This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Dr Steven Cousins, alumnus of Durham University and the Open University.
The Open University has responded to the blog: you can read their response underneath the article.
It is as though the Open University (OU) has suddenly discovered an oil reserve deep beneath the Walton Hall campus and is determined to drill and extract the market price, whatever the CO2 cost or the reputational damage might be. After all, the OU is renowned for its support for a low-carbon Planet Earth and the OU remains one of the UK’s most trusted institutions. After the Post Office scandal, most trusted institutions seem rather rare. The black gold the OU has discovered is the value of the campus land for housing and the CO2 cost comes through emitting around an additional half a ton of CO2 for each square meter of floor area when the existing area of University buildings are rebuilt elsewhere. This comparison includes the OU staying put and upgrading its buildings to an equivalent high standard.
The OU is the UK’s largest university and it is embarking on the most major educational transformation in its 50-year history. It is about to combine its role as an institution of some 200,000 distance learning students with a new target population of ‘up to’ 20,000 face-to-face students taught on-campus in Milton Keynes. To pay for this transformation, the University has controversially proposed to demolish its Walton Hall site for housing and move to a new campus 4 miles away in Central Milton Keynes. This is the big idea behind the OU 2030 project.
There are fears that this preoccupation with bricks and mortar (glass and steel?) is a major distraction from the University’s real challenges which are educational as well as financial. The challenges include revitalising its core business of distance learning to better compete and lead nationally and internationally; revitalising the curriculum to meet the evolving environmental, economic and new strategic challenges; and the need to find out what actually works in the blended use of OU materials when teaching face-to-face. These challenges should be immensely exciting for OU academics. Suitably managed they constitute a good reason for academics to come into work again and, post-Covid, to make the campus a vital and vibrant place once more. In addition, research output and income are much more likely to grow at Walton Hall in the short and medium future if facilities are maintained and if the place feels dynamic. The 2030 hiatus and promises of labs tomorrow do not attract bright minds to stay around. Ironically, a small unit specialising in embodied energy in buildings has already moved on.
