This is the second of a two-part post. See the first post.

A very nice feature of the campus (using these photos is leading me to talk much more about the campus itself than I intended, but there you go) was its landscaping. Much of the landscaping being implemented during my time at the OU was quite sensible stuff: flowerbeds giving way to tall grass and native plants that require much less maintenance. I’ve always hypothesised – without ever investigating – that halfway through my time at the OU, a very nice chief landscape gardener reached the end of her/his career and retired, replaced by another very nice chief landscape gardener who made it his/her agenda to introduce new techniques and practices of landscaping to the campus. Improbable, I know, but I like to imagine that’s what happened.

Very near to my final days, I looked out my office’s window to see that carefully-sculpted sections of grass sod were being removed to expose the topsoil beneath. We later learned that a vegetable garden was being introduced, which was going to be used by the central catering facility at the campus (also then being refurbished), which I thought was great. We found out that this specifically was happening through one of the Faculty Administrators, who went out and asked the workmen, who were turning up all this grass sod, what was going on. I mention this as an aside because in telling her they also registered their opinion what they were doing was a bad thing since ‘so many people are out of work these days’; i.e. presumably that this will just take jobs away from the food industry in a recession. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it does illustrate the oft-mentioned tension between green and red (labour) politics.

Ah, and then there is the Lebanon tree, which when I first began was an absolutely massive and beautiful cedar tree standing right next to Walton Hall. Then, one day, an email was sent around to all staff at central campus. It reported, in very earnest tones, that an arborist had visited, and had been looking into an apparent problem with this grand tree. Something was wrong, it seemed. The tree looked fine at this time, but this email seemed to be anticipatory. In between the lines, it seemed to say ‘everyone will be so upset if this tree is felled without forewarning’. The actual email ended with (paraphrased) ‘we will keep monitoring the situation with the Lebanon tree, but the prognosis is not good’. About a year later, it was reduced to about one-third its size, as shown in the photo.

One thing that really defined my experience of the OU was actually reaching it. Like many central academic staff members, I did not live in Milton Keynes during my employment with the OU. One way to get there is driving, of course, a mode in which I myself partook from time to time.

This is after all a place that actually has its own ring road, as if it is a metropolitan area. Like Birmingham, say. But most of the time I came by rail, and then a connecting shuttle bus provided (and subsidized) by the OU. I would very often see colleagues on the train, and of course, virtually everyone on the shuttle bus worked at the OU. This gave each and every OU visit (usually twice a week for me) the feel of a research retreat. It was almost like having a mostly virtual connection to the place, through the web working from home, punctuated by these special occasions where we’d actually come together in physical co-presence. The fact that meetings of various sorts were crammed into such days only accentuated the ‘retreat’ feeling. Also accentuating this feeling was the fact that the OU is located in the new town of Milton Keynes; it’s like nowhere else in the UK, a very distinct environment. For a time, while I still commuted all the way from Cardiff (a not uncommon distance to commute for an OUer, I should add), I rode a bike for the five or so miles from Milton Keynes Central rail station to the campus. On these occasions, getting to the OU felt less like a retreat, and more like a mission.

Funnily enough, given my research interests, I never was hugely connected to all the scholarly work going on around media at the OU during my time there. And there is some serious media and cultural studies heritage at this place, a material trace of which is, for example, the Stuart Hall building, named of course after Stuart Hall, distinguished cultural theorist and key progenitor of the ‘Birmingham School’ of British Cultural Studies. That said, the other big part of my research-interests-equation – debates around cities, geography and politics – was very well addressed through my involvement in the Department of Geography (now represented by the OpenSpace research centre) and the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG).

I did however make more of a connection to all the ways in which the OU is a great place for doing academic work with media – particularly the work I was involved in around the new CCIG website. With all the infrastructure surrounding course production, the OU also has plenty of potential for using different sorts of media – video, audio, online resources, etc –to connect research and theory to different sorts of publics. Admittedly this remains somewhat latent at the moment, but the potential is there nonetheless. Indeed, it’s not only there in infrastructure but, arguably, embedded in the very ethos of the place.

This leads me to end this unintentionally-long post with a point about the OU for which I won’t lead from any particular aspect of the campus. This is to say that I always thought there was a very ‘open’ culture at the OU (no pun intended).There was just this distinctive disposition at the place to get together and thrash through various matters of theory, method and politics, even if said matters were not in people’s area of focus. A few people suggested that this came from the way courses are developed and managed at the OU – not by one person but by teams of different people who usually try to get at the very kernel of things (and generally, to not take existing literature as the given way into the subject). I think this is more than accurate. Another factor, of course, noted especially by those with a long history at the OU, was the university’s mission of social progress, and commitment to being accessible to a broad community of students (and, potentially, researchers too). This teaching style and mission really appeals to some; those that don’t connect to this peculiar situation have apparently tended to depart quite rapidly. To be fair, there’s also the issue of not having much contact with students, which I personally found difficult (even though my prior teaching was only during my PhD). But for those who can handle that, and who wish to make the most out of this unique environment, the OU is without doubt a truly incomparable place to work.