In November 2016 I was invited to speak at an Open University reception in London celebrating the launch of a new chair of economics named after my late father, Harold Wilson, who, together with Jennie Lee, brought the Open University into being in the 1960s. As a retired academic who worked full-time for the OU for 37 years, producing course materials for tens of thousands of students, I recalled Jennie Lee’s insistence that if the OU were to succeed, its degrees had to be as good as any in the country. Since then, over 2 million people worldwide, from all walks of life, have achieved their learning goals by studying with the OU.

I also pointed out that, because a university is only as good as its academics, the university needs to invest fully in them, so that they can be just as innovative and forward-looking as they were in the 1970s when the OU began. But currently they are struggling: courses aren’t being kept up to date, curricula are being allowed to shrink, and excessive paperwork and red tape are hampering the efficient production of new teaching materials.

If the OU is to be saved, such processes need to be speeded up, the hiring of more academic staff needs to be prioritised, and risks need to be taken – a few may fail, but if the OU is to regain its former impressive reputation for innovation, it must continue to attract and keep a new generation of students. The OU should go all out for those young students who choose to get a job at 18 rather than face the tuition fees of the conventional university sector, and the cost of many courses needs to be lowered so that these courses can again be afforded by those interested in learning for its own sake.

How will all these innovations be paid for? By cutting out costly and useless “initiatives” that university leaders are so fond of, but which bring no benefit to their students. If voluntary or compulsory retirements are needed, these should be directed at those who do not directly contribute to the production of new courses on which the OU’s reputation has been based for so many years. And most of all, the OU needs the sort of academic leadership that caused it to flourish so well in its early days.

Robin Wilson

Oxford

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