Jennie Lee

One of the most impressive buildings on the campus of the Open University is the “Jennie Lee Building”. It is named after the Minister who played a key role in setting up the OU.

A page on the Open University’s website states –

“Jennie Lee (1904-1988) was a Labour MP and the wife of Aneurin Bevan She was instrumental in the foundation of the Open University during her time as Minister for the Arts, under the government of Harold Wilson, and subsequently bequeathed her personal papers to the Open University.”

Nye Bevan was the Minister who founded the National Health Service, and a major character in British politics during the 1940s and 1950s.

She had attended a traditional university (Edinburgh University – where “she graduated with an MA, a teacher’s diploma and a law (LLB) degree.”), She was passionate about extending educational opportunity. She “felt that adult education should be more than ‘dowdy and mouldy… old-fashioned night schools … hard benches’. Lee was mindful of the fact that Adult Education was, as the OU’s first Vice-Chancellor, Walter Perry, put it, to be ‘the patch on the backside of our educational trousers’. Her 1966 White Paper, A University of the Air made it clear that ‘There can be no question of offering to students a makeshift project inferior in quality to other universities. That would defeat its whole purpose’.”
[from article on Jennie Lee on the Open University Website]