This fine fellow is called Vaska, the Prussian cat, and he’s very much identified as the enemy of Russia.
He counts as a higher education postcard subject because he is part of a series of postcards published once by the Open University (OU) for one of their modules.
The OU works on a slightly different academic year, with courses starting in October or February or sometimes April. Which means that OU students might still not have finished their studies for this semester. So while lots of university students have stopped now for the summer, learning carries on at the OU.
And not only the OU. The University of Buckingham, famously, was founded to offer an accelerated degree, with students studying all through the year, completing their undergraduate degree in two years not three.
These accelerated degrees have been tried elsewhere with occasional niche success, but as a general rule they have not taken off.
Don’t forget as well that many universities offer students a chance to resit modules, or re-present coursework over the summer to enable them to start the next year in good standing.
While this is a great way to ensure that as many of a cohort as possible are able to complete their studies in the “normal” time, it does mean that the idea of the university as empty during the summer is some way off the mark.
Certainly Dr Piercemuller will struggle nowadays to spend his summer in Tuscany. And a legion of professional service staff continue to work through the summer – for example on clearing and admissions, assessments, conferences, statutory returns, estates and building works, finance for year end. There’s a lot going on.
All of which is a long way of acknowledging that for many in the sector the summer is not a quiet time: there’s vital work to be done to keep the cycle turning. And as one who loves the sector and works alongside it, I say thank you!
The image is a satirical print produced in Russia during the early stages of the first world war. It depicts the Prussian Kaiser – Wilhelm II – as a scruffy yard cat.
And it deliberately uses, as I understand it, a folksy portrayal to take the Kaiser down a peg or two. In the scheme of propaganda, I think it’s fairly tame. It was published as an example of revolutionary graphic art, to be used in conjunction with a radio broadcast. There were at least three other cards for the same programme.
In pre-internet days the OU was a university of the airwaves: lectures were TV and radio programmes broadcast at otherwise quiet times. One of the features of being off sick from school in the 1970s was that you might end up watching – for a very short time – an OU lecture.
Materials like the postcard here were visual aids that the lecturer used to help illustrate their talk. Increased digitisation and the internet have meant that such programmes are not now shown, but the pandemic meant that some universities re-learnt how to provide a lab in a box for home study.
Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard.
My higher education postcard blogs are on a summer break now, returning in September. Thank you for reading them! I hope you enjoy them. And as always if you have any requests please let me know – in the comments below or find me on the socials (as the kids say) and drop me a line.
