Peter Horrocks may have fallen foul of the BBC hierarchy at one point (A visionary to save the Open University – or the man who will run it down?, 9 January), but for the OU he is just the latest in a line of vice-chancellors peddling the neoliberal agenda for higher education. He has threatened to cut a quarter of the curriculum and the workforce in student support. Horrocks is seriously compromising the future of the OU as a distance-learning provider of excellent degree programmes.
Critical thinking and critical speaking are indeed being stifled in the faculties. For some years now the vice-chancellor’s executive has implemented disastrous strategies (centralisation, closure of regional centres, putting so much online in administration and teaching, and drastically reducing tutorial support for students). We are now confronted with a remote, blinkered and yet highly paid senior management which fails to consult or listen to those who actually know something about the OU students and their educational needs.
The catastrophic drop in student numbers cannot simply be explained away by the hostile environment, which in any case could easily change if a government with socially progressive policies is elected and rapidly restores properly funded state education at all levels. In the meantime the OU could use its enviably large reserves to subsidise fees, increase the pay of part-time associate lecturers, and re-establish the regions and the university’s local presence and internal support network. Expensive vanity projects like FutureLearn and its massive open online courses are not bringing in students.
This may be the digital age, but the American experience of online universities is that the option of regular face-to-face interaction among colleagues and between tutors and students is the only way to make blended tuition work at degree level, and to motivate those creating, delivering and studying intellectually stimulating modules.
Dr Paula James
Research associate, retired senior lecturer in classical studies and south-east staff tutor, OU
• As an OU tutor in Northern Ireland in the early 70s I saw how the tutorial system, regular meetings at study centres and summer schools were a vital and intellectually stimulating part of the students’ experience. Many were studying for the first time, others to increase existing qualifications, and some for the sheer pleasure of learning. All had something to teach each other. The chilling new proposals for an OU based on “service centres and media platforms” operating in the cloud, are bound to kill off the OU’s great strengths of warmth and inclusion in an academic community.
I remember Peter Horrocks when he was head of TV news at the BBC and I was a daily newscaster. He was a man of dry intellectual brilliance, but his admitted shyness revealed a crippling lack of social skills. He is not the visionary needed to lead and encourage the Open University community to grow and prosper in the 21st century.
Anna Ford
(OU tutor in Northern Ireland 1971-74; chancellor, Manchester University 2001-08), London
• Imagine a philanthropic university that aims to provide high-quality education to anyone who wants it. Tens of thousands of students from all over the country pour through its open doors and avail themselves of the rich resources on offer. People can choose to educate themselves in this way, joining others, learning together, changing their lives and expanding their minds.
Now wake up from this delightful daydream. Get back to the dreary repetition of rumours, slogans, scandal and gossip known as social media. Sit back down on your sofa. The university has sold out and joined the real world, where everyone is hypnotised by the magic of the screen. Who needs high-quality education when you can have Twitter and Instagram? Who needs books when you have Facebook? Who ever needed face-to-face meetings with real people? Real people are so last century.
The doors have closed already. Now the weasels are busy taking the faltering structure down altogether. Hurrah! We are happy in our ignorant consumption. So, so happy. Joan Bellamy’s letter (Open University plan will be its death knell, 11 January) is absolutely right.
Mary Reddaway
Stroud, Gloucestershire
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本文來源：https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/14/our-open-university-has-become-a-daydream
