Examination of Witnesses (Questions 594-599)
12 JANUARY 2005
SIR BRIAN
FENDER AND
DR ADRIAN
LEPPER
Q594 Chairman: Sir Brian, can I welcome
you and Dr Adrian Lepper to our deliberations and thank you for
coming. You know what this inquiry is about. You have been sitting
at the back while Sun Microsystems gave their evidence. You are
an extremely distinguished academic and university administrator
and you have played so many roles in so many organisations that
the Committee is involved with. As they say, we have history.
I have always admired you, both as an academic but also because
of your reputation as a bit of a buccaneer and an entrepreneur.
I say that in the nicest way. You have a reputation of making
things happen, and one of the things that you seem to have made
happen from most people's point of view is that you were the inspiration
for the UK e-University. Is that true?
Sir Brian Fender: I think to some
extent it is, and it is a disappointment for me to be here because
of the demise of UK e-U, and I think a fair amount of responsibility
for that falls on my shoulders.
Q595 Chairman: Did you persuade the then
Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to go with this? In a minute I
am going to ask you if you want to make a more general statement,
but I just want to clear those two things up?
Sir Brian Fender: Yes, I will
do that. I came to the view, and discussed it, of course, with
my senior team in the Funding Council, that we needed at that
time (1999) to send out a strong message about the importance
of e-Learning to the higher education community, and we formulated
ways in which that might happen. The best way, in our view, was
to try to harness all the resources of UK universities and make
those available really to three groups of people, three markets,
if you like: the overseas market on the one hand (a very obvious
way of adding value, if a project was successful), I think I always
thought that in the end probably the most important market was
the corporate market (businesses more generally), and finally,
if you had successful operations, if you had successful programmes,
they were bound to filter back into the UK higher education experience
itself. In some ways the UK higher education market was the easiest,
because you had students there to support it and staff there to
support the programmes, but, of course, it was more difficult
if you made that the first goal in the context of trying to get
all universities to work together in one place because to some
extent it would then be a competition for existing universities.
It seemed very sensible to focus on this overseas market, this
very big market. There was a lot of interest at that time. You
have to take it in the context of 1999-2000 in which there probably
was too much hype. After all, telecommunications companies paid
£22 billion for 3G licences for which commonly now pay a
tenth of that. There was some feeling, I think, that digital technologies
would move more quickly than they have turned out to do, and I
can give you some reasons why that has turned out to be so, but
the concept of using the skills of all the universities focusing
in this way on an e-Learning delivery seemed a very attractive
way of sending out a message that British higher education was
up to speed in modernity as well as in its conditional deliveries.
There were some good reasons why the UK could be expected to lead.
First of all, we have this very successful collaboration of Joint
Academic Network (JANET) with the production of a high band-width
network and with it the associated development of middle ware,
the supporting technologies, and, in addition to that, a rather
high experience of collaboration. Universities did get together—there
were a number of good examples in the teaching area, the learning
support network, and so on—so there was a good prospect
that universities would be able to combine and make the most of
the opportunity. That is quite different a model from the Open
University. The Open University was a single university adapting,
of course, e-Learning into its programmes, because its programmes
essentially are print on paper, and, as a single university, I
think we had discussions with the Open University, we kept in
close touch with them all the time, and although the e-University
started with a small capital base and a big development programme
ahead of it, nonetheless I think they recognised the potential
power of having all universities engaged.
Q596 Chairman: Thank you for that. Can
I take you back to the question. Did you persuade the then Secretary
of State—
Sir Brian Fender: What we did
was put in a bid in the spending round, and we said this was important,
we thought it was an initiative. After all, there are several
initiatives that you put forward before any spending review, and
we said this was an important one. It was one of several, I might
say. We produced the arguments for it rather along the lines that
I have given you just now, and the process was dealt with by my
colleagues in the Funding Council and civil servants and, in the
end, the Department did decide to put it on its agenda and the
Secretary of State, as you well know, in February 2000 made a
statement saying that he personally thought this was a project
worth support.
Q597 Chairman: Sir Brian, you are a brilliant
net-worker. Do answer the question though. Did you talk to David
about it?
Sir Brian Fender: Not directly,
no.
Q598 Chairman: Never directly?
Sir Brian Fender: No.
Q599 Chairman: Or to the Chancellor of
the Exchequer?
Sir Brian Fender: No.
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