May as well have a thread about the A. C. Grayling New College of the Humanities thing

most colleges charge £9k; these fuckers charge £18k. academics are super upset [via whatever the freudian term is here]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8562531/AC-Grayling-forced-to-flee-smoke-bomb-protest-at-Foyles-debate-on-private-university.html

morons get irate, news at 11

well yeah, but a lot of non-smoke-bomb-throwers are also very angry

the state system -- which i've worked in -- isn't any utopia, and the imposition of £9k fees is absurd and should lead to a complete change in higher education. it won't, but the idea of coming out of college with debts on that scale is crazy to me. at the very least i'd have thought it would lead to more people studying in their home town (i.e. while living with their parents) but who knows.

this is a whole other thing, really, kind of an interesting experiment, probably appealing most to international students -- and all universities are getting as many internationals as they can right now. it won't be a real university in that there won't be any research going on, but it's part of the university of london too, kinda. don't know how that will pan out.

Is this basically Scam College - For Poshos?

That's what Boris said: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/8558621/At-last-an-Oxbridge-for-those-who-cant-get-into-Oxbridge.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/06/ac-graylings-new-private-univerity-is-odious

(terry eagleton)

'the imposition of 9k fees' is coming with a vast expansion of funds made available to prospective undergrads, right - ? whereas the only loans available for this will be at a private rate, presumably. (yes, scholarship places. eh.) ("How on earth are people going to afford it? He has a ready answer, in that he and his colleagues want to see 30 per cent of undergraduates receive some help with their fees, and a large proportion will have full scholarships, funded either charitably or from the fees of those who can afford to pay." -- one hundred percent of people going to actual oxbridge / any university get 'some help of their fees', thanks)

i'm not sure i understand by what authority they'll be able to issue degrees

eagleton and boris are both playing to type huh

protest outside st. antony's college this friday, apparently (via facebook)

okay, so i don't get this, at all. i assume that there's some sort of national accrediting body in the UK that validates/authorized degrees issued by this or that college under the auspices of this or that university. and if this new rich kid's school is properly accredited, that takes care of that.

so what's the objection to its being fabulously expensive? you probably have homes, cars and meals that one can pay vast sums for, right? and since this is a new school with no established reputation, who cares that it will only be accessible to the very wealthy? as an american observing from a distance, the furore baffles me...

uh, authorizes...

come back when your public sector isn't a hundred years out of date and we'll talk

also, americans are all obese and stupid and here are some funny jokes about it in a comedy representation of 'an' 'american' 'accent'

teehee

this is probably about the 46th most egregious thing happening to the british university system atm

TWO BRAINS will be thankful for the distraction

i get the vast differences in culture and economy, am by no means a defender of the invisible hand's benevolence, but remain sincerely curious about the nature of the objection here.

buckingham have been doing this for years, but you know, lol at the academics working there

http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/admissions/fees/undergraduate/home

not trolling, just looking for a beginner's manual...

i think the pragmatic concern is inflationary pressure on point-of-delivery fees for higher education

http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/themes/bucks/images/school-backgrounds/swans.jpg

also the idea with the current system (or at least the system 15 years ago) is that the best universities should be available to the best students, regardless of ability to pay because, you know, it's the right thing to do (also good for the economy)

i'm not sure i understand by what authority they'll be able to issue degrees

same way as buckingham

Do Boris's disappointed multiple-A students who couldn't get into Oxbridge also get turned away from Warwick, Durham, the London universities, or wherever else gives offers in the Oxbridgish AAB/ABB range?

If they actually can get into somewhere first-rate but are still bemoaning their terrible rejection because they only ever wanted to be at Oxbridge, why would they want to go to some crank's moneyspinner college to be taught by, err, nobody actually knows, but Richard Dawkins has promised to teach a couple of hours per term, that's really good, right?

