Hi all,

Terry Eagleton's contribution to 'the debate' on AC Grayling's heinous 
proposed New College of the Humanities is worth a read.

Cheers

Dave

AC Grayling's private university is odious

The money-grubbing dons signing up at the £18k a year New College of the 
Humanities are the thin edge of an ugly wedge


Terry Eagleton guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 June 2011 17.00 BST Article history

A group of well-known academics are setting up a private college in 
London which will charge students £18,000 a year in tuition fees. There 
will, as usual, be scholarships for the deserving poor. As a kind of 
Oxbridge by the Thames, the New College of the Humanities will offer 
students weekly one-on-one tutorials. For that kind of money, I would 
demand a team of live-in, round-the-clock tutors, ready to fill me in 
about Renaissance art or logical positivism at the snap of a finger. I 
would also expect them to iron my socks and polish my boots.

There will, however, be teaching from 14 "star" professors as well, 
including Linda Colley, Christopher Ricks, Richard Dawkins, Niall 
Ferguson and David Cannadine. Somehow it's hard to imagine these guys 
rolling in at 9am and teaching for 12 to 15 hours a week, which is what 
you do in the real Oxbridge. Prospective students should talk to these 
professors' travel agents and insist on obtaining photocopies of their 
diaries. Students can, however, be fairly relaxed about the prospect of 
being kicked out. It would be like JK Rowling being kicked out by her 
publishers.

The master of the college will be public sage and identikit Islington 
Man, AC Grayling. Many observers, he comments, will be surprised to see 
a group of "almost pinko" academics pitching in to the project. If 
Dawkins, Colley, Ricks and Ferguson are pinko, I'm a deep shade of 
indigo. Anyway, why should anyone be surprised at the prospect of 
academics signing on for a cushy job at 25% more than the average 
university salary, with shares in the enterprise to boot?

What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to 
the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit. British 
universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they 
educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship 
and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of 
medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink 
off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are 
taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from 
the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been 
fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.

If a system of US-type private liberal arts colleges like this one gains 
ground in Britain, the result will be to relegate an already 
impoverished state university system to second-class status. So far, 
British society has held the view that the education of doctors, 
teachers, social workers and so on is too momentous a matter to be left 
to the vagaries of the profit motive. This is why though there are 
already one or two private universities in the country, nobody has a 
clue where they are. This new college, however, could be the thin end of 
an ugly wedge. Why should Grayling, Dawkins and their chums care about 
that, though, when they will be drawing down mega-salaries for what is 
reported to be an extremely modest amount of lecturing?

In the US, getting yourself a decent education depends in part on the 
whims of the well-heeled. It is they who decide whether to obtain their 
tax breaks by donating a new theatre or lab to your college, or whether 
to find some more devious way of avoiding the inland revenue. This new 
venture in Bloomsbury is said to be backed by multimillion pound funding 
from private investors. While the Graylings and Colleys spout on in the 
classrooms about humane values, they are in the pay of those who would 
not recognise such things if they were to move into their living rooms.

This piece of the so-called private sector will actually be parasitic on 
the public one, rather like surgeons who use public facilities for 
private operations. The college's degrees will be awarded by the 
University of London, which ought to know better than to collude in an 
enterprise which could result in seeing its professors poached by those 
with the biggest bank balances. London Uni will share its libraries and 
other facilities too, thus ensuring that its own students are forced to 
share resources with those who have bought their way in.

Grayling and his colleagues, good liberals all except for the 
flag-waving Ferguson, are naturally committed to the ideal of following 
the argument wherever it leads. The only problem is that under these 
circumstances it leads straight to the bank. If education is to be 
treated as a commodity, then we should stop pussyfooting around. I 
already ask my students at the start of a session whether they can 
afford my £50 insights into Wuthering Heights, or whether they will 
settle for a few mediocre ideas at £10 a piece.

The new college, staffed as it is by such notable liberals, will of 
course be open to all viewpoints. Well, sort of. One takes it there will 
not be a theology department. It is reasonable to suppose that Tariq Ali 
will not be appointed professor of politics. The teaching of history, if 
the work of Dawkins and Grayling is anything to judge by, will be of a 
distinctly Whiggish kind. Grayling peddles a Just So version of English 
history, breathtaking in its crudity and complacency, in which freedom 
has been on the rise for centuries and has only recently run into 
trouble. Dawkins touts a simple-minded, off-the-peg version of 
Enlightenment in which people in the west have all been getting nicer 
and nicer, and would have ended up as civilised as an Oxford high table 
were it not for a nasty bunch of religious fundamentalists. Who would 
pay £18,000 a year to listen to this outdated Victorian rationalism when 
they could buy themselves a second-hand copy of John Stuart Mill?


To mention Mill in the same breath as Grayling, however, is to do a 
great liberal a grave disservice. Mill refused to allow his passion for 
freedom to blind him to gross inequality. By contrast Grayling is the 
kind of liberal who is prepared to let equality go hang. Freedom from 
state intervention for him means freedom to charge students sky high 
fees. If this catches on, the current crisis in universities will 
escalate into educational apartheid of the kind that we already have at 
secondary school level. There will be a number of private unis where 
students are assigned fags and expect to stroll into the Foreign Office 
with a third-class degree, and a lot of other places which cannot afford 
to paint the walls. Just when the real Oxford and Cambridge have been 
dragging themselves inch by inch into the modern democratic world, an 
ultra-Oxbridge is being proposed which will probably have an even lower 
intake of working class students than Cambridge did when I was there in 
the 1960s. Grayling's scheme is odious.