As education succumbs increasingly to the tyranny of business management plans, the Open University's TV programmes are to be phased out - but where else will we be able to find the iconic 1970s rigouts and haircuts worn by its lecturers?
The news that the Open University's late-night television programmes are to be phased out constitutes a calamity for real education. Perhaps the planned CD-Roms and Internet sites will prove to be efficient replacements, but the OU programmes' central teaching message is now gravely jeopardised. That message, laced through lecture topics ranging from Aristotle to zoology, nightly stressed the habitually neglected truth that there is no simple relationship between knowledge and taste.
It seldom mattered what the lecture topic might be - Orwell or organic chemistry, Paraguay or particle physics, the Brontes or the brontosauruses - the central message was rigorously maintained. Certainly there was knowledge on offer, but long before supermodels and the narcissistic cult of the catwalk became over-exposed parts of popular culture, the clothes of OU lecturers were iconic. Of course, like the rigouts promoted by the catwalk crowd, the lecturers' outfits were not suitable for everyday street wear.
Jackets with lapels wide enough for hang-gliding, worn over brown chalkstripe nylon shirts tucked into polyester houndstooth hipsters and accessorised by floral ties and two-tone shoes made serious statements.
Karel Poborsky haircuts, ginger afros and even the occasional, rare academic mullet complemented by horn-rimmed glasses, made you realise that, where fashion was concerned, the Open University was the land that time forgot.
Even in the 21st century, you could slip back to 1970 by zapping on to late-night BBC2.
Britain's Open University was granted its charter in 1969 and Harold Wilson hoped it would stand as the principal legacy of his time as prime minister. Intended to push a more educated population forward into what Wilson called "the white heat of technology", it's ironic that technology, in league with business, has finally undone its public face. According to the BBC, "The OU night-time schedule will decrease over the next three years and then remain at that level until 2006, when it will be looked at again".
But it can never be looked at again in the same light. A founding principle of the OU was that it should be "the university of the air". Watching a lecturer in a suitably inappropriate rigout and hairdo drawing graphs in chalk on a blackboard offered a kind of sanctuary from time. Designer labels, power suits and Power Point presentations came, went and came again, but the outfits and coiffure of OU lecturers retained an integrity in their hideousness. Glacial erosion might or might not be your gig, but who could not be riveted by the regulation outfits from hell? Such was the integrity of the OU lecturers that even programmes on aesthetics seldom neglected the central message. In emphasising the lack of a simple relationship between information and taste, those OU programmes have been much parodied. Advertising cars, Griff Rhys Jones, for instance, got the tasteless boffin look spot-on. Sure, it was funny and the OU provided some of television's best visual comedy as well as its best scholarly information. More seriously, however, the passing of these programmes coincides with the passing of a certain kind of education.
In an age in which education, like just about everything else, is being distorted by the tyranny of business-management models, the phasing out of OU television is a lesson in itself. That news of its demise comes in the year of the Skilbeck report on the future of Irish universities, the "degrees for sale" scandal in Oxford and the relentless degradation of secondary school teachers, is telling. Forget insomniac students and lecturers in time-warp rigouts - welcome to the age of "knowledge supermarkets", "information managers" and "customers".
As the business models bite, education is increasingly described in such management guff. It's ironic, too, that as business people nowadays arrange "lectures" and "seminars" for themselves, the people who traditionally traded in such gigs are being referred to as "information managers". Perhaps it's appropriate too, for, as Oxford's "degrees for sale" scandal shows, universities are being made more and more ravenous for money and will now take loot from practically any source.
"Managers" at Oxford's Pembroke College have been shown to be willing to grant a place on a law degree course to an under-qualified student in return for a £300,000 donation from his father. It's not as if Oxbridge corruption, like American Ivy League corruption, is anything new. The progeny of the rich and powerful have always found ways to open doors (ask Yale graduate George Bush). But doing hucksterish deals for money is the inevitable result of imposing unsuitable business-management models on education.
Clearly, the businessman attempting to purchase a university place for his son considered he was simply buying a premium designer brand: an Oxford education. In a world in which even the rain that falls from the sky can be commodified by private "water resource management" outfits to make profit, why should education be any different? Everything is up for auction in this wonderfully efficient new market. Fair enough, it's probably no worse than the bigoted system of class patronage which formerly guaranteed that idle aristocrats infested universities. But it's no better either.
The upshot is that the great drive for business-like efficiency in education turns out, like the elitist system it is replacing, to be anti- meritocratic and anti- democratic. That's a wonderful model of efficiency to promote for the next generation of students (sorry, "customers"). Certainly, accountability in spending public funds is as necessary in education as in anything else. But, increasingly pushed towards the private sector to secure funds, education is learning that there's no such thing as a free lunch when the lads with the loot are in control.
Imposing US business models on universities in Ireland and Britain dilutes and colonises education here. The US is different. With the country's long history of private education, grateful graduates fill the coffers of American colleges. That is their culture and it assures a continuity of funding.
But that is not the culture here or in Britain, and imposing it without adequate foundation and establishment is sure to undermine the quality on offer.
The Skilbeck report gives little cause for hope in Ireland. It might make more efficient the relationship between education and the economy but only at the continued expense of the traditional relationship between education and society. There used to be a recognised difference, as well as some similarities, between education and training, but the machine that is the economy demands training and calls it education. Useful knowledge is, of course, vital, but it is not the sole end of education.
Anyway, when next you see an orange, purple and pink tank-top, rabbiting on about early German Romanticism or the sermon tradition in old and middle English, remember that the end is nigh. "The Semiotics of Open University TV" may well, in time, become a course of study on the Internet. But the phasing out of the OU from television marks an end to what was once a trail-blazing tie-up between education and technology designed to educate millions for a coming technological society.
Sure, that technological society did arrive and has been duly hijacked by business. Computers, mobile phones, CDs and the rest of it are fine developments which coincide with the decades of the OU on television. But it is primarily marketing - most of it propaganda - which has generated billions from such wildly overpriced devices and services. We have been trained to serve the white heat of technology, alright. But the white heat of technology has been hijacked to serve the avarice of the few and burn the ordinary punter. The great pity is that the drift already evident in education may be just a taste of worse to come.