Oxbridge by the Thames

Err...

it looks like their degrees will be awarded via u. of london, who are a recognised body to do so. okay, that took me all of twenty seconds to actually look up

anyway: this is still a country where people find the idea that people should have to pay for undergraduate education at all to be a bad thing. our best universities are publicly funded (admittedly they're also incredibly rich) and still compete with harvard, MIT, etc. oxford and cambridge are messed up and imperfect in terms of class and money and access but it's still the case that fees are capped at £9k and the government will pay that for you.

or also the idea with the current system (or at least the system 15 years ago) is that the best universities should be available to the best students, regardless of ability to pay because, you know, it's the right thing to do (also good for the economy), yes, xposts etc

a lot of the anger at these chancers comes from the fact that they're capitalising in our impending crisis in education funding, that they're trying to represent themselves as in it for something other than the money.

they're also playing to the tedious resentment of the upper classes, the kind of people that johnson article sympathises-with-whilst-looking-down-on, the 'oh my kid had a perfect record and was captain of his rugger team and was passed over for someone from hull' type; this is also nagl

tbf in terms of international rep. oxbridge is more than one or two places above the other russell group universities; there's also a lot of social and networking guff involved with 'going to oxbridge' that isn't the case with going to warwick or york or wherever

also the idea with the current system (or at least the system 15 years ago) is that the best universities should be available to the best students, regardless of ability to pay because, you know, it's the right thing to do (also good for the economy)

― caek, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 11:38 (18 seconds ago) Bookmark

luckily this won't be one of the best universities.

buckingham's different, it has its own charter, awards its own degrees, does research. this is just offering university of london external degrees for an inflated price with a once-a-term celebrity lecture.

buckingham is a shitty university, but its major selling point is that its fees are now *less* than the russell group (and their BA takes 2 years because they don't take summer holidays, so they are quite a lot less)

didn't know about the U of London connection. how is that going over with UCL/Imperial/Kings?

ahaha not well

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/06/ac-grayling-private-university-syllabus

( Grayling has said that New College students would receive University of London degrees, but the university has since made clear there is "no formal agreement between the University of London and the NCH concerning academic matters".)

additionally:

A new private university college founded by the philosopher AC Grayling and staffed by celebrity professors will teach exactly the same syllabuses as the University of London, which charges half the price, it has emerged.

Students of the New College of the Humanities will pay £18,000 a year to take courses in history, English literature and philosophy that are already on offer at Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and Royal Holloway for £9,000 or less.

Academics complained that syllabuses listed on the New College website appeared to have been copied from the University of London's own web pages in a move some said amounted to plagiarism. Grayling claimed it would help save humanities education from cuts by bringing together teachers including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Stephen Pinker.

"Every university is worried about students plagiarising essays," said Justin Champion, a senior historian at Royal Holloway college, who spotted that the titles of modules he wrote were reproduced on the New College website.

"Here we have a whole degree programme being plagiarised. I feel quite insulted because I wrote a lot of the syllabus. If the University of London didn't exist and public money hadn't been used to draw up these syllabuses, they wouldn't have been able to do this, or they would have had to invest a lot of money."

they've also been nicking course materials from goldsmiths, 20 years late:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=416422

gotcha. whereas here in the US, we've accepted the regressive idea that most of the best colleges & universities (the private & independent ones anyway) should be priced well out of reach of the common man. they're usually extremely well endowed (rimshot), which ostensibly allows them to assist qualified applicants who can't afford the ride, but when push comes to shove, wealth has its way. sounds like you've got a more egalitarian system that this new pricing scheme threatens to disrupt...

unsurprisingly, the same thing is going on over here with relatively inexpensive state-sponsored public universities. tuition caps are being lifted to make up for dwindling state funding in an era of relative austerity, and sweetheart programs that favored local students with significant tuition breaks are being phased out. because we're accustomed to these sorts of economic abuses, in fact expect them as expressions of nature's moral will, there's been little protest. :(

we don't really have private universities. buckingham was the first and only for a long time. the issue is that our nominally state-sponsored ones are now charging £9,000 a year.

xp, there is little culture of endowment in the UK, so any privately funded university would have to charge fees that are (a) large (b) rarely waived.

didn't realise that specious cunt Ferguson was on board. woo woo.

sounds like you've got a more egalitarian system

Who'd've thought it?

tbf in terms of international rep. oxbridge is more than one or two places above the other russell group universities; there's also a lot of social and networking guff involved with 'going to oxbridge' that isn't the case with going to warwick or york or wherever

Re networking, I suppose so, but I get the impression that said networking is largely available only to those who are already well-connected enough to have feet in doors regardless; international rep I grant you though, but that's not something Grayling's place is going to get immediately, even with a few big names signed up for a termly 101 class

