The report that the Open University plans to axe more than a third of its courses and slash its teaching staff makes grim reading for anyone who cares about the consequences for its original mission of making tertiary education open to all. Of course, the cuts must be set in the context of what has been happening to higher education as a whole, but there is clearly a danger that the OU’s unique contribution to public education over the half-century since it was created will be lost.

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I’m a survivor of that first-generation of OU academics, appointed in 1969 to create a curriculum accessible to anyone, irrespective of their prior educational level. We had a charismatic vice-chancellor who shared a conviction that knowledge was power and that to democratise power, the university’s task was to democratise knowledge.

In those pioneering days, anything seemed possible. Teach lab science by correspondence and TV? No problem – we invented experimental kits that students could use at home, opened up conventional university classrooms and labs during vacations for summer schools, created a network of tutors to monitor and advise students, and turned the loneliness of the long-distance learners into a strength by involving them in mass research projects. When a postal strike disrupted exams, academics drove across the country to deliver exam papers to our regional centres.

Once-sceptical colleagues from other universities began to confess that they were using OU course material for their own lectures. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall and geographer Doreen Massey made the OU’s social science faculty an international intellectual hub. Science could boast of Colin Pillinger, almost single-handedly the creator of the Beagle Mars Lander. Student demand was high and administration light, proud to serve the university’s twin functions of teaching and research.

High-paid VCs feel insecure without a small army of administrators; lecturers have become a casualised workforce

The OU’s first two vice-chancellors fought successfully to defend and expand the university against the hostility of the Heath and Thatcher governments, who saw it as a dangerously radical experiment. But that was then. What followed is in part a microcosm of what has happened at other UK universities over recent decades. As sociologist John Holmwood has pointed out, successive neoliberal governments, from Blair on, have seen universities’ only functions as developing “human capital” and enhancing economic growth. To achieve these goals, the relative autonomy of university teaching and scholarly inquiry has been curtailed while the ideology of “choice” – coupled with steadily rising fees – has persuaded universities to regard students as customers or consumers.

In this context , vice-chancellors – in the OU’s case drawn not from academia but from accountancy, IT and most recently the BBC – understand their institutions as businesses, and themselves as CEOs, deserving of their soaring salaries.

High-paid VCs feel insecure without the support of a small army of administrators and bean-counters, while lecturers have become a casualised and insecure workforce, under the pressure of almost continuous assessment to obtain research grants and achieve teaching “excellence”. Professors are now junior links in a chain of line managers and a bullying culture is endemic – I’ve seen a senior academic colleague reduced to tears by an over-promoted “pro-vice chancellor for research”.

So far, so general. But even though the OU remains the UK’s largest university, its unique position in higher education is under a very specific challenge. Established as a “university of the second chance” when only some 15% of 18-21-year-olds went to college, and there was a huge untapped demand. Now that 32% do, its potential student base has eroded. And there is new competition. Many conventional universities and private providers have recognised the potential of distance digital learning and offer web-based MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – often fronted by celebrity academics.

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In contrast with those early days, the response of the OU’s managers seems to have been defensive and unimaginative. Despite the university’s home campus being in Milton Keynes, they even seem to have missed out on the chance to be at the forefront of the city council’s proposal to create a new STEM-based university there. Management proposals to reduce and reconstruct were met with a vote of no-confidence by the university senate, its academic ruling body. The vice-chancellor’s offer to sell his official residence and have his £360k salary reviewed doesn’t cut much ice against the 250 teaching staff reductions or slashing of courses and student support.

The OU’s greatest strengths have always been the commitment of its academics and the enthusiasm of its students. It was student pressure that saved the OU from Thatcher’s axe at its birth. But this time, the management has failed to mobilise the huge and loyal nationwide alumnus base. Is there still time for the OU to call again on its students and graduates to help save it from death by slow strangulation?

• Steven Rose is emeritus professor of neuroscience at the Open University