OU shouldn’t
Cuts are now biting on the one institution that has done the most for social mobility
Charlotte Lydia Riley
British people of a certain age have a shared cultural memory of the Open University. A lecturer—usually a man— appears on television dressed in an alarming outfit, standing in front of a chalkboard or behind a demonstration table, talking earnestly to the camera about particle physics, or the Reformation, or the Upper Volta rivers. This programme might have been glimpsed whilst someone was up in the middle of the night feeding a baby, or stumbling in from the pub, or perhaps by a small child looking for entertainment early on a Saturday morning and finding only education.
For many people in Britain, those kipper- tied academics doing a chalk-and-talk lecture were their first, or only, exposure to higher education. The OU has changed dramatically since it was first established in 1969; the “university of the air” has mostly moved from the television to the internet, and the kipper ties are mostly banished to the back of the wardrobe.