(I realise I'm wasting my time in pretending that Boris's article was actually a serious declaration that a gap had been filled, rather than a serious of "what have these lefties done to our brilliant rich children" bonnet-bees attached in Boris's usual flippant who-cares manner to a convenient news story)

err series

this is why I don't have a degree! and took up a university place that could have been filled by a starving Etonian only to drop out! etc

Loving the fact that al these liberals/ Liberals are showing their true colours these days, so we never have to get fooled by the cunts ever again. I'm assuming Grayling is a Liberal, I know Dawkins is.

sorry for disrupting the thread w entry-level questions, but thanks to all who took the time to respond. as an american, accustomed to the dictates of the wheel, i'm often surprised by the lack of political apathy displayed by citizens of other lands.

lol free universal education

Make em fight for it imo kids these days get it all handed to em etc

don't worry, we have plenty of political apathy of our own

(if current social institutions are dismantled or made inaccessible, the UK now seems like it may never again have a government with the mandate, inclination and economy to build new ones - so this outrage at the current cuts and anti-public-service ideology may be a futile last shout. but maybe my pessimism is both misplaced and unusual)

yeah, i think the "you can't go home again" fear is well-placed

I don't really understand the fuss about this, surely it'll just be a fairly unremarkable university filled with braying Sloanes who can't get into Exeter or Bristol let alone Oxbridge and are stupid enough/have parents stupid enough to pay £18k a year to be educated by middle-ranking academics and have Richard Dawkins turn up once a year.

It'll be interesting to see who takes up the offer of paying eighteen grand a year for a degree that'll tell future employers that they weren't accepted into Oxford / Cambridge / LSE / UCL but weren't prepared to 'slum it' at a redbrick.

This might make some sort of sense if they were offering quantifiably superb education in a hard science (not that they ever could). It's ridiculous for humanities.

I mean, they are actually privatising arts degrees by stealth at the moment which is of far greater concern as far as I can see.

you dont think shiny new graduates from this place will walk into boardrooms?

have they talked about their admissions criteria?

i was expecting it to be mostly international students, like LSE gadaffi's slightly dim younger brother, whose parents refuse to send them to columbia/ucla to do film.

like somewhere for an oil sheikh who draws the line at an MFA to send a kid who doesn't want to think about international development

or guardian columns or publishing their witterings out of bloomsbury or whatever wellheeled arts grads currently do anyway?

This seems to be just a handy way to keep them seperated from the oiks for that troublesome 17-21 bracket

ohhhhhh

terrible hair, too

i've been informed he is Wrong About Linguistics but couldn't comment

i always get him confused with stephen jay gould who actually seems like a good dude

me too

terrible hair, too

AC's is worse

SJG would have been a lot more fun to hang out with, thats for sure. better writer, too.

but he claimed to be a yankees fan and a red sox fan at the same time, which is just...

"yankees and red sox are Non-overlapping magisteria"

i hope one of the entrance criteria for this place is that you self-identify as a "bright"

so if you go to this university are you automatically a Bright oh COME ON I JUST READ THE WHOLE THREAD XP

lol

God, I'm glad I didn't meet too many people at university who thought it was all about networking.

ts, 'networking' vs 'making friends while attending college', i suppose

Feel staff recruitment might not be such a problem for them - there must be hundreds of humanities PhDs graduating each year into a brutal job market, some of whom will be happy to take a teaching job to tide them over until they land that British Academy Fellowship.

As for students, their market has to be "rich people who want to study in London". If it succeeds, NCHum is going to be less an educational institution than a luxury brand.

yep, its a finishing school basically.

The real concern for state universities will be whether companies like the one i work for want to muscle in on the game - offering standardised, high-quality, brand-name education in London / Shanghai / Mumbai / wherever, undercutting fees and hoovering up staff with no requirement to provide unprofitable / niche courses.

Max's box, the ReTARDIS, has plenty of room for all these libertarian/conservative types who think this place is a good idea. FWIW, there are a few private universities in London (from the Architectural Association/Royal College of Art to that shitty US-accredited college in Marylebone) but they don't really have much of an impact on the larger system.

