Many of the problems facing the Open University in its early days are obviously peculiar to its unique structure and emerge out of its unlikeness to other universities. Teaching at a distance' involves all manner of difficulties which the 'conventional' academic can, no doubt thankfully, wash his hands of. He may pay some sort of lip-service to the potentialities of radio and television as teaching media: but he is unlikely to respond very intimately to what, both in time-consuming practice and academic importance, is the prior concern of those of us who work at the Open University: the production of correspondence material that is intellectually exacting and educationally viable. This, the average university teacher must feel, is altogether too far from his beat.