New Concept in Higher Education Triggers Polemical Fireworks in the U.K.

Eric Koch has returned from his travels. He wishes to express his warm thanks to his guest bloggers for their excellent work while he was away.

The facts first:

In implementing its austerity program for the universities, the government cut the humanities and the social sciences far more drastically than the rest of the curriculum. To fill this void, a group of prominent British academics, led by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, is starting the New College of the Humanities, a private, liberal arts university connected with the University of London. The faculty will include celebrities like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the historian Niall Ferguson, the scientist Steven Pinker, and other prominent educators, some of whom will commute from the United States. The cost for undergraduates will be £18,000 a year, double the maximum allowed under a government cap on public universities like Oxford and Cambridge. But scholarships and other financial aid will be available for one out of every five undergraduates.

“The provision of the humanities – history, philosophy, literature – is shrinking,” Grayling told the Associate Press. “It has an intrinsic value, but also the U.K. economy is a service economy and these graduates go into law, journalism, government. It’s a resource for this wide range of endeavors…. We’ve tried to learn from the American model how to mitigate the effects of the expensive costs by means of either full scholarship or charging some students only very low fees.”

The new college, to be located on Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, has started accepting admissions applications, with classes expected to begin in October 2012.

And now the polemics:

A blogger in The Guardian writes:

“This has been a purple week for red rage. The hirsute philosopher A.C. Grayling may call himself a ‘pinko’ but his embryo London humanities university in Bedford Square has induced apoplexy in the old left. He and 13 high-octane scholars are having their lectures “targeted.” The Guardian is in ideological meltdown. Foyles has been hit by a smoke bomb. The Kropotkin of our age, Professor Terry Eagleton from Lancaster University, who described Grayling’s plans as ‘odious,’ claims to be fit to vomit. Bloomsbury has not been so excited since semen was spotted on Vanessa Bell’s dress.”

To this, Grayling replies:

“Of course it is upsetting. I don’t like it at all. Having been, in some respects, for some constituencies, Mr. Nice Guy for some time, it is hard work and upsetting to be Mr. Bad Guy….

“[This issue] has become this sort of lightning conductor for the whole dissatisfaction that everybody feels about what’s happening in higher education…which is really bad, so they pick on something to have a real go at.”

Grayling said suggestions that his university would rival Oxbridge were overblown and untrue. “It has been blown out of all proportion because there has been a lot of press hyperbole about us claiming to be able to rival Oxford and Cambridge and so on. And this is just nonsense. We’re no competition to anybody. We are a very small experiment,” he said.

Grayling admitted he agreed with many of his critics’ points of view about private institutions operating in the education sector.

“Everybody is quite right about the thought of bringing private money into higher education. All the precedents are very poor. When you look in the past, the profit motive has always trumped the education ambition and has always made a mess of it. And so the precedents are terrible,” he said.

Grayling said he had not set up a charity because it would have taken too long and the need for his university college “was now.” However, he said his “small experiment” should be given a chance in the face of drastic government cuts.

“We’ve really got to keep the public universities. We’ve got to fight to get them back and funding back into them; they’ve got to survive. But why is it at the exclusion of any other experiments?”

The blogger continues:

“Britain’s professors, lecturers and student trade unionists appear to be united in arms against what they most hate and fear: academic celebrity, student fees, profit and loss, one-to-one tutorials and America. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities may be no more than an egotists’ lecture agency, better located at Heathrow Terminal 5, but the rage it has evoked is fascinating.

“What Grayling has done is caricature the British university. He has cartooned it as no longer an academic community but a high-end luxury consumable for the middle classes, operating roughly half a year, with dons coming and going at will, handing down wisdom in between television and book tours. Just when state universities have been freed by the coalition to triple their income per student (initially at public expense) to £9,000, Grayling has mischievously doubled that to £18,000.

“For Eagleton, ‘nausea wells to the throat’ at the thought of globe-trotting ‘prima donnas’ jumping from state universities into the trough of lucre. He derides Grayling’s creation as Oxbridge on Thames, ‘raking off money from the rich’ and thus relegating existing universities to a second division….

“What consenting adults do in Bloomsbury has never borne too much scrutiny. If Grayling, Dawkins, Pinker, Ferguson and the other freelancers think they can charge rich kids £18,000 a year to catch fleeting glimpses of their grey eminences in the academic transit lounge, good luck to them.”