In fact, events resolved themselves, as they usually do if you let them.
Today being Sunday, I didn’t set any alarm and slowly came to in a kind of leisurely fashion putting this weeks’s plans into some kind of shape.
After a while and having the urge to go for a Gipsy’s, I crawled out of bed to notice the time – 12:24 pm. That put paid to any plans I might have had to go out anywhere. It’s been a couple of times that I’ve done this just recently. It gives you an idea of how hard I’ve been working during the week, even if it doesn’t look much like it.
A leisurely breakfast followed by some generally inactive kind of tidying up in the verandah and in my room and that was that, effectively. I haven’t done anything else.
In other news, the Confederation of British Industries, desperately in need of some brownie points and trying hard to ingratiate itself with Gordon Clown’s government, has leapt onto the bandwagon of demanding higher tuition fees and cutting back on student support.
It’s the Leitch Report all over again.
“At a time of economic crisis, when many hard-working families are struggling to support their offspring through university, I am astonished that the CBI should be making such offensive recommendations,” said NUS president, Wes Streeting – the NUS being for the most part a bunch of naive wet-behind-the-ears adolescents.
So, where’s the quote from the OUSA President?
OUSA is (so we are led to believe) a bunch of 200,000 or so distinguished grown-ups actively pursuing academic excellence in their own time at their own pace? Could it be that the BBC forgot all about the existence of OUSA? Or was it that the President had nothing to say on the subject? Or was it that whatever the OUSA President had to say wasn’t worth quoting?
Whichever way you look at it, it just shows how inconsequential OUSA has become under the “leadership” of the last few years. No concept of a sense of history, no sense of grasping the important moment, no sense of pushing themselves and their ideas into the limelight.
When the ideas of the Leitch Report were first sprung onto the unsuspecting masses (I say “unsuspecting masses” because there were a couple of us who had seen the Leitch Report mentioned in a paper of February 2007 and tried our best, but in vain, to urge the remainder to take it seriously) do you know what the clowns did?
They organised a petition.
We did things like that in primary school. I worked for 12 years or so in a major multinational organisation, the largest of its kind in the world, and I can tell you what happens to petitions because we used to get thousands from all over Europe. What happened to the petitions was that the organisations’s budget for toilet paper was zero.
During the review of the Leitch Report, the British Government set up a committee to look into its effects on part-time Higher Education. The Open University is the largest supplier, by a country mile, of part-time Higher education in the UK, if not the world and has the most students of any educational establishment in the UK. So which University was asked to send a delegate to sit on the committee?
You’ve guessed it. Those well-known suppliers of part-time Higher Education, the … er … Staffordshire University, or North Staffs Poly as it used to be called when I studied Accountancy there in the 1970s.
At an Open University committee meeting, I asked if this appointment was a slap in the face for the Open University. I was told “no – you can’t expect the OU to sit on everything that involves part-time Higher Education”.
So I asked “why not? It’s larger than all the other suppliers combined” and “what other equivalent committees are there in existence currently that the OU sits on?”
And no-one was able to give me a reply.
But that’s where the OU and OUSA sit right now – treated with total contempt by Government and the major British press. And having met personally many representatives of those two organisations, I have to say that I am not in the least surprised.
