have not been able to take advantage of higher education’.

As prime minister from 1964, Wilson made the OU his pet project, defended it from the doubters and was on hand for its first academic meeting in July 1969. And for the next two decades, his vision was triumphantly vindicated. The OU went from strength to strength — even as social mobility declined in the Eighties it remained a shining beacon of self-improvement.

Indeed, the OU’s national reputation was such that on television it became a kind of shorthand for working- class aspiration — especially among women who had never even dreamed about careers outside the home. Sue Johnston’s character in the Eighties soap opera Brookside, for example, studies at the OU, as well as Lesley Joseph’s character in Birds Of A feather.

But then things started to go wrong. The Blair government announced a target of 50 per cent of youngsters going into higher education, and tuition fees began to rise to pay for it. In 2012, the Coalition raised tuition fees to £9,000 a year (now capped at £9,250).

And as central funding and part-time enrolment plummeted, the OU — which had previously charged fees in the hundreds — saw its numbers collapse, with recruitment falling from more than 242,000 to fewer than 174,000 students in just five years.

In came the former BBC executive Peter Horrocks, appointed vice- chancellor in 2015, to sort out the mess.

But his solution — cuts of some £100 million, the withdrawal of many modules, the virtual disappearance of faceto-face tuition and a greater emphasis on online courses — has provoked mutiny among the academics. They argue that the OU is in danger of dwindling into an internet correspondence course.

Yesterday, the issue was the subject of fierce debate during an OU council meeting, at which Mr Horrocks’s adversaries — whipped up by the hysterical lecturers’ union — were demanding his head for daring to question the funding model.

The lecturers are furious that OU bureaucrats have spent some £2.5 million in fees to the City consultants KPMG to advise on initiating change. It would, critics say, have been much better invested in teaching. I agree with them.

To me, it is yet another example of the culture of pseudo-managerial jargon that is poisoning higher education, which has fallen under the sway of an overpaid and intellectually worthless caste of bureaucratic leeches.

The academics have a point, too, when they argue that moving the OU online and losing face-to-face teaching will dilute its unique appeal. If the OU becomes just another jumped-up correspondence course, it will die.

Shambles

Yet the academics — so stubborn and solipsistic — need to look in the mirror themselves. Mr Horrocks says the OU needs to save £ 100 million. Do the OU’s various classicists, geographers and literary critics, who fancy themselves as financial experts too, expect us to believe he is just making this up?

I could fill every page of this newspaper discussing the appalling shambles in British higher education, from the ineptly presented introduction of tuition fees to the widespread corruption of intellectual standards and growing culture of Left-wing intolerance. But the OU is worth fighting for.

More than any other university in the land, it stands for something greater than itself: hard work and aspiration.

Its students are not pampered public schoolboys or cosseted members of the snowflake generation. Nor, by and large, are they posturing student-union radicals.

Some seven out of ten of them work. Even as they are holding down a job, looking after their families and paying the bills, they are also putting in about 21 hours a week on their studies. They do not roll out of nightclubs on their way to a lecture. They do not censor, hector, whine and whinge.

Perhaps this is part of the problem. Because the OU’s beneficiaries are hard-working, grown-up people, often from humble backgrounds, they are not fashionable. It has been too easy for successive governments to ignore them, starving the OU of funds.

As a result, an institution that was once ahead of its time is in danger of being left behind. With the arrival of the internet in the Nineties, the OU could have taken the chance to be a leader in education.

It could have embraced the new technology, combining it with its strengths in distance learning and face-to-face tuition, and turned itself into the ‘Harvard of the air’, perhaps.

Even now I think it is not too late. I would give Mr Horrocks a chance to drag the OU kicking and screaming into the digital age, but on the condition that he undertakes a radical cull of its managers who have wasted money. (As a former BBC man, he should be very familiar with the breed.)

And that may mean getting rid of some under-performing and hysterical academics, too.

Above all, though, it is time the Government stepped in to save a great but ailing institution. I appreciate that Theresa May cannot bail out every university. But as the University of the Second Chance, the OU is special.

Benefits

‘We will do everything we can,’ she said when she first walked into Downing Street, ‘to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.’

Isn’t that precisely what the Open University is all about?

I know money is tight. But we are not talking about colossal sums, just the investment necessary to put Wilson’s creation back on its feet. Indeed, since the Open University produces precisely the kind of hard- working people our country needs, the economy would surely see the benefits before too long.

Let me put it this way. Would you rather waste millions sending legions of Corbyn- crazed 19-year- olds to read Gender Studies at the University of Uxbridge? Or would you prefer to invest the money in helping mature, serious-minded adults study engineering or nursing at the Open University?

I know my answer. Over to you, Mrs May.