A.C. Grayling's New College of the Humanities - Will the celeb professors be there? Oliver Wiseman argues they won't
Published: 09 June 2011
WHEN the doors of the New College of the Humanities open in October 2012, it is far from clear what the 350 or so students constituting its first batch will be getting in exchange for the hefty £18,000 per year fees.
For most, it will have been the allure of the celebrity professors that has drawn them to the plush Bloomsbury townhouses that will house New College. In anticipation of their time there, students will no doubt have dreamed of being part of the kind of intellectual discourse not seen since Aristotle’s Lyceum: lengthy and logically rigorous debate with the keenest minds around.
This vision – today’s best training tomorrow’s brightest – is clearly what the New College of the Humanities brand seeks to convey. Unfortunately for prospective students, this dream looks to be at odds with the realities of what the university will offer.
They seem more likely to encounter a revolving door of preoccupied celebrities, hackneyed syllabuses and tuition from journeymen teachers roped in to do the heavy lifting that degree-level education requires.
New College seems to pride itself on one-to-one tuition, something AC Grayling laments the decline of at Oxford and Cambridge. But if students think this means Niall Ferguson finding time between his CNN appearances and book tours for a quiet chat about the economic necessity of empire, they’ve been sold a myth.
Beyond fleeting appearances behind a lectern, Grayling’s superstars won’t be getting their hands dirty with teaching. Instead, far less interesting and far more anonymous characters will be left with the one-on-one tuition. The content of courses will be as unremarkable as those that teach them. Take, for instance, New College’s philosophy syllabus, the blurb for which takes the exact wording of the University of London’s equivalent offering.
Grayling, who for a long time has advocated free higher education, says he is founding the New College of the Humanities in part because he is resigned to the marketisation of education. The problem for Grayling is what gap in this market his intellectual finishing school will fill.
OLIVER WISEMAN
• Oliver Wiseman (pictured) is a former managing editor of The Beaver, the student newspaper of the London School of Economics