The Open College is halfway here

Discussions about an Open College — a system of flexible learning opportunities for those aiming at ends other than degrees and diplomas — have gathered strength and subsided many times in the UK during the last fifteen years. It is not widely known that during the period 1963–1965, when Sir Harold Wilson (then Opposition Leader and Prime Minister Wilson) was making his challenging speeches about a University of the Air and the academic and newspaper fraternities were both having fun with ‘telly degrees’, the senior educationists at the BBC were in close discussion with HM Inspectorate and DES officials on an equally ambitious but less charismatic project. This was a proposal for using radio and television in close collaboration with correspondence courses and local tuition to extend opportunities in technical and commercial education and in preparatory courses for higher education: in other words, an Open College. It was Miss Jenny Lee's insistence that the new institution must be ‘a university, and nothing less than a university’ that finally closed the files on those discussions; and, in terms of political survival through a period of recession, no doubt she was right.