What higher education bubble? New Humanist interviews AC Grayling

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2859/saving-our-universities-new-humanist-interviews-ac-grayling

Saving our universities? New Humanist interviews AC Grayling

As AC Grayling’s New College of the Humanities enrols its first intake, Caspar Melvilleasks our most prominent humanist what prompted his most controversial venture

“I believe that a mature civilised society ought to be funding universities properly through tax. Students should go to university for nothing because it’s an investment that society’s making in itself.” The words belong to Professor Anthony Grayling, Master of New College of the Humanities (NCH). This unashamedly elite private university – student fees £18,000 a year – is housed in an 18th-century mansion in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, where its first students will be unpacking their suitcases and sticking up their Radiohead posters right about now.

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By setting up a college for the super-rich, Grayling has been accused of betraying public education: of opportunism, parasitism and elitism. Terry Eagleton in theGuardian called the project “odious”. At a speaking engagement last summer angry activists heckled him and let off a smoke bomb. Then there was the reaction of his former colleagues at Birkbeck College – founded to provide high-quality education to working people – from which Grayling resigned last year. In a letter published in the Guardian on 14 June last year, 33 members of Birkbeck’s faculty accused Grayling of losing faith with Birkbeck and public universities in general, and of colluding with, if not leading, the coalition government’s assault on the very principle of publicly funded education. The letter said Grayling was part of an attempt to “asset-strip”, “marketise” learning and offer education that is, in terms of aims, “profit-driven” and, in terms of quality, “cut-price”. During the febrile height of the row last summer, the NCH was even accused of “syllabus plagiarism”, for offering courses which had been written specially for the University of London. Historian Amanda Vickery, who spotted one of her own courses on the NCH website, accused the new college of “ripping off” the University of London.

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So is NCH a product of Anthony Grayling’s altruism – so palpable in his many acts of generosity and decency? Or another example of the over-developed ego of the man who rewrote God’s word? To launch such a venture requires great resources of self-belief – and risks hubris. But you also need huge reservoirs of sincerity and self-confidence to believe that you are saving the humanities in this country, if not the entire university system.