I explain it to Americans thusly: for a few generations, British people have been able to earn funded places at university - regardless of parental circumstances - so long as they earned high grades. The same high taxes underwriting the NHS also underwrite the university system, and for years the people got a lot for their money. They were encouraged to look at their achievement as earned, even if they were old Etonians with wealthy parents able to smooth all the rockiness out of getting to that point. Because fees were paid and you got a maintenance grant, there was some weight to the idea that being a student was your job for three years, a job you'd earned. It also leveled the playing field as much as possible and freed rich and poor parents alike from many of the now-mandatory obligations for parents to subsidize their kids. I find it bizarre that students in Britain seem no longer to think that they earn their places and parents who earned free educations think it's OK that their kids don't have the same opportunities as they did.

The best advice I can give someone who just misses getting into Oxbridge is to work hard on your BA, get a first or a 2.1, and do your MA at Oxford or Cambridge. That gets you the network with only one year's effort. I will totally cop to choosing the university with the best networking potential later - I was accepted at all the schools I applied to so the final choice depended on a) amount of financial aid offered and b) opportunities afterward - and because my college has a tangental relationship to Oxford I've never, in this country, felt excluded by people educated there.

BTW, it is not exceptional that Euan Blair got a partial scholarship to do an MA at Yale (or any other US school). People with worse degrees get scholarship wonga from many top US schools all the time.

for a few generations, British people have been able to earn funded places at university - regardless of parental circumstances - so long as they earned high grades. The same high taxes underwriting the NHS also underwrite the university system, and for years the people got a lot for their money. They were encouraged to look at their achievement as earned, even if they were old Etonians with wealthy parents able to smooth all the rockiness out of getting to that point. Because fees were paid and you got a maintenance grant, there was some weight to the idea that being a student was your job for three years, a job you'd earned. It also leveled the playing field as much as possible and freed rich and poor parents alike from many of the now-mandatory obligations for parents to subsidize their kids. I find it bizarre that students in Britain seem no longer to think that they earn their places and parents who earned free educations think it's OK that their kids don't have the same opportunities as they did.

well hang on. this bit would be valid until about 20 years ago. it's a lot different now. until about 20 years ago a small number of people got those funded university places, and other people, if they stayed at school went to polytechnics, which were not universities. there wasn't a level playing field: same as now, if you went to a private school or 'the better sort of state school', which is not unrelated to your parents' social class, which is a factor anyway [via cultural capital, via other stuff too], then you had a better chance of getting good grades and going to university.

n e ways, then the polytechnics got turned into universities, it wasn't possible to fund the increased number of university students as before, so in came the system of paying fees, i.e. going into debt aged 18 to go to university. there are way more university students now than twenty years. you might think the polytechnic system wasn't 'that bad' except that there was a degree (wordplay} of snobbery towards it, which changing their names hasn't actually altered that much. the last government wanted 50% of everyone to go to university, which is a lot. you don't need high grades to go.

the tories probably want fewer people to go to university, but don't say so.

I was accepted at all the schools I applied to so the final choice depended on a) amount of financial aid offered and b) opportunities afterward - and because my college has a tangental relationship to Oxford I've never, in this country, felt excluded by people educated there.

I may be v naive, but the thought of choosing a uni for "opportunities" never crossed my mind. I chose mine based on the city it was on, pretty much, and on the fact that it asked for better grades than the other offers I got. I was lucky enough to start in 1996, though, which meant I was one of the last years' intake not to have to pay fees.

HM, points taken but you're suggesting (inadvertently, I think) that poly students didn't get fees or grants paid. I still think whenever rich people emote about there being no money for whatever, that they are probably lying or don't want to spend it on people who aren't just like them.

My family's finances were pretty much set to 'skint' and I wanted to get the fuck out of Dodge. These things tend to sharpen the mind, as does growing up somewhere fairly egalitarian where you nevertheless discover how the world works versus how you'd like it to work. My dilemma was whether to do trad journalism at Northwestern (best course in the US for undergrads) or go to an art college with excellent fiction and expository writing courses. The college was near NYC, which I saw as the ultimate opportunity, so it won. It wasn't until I arrived there that I saw how starry it was or how the alumni were very good at looking after each other.

i couldn't find the example of grayling being an asshole that i wanted to, but i did find this at the new humanist, which is headlined 'AC Grayling politely rebukes an attempt to reconcile religion and science'. the word 'politely' is being used in some newfangled sense that i don't actually understand, in that headline, i think.

