The Open University Opens

Still going strong today, The Open University, Britain's national correspondence - TV - radio University, excited much controversy when it first opened and in 1973 awarded its first degrees. With its adult, part-time students, its freedom from formal entrance qualifications, it deliberately questioned many orthodoxies of higher education at the time. Yet the OU differed so much from other universities that few outsiders grasped quite how complex, quite how revolutionary, quite how downright infuriating the OU was, or could be.

Originally published in 1974, this book gives a first-hand account of what the OU was about and what it felt like to be an OU student or lecturer. The articles in the collection - edited by Jeremy Tunstall, himself on the OU staff - include contributions from outside observers, from OU staff, and from OU students. This is an unofficial yet informed and lively account of what it felt like in 1974, and what it felt like in the early days, to be part of a project so controversial and progressive.