Grayling fade

I stuck a paragraph about AC Grayling's little vanity project, the New College for the Humanities (NCH) on the end of an earlier post. As the story has generated so much heat over the past week, it seems to merit a posting of its own. Grayling, his academic backers and his rather limited band of supporters haven't had a good week, but some of the criticism he has received seems a bit over the top too.

Let's start with some of the critics. First up, the leftist academic Terry Eagleton, who was quick to go all Marxist on Grayling's ass, through the pages of (where else?) The Guardian. Here's a brief sample:

...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.... 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.

And there's a lot more -- a whole lot more -- where that came from. Grayling was moved to point out, very politely in the circumstances, that Eagleton, normally resident at the University of Lancaster, has a wildly lucrative annual gig at the hugely expensive, private Notre Dame University in the USA. It's hard not to join Grayling in seeing just a whiff of hypocrisy here.

There was a different whiff in the air at an event last Tuesday at Foyle's bookshop in London, where Grayling was fulfilling a previously-arranged speaking engagement. The proceedings were interrupted by students throwing smokebombs to protest against the NCH proposal. These protesters see NCH as the thin end of a wedge that will eventually spell the end of "free" higher education. This is a meaning of the word "free" that you may not find in your dictionary. It means "paid for by taxpayers, most of whom will never make as much money as university graduates do".

Grayling's response to this is that he too favours free higher education, and setting up the UK's most expensive college is his way of moving the debate in that direction. Perhaps you need to be an Oxford educated philosopher to figure out how that works. But at least Grayling knows how he'd pay for the "free" education: he'd raise the top income tax rate (which, for the information of readers outside the UK, is already 50%). No word on how the private equity types who are putting £10 million into NCH feel about that, but then again, they're apparently from Switzerland, so why should they care?

So much for the opponents. What about Grayling and his pals? Something that has become apparent over the course of the week is that Grayling has wildly oversold the project. It isn't really a university at all; it will be offering a syllabus identical to that available to non-resident students at the University of London, a point which was only acknowledged when Royal Holloway College complained that its prospectuses were being reproduced wholesale on the NCH website. NCH really looks more like a higher education version of those A-level cram colleges that you often find located above shops in the more rundown parts of town.

Attempts by Grayling and others to compare NCH to Ivy League schools in the US are preposterous. Harvard, Princeton and the rest are academic and research powerhouses with a track record stretching back over generations. That may be Grayling's eventual goal, but NCH will have no research capability and (as the name suggests) no science teaching of any kind. It will be a small limpet attached to the vast body of the University of London, many of whose existing institutions (notably Imperial College) are already eminent in a global academic context, and may well resent the slurs to the contrary that are implicit in NCH's foundation.

NCH may not even have the academic firepower that Grayling is trying to claim. One of the supposed leading lights, Richard Dawkins, was quick to sense which way the wind was blowing, and made it clear that NCH was Grayling's baby; he had simply agreed to do a modest spot of teaching. Some of the other luminaries who are notionally on board are scarcely even committing to that much. The historian David Cannadine, prominently listed in the early publicity, has apparently agreed to teach for one hour....per year! The Oxbridge-style one-on-one teaching that NCH promises will be carried out almost exclusively by regular academics, rather than the distinguished types that Grayling is attempting to festoon the thing with. Nothing against regular academics, of course, but here's Terry Eagleton again:

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.

While The Guardian has taken the lead in the anti-NCH campaign, the Murdoch media have cast themselves as cheerleaders. The day after the story broke, The Times gave part of its op-ed page to a paean to NCH by the Headmistress of St Paul's School. The paper only revealed the next day, and then only by publishing a letter to the editor from a diligent reader, that this lady is a member of NCH's fledgling advisory board.

Not to be outdone, The Sunday Times published a truly dire story on Grayling by Camilla Long, who paid considerably more attention to his admittedly spectacular hair than to the story at hand. Alas, the story is behind the Murdoch paywall, but I can't resist bringing you the opening few words:

Someone once introduced me to AC Grayling as “the most boring man in the universe”,

Wow, Camilla, I always thought you were boring, but I really had no idea you were a bloke.

Anyway, probably the main thing you need to know about NCH is that the original plan was to call it Grayling Hall. As it's probably brought Grayling more publicity than he's ever known, he may well feel that all the opprobrium is worth it, even if NCH never actually gets off the ground.

If you still have an appetite for more about NCH, there is an excellent piece on the OpenDemocracy website by Anthony Barnett, who had the opportunity to discuss NCH with Grayling (but still thinks it's a lousy idea).

And finally, let me just refer you back to the title of this post. You did pick up on the fact that it's a Spoonerism, I hope.