and correspondence), mainly for people who had missed out of higher education in their younger years. Its first students enrolled in 1971. Courses were to take four or five years, beginning with a broad introduction followed by a flexible combination of specialised studies. Its activity, including the production of course materials, also had an impact on the wider population. Furthermore, it did not demand formal entry qualifications but accepted all applicants capable of study.
The Open University represented an important advance. However, it should not be overlooked that most of its first entrants were “middle-class”, a reflection of the fact that many working-class school leavers lacked the educational basis for further study. Quite apart from this, the cost of study exceeded the financial means of many workers.
Looking back at the development of higher education in the 1960s, three issues stand out: the widening of access to study, new approaches to courses, and changes in the structure and organisation of higher education. Let us consider these in more detail:
1) In the course of the 1960s, the percentage of the age group gaining access to higher education more than doubled. In full-time studies the proportion reached about 15%, but, including part-time students, about every third school leaver or holder of an ordinary vocational qualification started some form of course in 1970-half of them for a degree.
And yet, though numbers increased, discrimination against the working class, and also against women, remained. The proportion of university entrants from the working class stayed virtually unchanged at the 25% prevailing since before the second world war. This represented less than 5% of working-class youth of that age group. The proportion of women students in higher education increased gradually to a third by 1970, but was unevenly distributed, most being in teacher training and very few in technological subject. All this showed the limits of the Labor government’s program: It was still mainly the “middle class” that gained from advances achieved in higher education.
2) The 1960s also saw some important new approaches to courses. Many university students still studied one or two highly specialised subjects for three or four years (in some subjects longer) to obtain a degree, mainly the Bachelor of Art (BA) or of Sciences (BSc). Most degrees were awarded “ with Honors”, while broader courses (two or three subjects leading to a “general” or “ordinary” degree) had a lower standing. A few students carried on with postgraduate studies, usually for the degree of Master or Doctor demanding a dissertation.
These university courses, though pro viding sound knowledge and general academic skills, fell short of requirements in a number of fields, especially for industry, and in some cases the new polytechnic degree courses came to be preferred.
Extending initiatives already seen in the technological universities, polytechnics offered courses with a broad base, often integrating subjects. Advances were made in combining theoretical knowledge with practical training, and “sandwich courses” (periods of study alternating with periods of work in industry or office) became especially popular. Moreover, high standards were guaranteed from the start by the fact that polytechnics had to submit detailed programs for every course to the CNAA. This council examined the syllabus, the teaching staff and the general conditions in each case, and often made rigorous demands before approving a course. This contrasted with the situation common at universities, where academic standards tended to vary and subjects were sometimes taught without binding syllabuses.
The new approach in polytechnics was accompanied by controversy. There was strong pressure from central and local government and employers, this being evident in the involvement of business interests in sandwich courses and in the demands put by the monopolies to the CNAA. At the same time, some success was achieved by the teachers’ union and student organisation in gaining staff and student representation on management bodies of polytechnics, and participation in course development.
At this point we should consider the question of ‘academic freedom’. This is a cherished ideal of university life, allowing opinions ranging from Marxist to reactionary all to be broadly tolerated within a pluralist framework. The concept is misleading, because it functions in the context of an all-pervasive bourgeois ideology, and because, by permitting each university academic to teach broadly as he wishes, it in practice evades the fighting out of ideas. In polytechnics, at the time they were established, conflicts between progressive ideas and traditional bourgeois thinking were brought out more into the open. New courses had to be worked out collectively and defended before the national body, the CNAA, and this produced syllabuses to which all teachers involved were committed.
What this achieved at polytechnics should not of course be exaggerated. There was both advance and compromise, an example of the latter being “European Studies” (combining the study of the literature, history and economy of several countries). Objectives here tended to be confused, and there was mostly a bias towards Western Europe.
3)