Staff despair at Open University

COMING as it does from your multimedia editor, who is professionally placed for a balanced and objective view, the article ("IT cannot replace eye-to-eye", THES, December 6) gives welcome support to most OU staff, academic and administrative, who find their expertise disregarded in the rush towards change.

The decimation of this regional network that was reported on your front page (THES, November 29) was actually presented by the OU's director of regional academic services, in the paper which you quote, as "a personal contribution based on a number of beliefs which I happen to hold". It is now being implemented, however, without exploring any counter-proposals.

The paper's "implementation" was presented as "not something which will be achieved through a rational model of decision making", which it considered "impracticable", but only through "an essentially political process involving power, pressure and interests". Its implementation is deemed to require "acceptance of the inevitability of organisational politics", of "conflicts" that must be "managed positively to counter lethargy, apathy and similar organisational pathologies", conflicts between "public ideology" and "tribal preconceptions and preoccupations".

To most of us, this is not the language, verbal or conceptual through which to approach a delicate re-engineering operation in a university. Small wonder that the most commonly heard word in all OU areas at present is "despair".

In pursuit of an arbitrary "25 per cent saving" in delivery of our teaching, the university is enacting these regional changes in defiance of an overwhelming vote of its senate, in October, that all proposals for cuts must be discussed and evaluated by its faculties, as "the units where its academic responsibilities and reputation reside".

The merits which this national-but-local university has are being discarded before there is any proven alternative to put in their place. The supposed alternative of IT, as your multimedia editor has again spelt out, is a pedagogical and financial chimera. Full-time employees of the OU are well aware that it is an institution "owned" by a vast membership elsewhere in academia and in the general population. At present, however, all staff except the most senior find themselves disenfranchised.

Now these concerns have been aired in public it might just help to save something recognisable out of this extraordinary "network of learning people", or at least to restore "rationality" to the process of change.

Catherine Cooke

Faculty of technology

Open University