The New College of the Humanities should not be opposed because it is private or atheistic. There is nothing inherently wrong with a private institution willing to pay its own way, such as the University of Buckingham. And having noted atheists involved, such as A C Grayling or Richard Dawkins, is not by itself any discredit, even if being associated with this misguided project may discredit them as rational or progressive thinkers.
The New College of the Humanities should be opposed because it is simply a sham.
Careful attention reveals it to be just a branding exercise with purchased celebrity endorsements and a PR-driven website. The College has no degree-giving powers, nor any influence over any syllabus for any of the offered degrees. The degrees that its students will study for are normal University of London degrees, which external students can undertake at a fraction of the proposed £18,000. The College will seek access to University of London facilities, which it will presumably have to pay for at a commercial rate.
So what will the student get for their £18,000? It will hardly be “face time” with the celebrity “professoriate”. Almost all of them are attached to foreign universities and have numerous other responsibilities and appointments. Indeed, in respect of the two listed law academics, neither of them are authorities in any of the seven core subjects of a standard law degree. The students will, it seems, have a course on science literacy, though such students would probably be better off going to their local “Skeptics in the Pub” branch and paying a couple of quid each month.
The humanities really deserve better than this.
The New College of the Humanities is an affront to the sort of rational thinking and evidence based approach that is associated with the humanities at their best. The distinction between appearance and reality is a staple of academic philosophy, and so it is disappointing that the eminent academic philosophers associated with this project thought they could get away with what is, in my view, a highly misleading PR exercise.
If there is to be some brave new initiative to protect and cherish the teaching of the humanities in this country then it should not be a glorified crammer for rich students in Bloomsbury with a slick and misleading website.
Thankfully, the initiative is now coming apart under scrutiny. For example, contrary to the college’s Twitter account, it appears that it was not “founded by 14 of the world’s top academics” and nor will it “provide gifted students with an outstanding education”.
Indeed, each of these propositions seems to be false. The 14 named academics have not “founded” anything: they have just lent their names to someone else’s initiative; the students will not be in any meaningful way “gifted” but those who (irrationally) choose to pay at least double the fees they would pay elsewhere to study for the same degree with exactly the same syllabus, but with the glamour of an absentee “professoriate”; and there is nothing about the proposed education which really makes it “stand out” at all.
Yesterday, I described the New College of the Humanities as “Grayling’s Folly”. Already it would appear that Grayling’s Folly is falling down.
David Allen Green is legal correspondent of the New Statesman
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