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2009/03/ac-grayling-politely-rebukes-attempt-to.html

― thomp, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 13:37 (6 hours ago)

lol i remember that
http://blog.voyou.org/2006/11/25/curse-you-richard-dawkins/

http://versouk.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/cimg2348.jpg

o shi huge image. massive apologies to anyone whose browser didn't downsize it.

Grayling seems to me to epitomise a certain kind of academic/intellectual who is like a super-high functioning version of Steve Carell's character from Anchorman. They've somehow immersed themselves enough in the patterns and movements of a tiny culture to be pretty significantly successful in it, but whenever they overstep those narrow boundaries they're revealed to have an IQ of 58.

pfft, who knows. it's evidently open season on the guy; but it's 'richly amusing' to me that this whole thing has opened up another front in the war between the neo-god-bothering 'left' and #team_atheism.

Grayling doesn't seem so much like Brick as like those Doctor Hilary or Raj Persaud dudes who turn up on morning TV all the time i.e. maybe he is qualified to be a populariser but i'm not sure he's done any work ever that isn't just tabloid hackwork

also what's the god vs atheism angle? i missed that in the articles, except obv Dorkins' involvement. jesus our public "intellectuals" are lame, at least the French guys have the decency to take themselves difficult to understand

you guys had raymond williams

and dont forget jeremy clarkson

was william empson a public intellectual? he was the man

even I'm not old enough to remember if Williams or Empson had media profiles. our media was pretty different back then so it's quite possible. don't really think Grayling or Dorks are fit to be mentioned in the same breath.

also lol max

clarkson should start a university

University of Real Life, son

williams was fairly well known, empson not really. more of a specialist, not involved in any public causes. but not completely obscure.

also what's the god vs atheism angle?

oh eagleton (who made his name shitting on williams as it goes) is the most prominent hater so far.

yeah i picked that up in the Crazy Terry thread after i asked the question in here. also lol Marx not being total Whig History

also what's the god vs atheism angle? i missed that in the articles, except obv Dorkins' involvement.

grayling has been doing press lately for his new 'atheist's bible' (or whatever it's called) which compiles wisdom literature and i guess bits of philosophical reflection in a manner deliberately meant to mimic the bible, without being theistic (or supernatural, or something like that).

not like Grayling to publish a cut and paste job

Really Grayling should have got Toby Young on board, just before we shoot the lot of them into the sun.

Grayling seems to me to be similar to Alain de Botton, in the sense that his "philosophy" is along the lines of Rabbi Lionel Blair "that's like life" homilies, IMO.

Trying not to be drawn into this too much, but yeah, one thing that really strikes me is that I don't actually consider these people to be good draws as academics at all - they're mass-market paperback pulp pop humanities people. You'd get a much better class at a normal bloody university.

How about making attendance at NCH compulsory for anyone who goes to Young's "free school"?

Toby Young didn't come to any harm in Camden's state schools. Tosser.

i see that as an argument against Camden's state schools.

I don't actually consider these people to be good draws as academics at all - they're mass-market paperback pulp pop humanities people.

kinda groaning here. not even a big fan of colley or cannadine, but they're not what you just said.

yeah i think saying this guys don't have chops in a strictly academic sense is trying a bit hard

fucking philosophy anyway, what's the point of it?

Young draws on his own experience and offers Grayling the following advice: “Don’t give an inch. No compromise, no surrender.”

I'm sure he could fit in an hour a year to teach English Lit.

When it comes to "public intellectuals", Freddie Ayer stomps A.C. Grayling into a thousand million billon zillion particles

The real concern for state universities will be whether companies like the one i work for want to muscle in on the game - offering standardised, high-quality, brand-name education in London / Shanghai / Mumbai / wherever, undercutting fees and hoovering up staff with no requirement to provide unprofitable / niche courses.

― модный хипстер (ShariVari), Wednesday, 8 June 2011 15:56 (4 weeks ago) Bookmark

Four weeks ahead of the game!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14011448

This is just the start. Much more significant a story than Grayling's finishing school.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/18/ac-graylings-university-open-60-students

lol

yuk yuk yuk