New College of the Humanities: the sale of privilege
Posted on Monday 6 June, 2011
Filed Under Education
MOST reviewers considered ‘The Expendables’ to be a pretty mediocre film, as action flicks go. But there was no arguing with the box office pulling power of a cast that included Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke.
I detect something of the same thinking at work when I read the names of the academic rock stars lined up to teach at the New College of the Humanities, which opens up in London next year. Students will benefit from one to one tutorials from the likes of AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson.
Short of raising Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell back from the dead, it is hard to imagine how the founders could have assembled a more bunch of profs more attractive to a target demographic of extremely bright rich kids.
Much is being made of the fact that the private sector and for-profit institution will be charging £18,000 a year to successful applicants. But by some standards, that’s tuition on the cheap.
Master’s degrees in economics and financial disciplines at top universities such as the London School of Economics run at anywhere up to £25,488 per annum, for instance. No doubt it will be the same story at Oxford or Cambridge.
Less than a month ago, education secretary David Willetts made the tentative suggestion that top universities should be able to auction off places at up to £28,000 a year for those not reliant on taxpayer support. In the event, he was slapped down soon enough once his thoughts became public.
Then of course there is the cost of tuition in private schools, from which the elite higher educational establishments draw a hugely disproportionate number of their intake.
As a recent article by an Old Etonian, ex-Oxbridge, Trotskyist barrister notes, Eton was charging fees of £29,862 per year in 2009-10. Throw in registration and entrance fees, uniforms, furniture, books and the like, and the cost per pupil is probably as much again, he claims from his firsthand experience.
Never mind, at least it is tax deductible. Eton, like Britain’s numerous other private schools, has the legal status of a charity. That’s right, they are there for the ‘public benefit’, as the Charity Commission would have it.
So it would be silly mistake to argue that NCH will somehow sully an otherwise egalitarian educational landscape in this country. What it will do is to make an already grossly unequal situation incrementally worse, and no doubt pave the way for further such schemes that will serve to widen that inequality yet again. For the left, that should matter.
What are those who purchase such educations actually buying? Educational excellence, of course. Low tutor to student ratios. The best possible facilities for both study and recreation. All that, and no doubt more.
But more importantly, they are effectively buying entry into – and even a head start in – the most prestigious and lucrative careers. They are making an investment that almost guarantees personal success, and is thus repaid with interest.
There’s room at the top, they are telling you still. But politics, the City, the media and the law are are becoming more then ever the exclusive preserve of the narrow social layer that has prospered without interruption since the Thatcher years.
This is another facet of the perpetuation of social exclusion, nowhere near as pernicious as that which applies further down the scale, but is insidious nevertheless.
No doubt supporters will point to scholarships by way of a plea of mitigation. Just as Eton has always offered a handful of places to poor boys, so NCH will take a quota of undergrads at reduced rates, and some for free.
That gesture does not alter the fundamental underlying argument here. Regard it rather as an overhead cost to enhance the political acceptability of the institution, and maybe even to assuage the conscience of some liberals. Whichever way you slice it, Grayling and his colleagues will do very nicely, thank you.
The idea that British society could, or even ought to, work towards equality of outcome was jettisoned decades ago and now has something of the antediluvian air of social democracy about it. The pretence of equality of opportunity looks like going the same way.
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39 Responses to “New College of the Humanities: the sale of privilege”
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There seem to be a lot of reasons to think this isn’t really a runner.There’s an open letter over at Liberal Conspiracy to Dawkins, though I’m more surprised to find Steve Jones attached to this.
Incidentally, are there any modern academic (or otherwise) defences of privilege per se?
Genuine question, I’m seriously interested.
tbh, the line up are academically second rate by World class standards. Celeb academics they may be, respected by peers they certainly ain’t. If I had the dosh to send my kids to a top uni I would choose the LSE over this trumped up Spectator uni.
Worth noting that the degrees are undergrad. not postgrad.
Some are world class in their disciplines, such as Grayling. Others are washed-up.
Personally I have no problems with private colleges – there are any number of them offering Uni validated degrees – as long as the quality is there.
Here, the compulsory syllabus seems tainted by bees in bonnets.
But they may well sell some to Yanks, in competition with the Euro setups of US Liberal-Arts colleges, as a cheap option
.
Tuition fees are not tax deductible. The charitable status of Eton and the other bastions is of no consequence when fees come in to it. Nothing from which one derives an advantage or service can be counted as a deductible donation from one’s taxes.
The 14 named celebs are apparently going to be doing 100 hours of teaching between them, i.e. 5-10 hours each – good luck getting face-time with Dawkins or Dworkin out of that.
None of it adds up financially, but sadly it’s probably got enough pulling-power to work for a while. I think it’ll go bust within five years, and Grayling and a few others will walk away rich men.
There already is a financially successful private University of Buckingham which actually can sell itself as a VFM alternative as they squeeze the degrees into two full years with minimal holidays and focus completely on teaching undergraduates rather than pretending to be a research institution for whose staff teaching is an unwelcome distraction.
Taking into account the lost earning potential of that third year, Buckingham may actually work out financially sounder in the long term if you just happen to have the money to pay the fees upfront and are motivated enough to not care that you are working almost as hard in your two year course as you might if you were in a real job – which is why we should be looking hard at that business model for the ex-polys who really have no business at all pretending that their staff need to spend nearly half the year on ‘research’.
This new entity aims at a very different demographic – rich kids who just aren’t bright enough to qualify for Oxbridge or the top Russell Group unis but whose parents can’t bear the thought of them going to somewhere that you didn’t even know was a university.
But clearly that demographic does exist and can make Grayling, Dawkins, Ferguson, Jones etc quite rich without even having to give up their real academic jobs (and the fact that they contemplate taking this second job along with all of their other extramural work on TV, newspapers, radio etc shows exactly what a pisstake their main job actually is).
There is a radical socialist alternative – free undergraduate education for whoever wants it delivered by dedicated teaching institutions working normal office hours over normal work years.
And research and post-graduate training should take place in similarly dedicated institutions stripped of their mostly pseudo-medieval flummery (again what did Lenin and Trotsky do? – they certainly had no time whatsoever for traditional academics and saw them as just another class of workers to be mobilised in the struggle for socialism).
This may sound dour and puritanical but in a world as fucked up as this one we can no longer pretend that half the population has an inalienable right to spend 3 or more years pissing around at public expense earning absurdly unrigorous ‘degrees’ just because the fucking baby boomers were able to do it.
Michael,
These people are not all second-raters just because they get to make lots of TV and write books that actually sell in Waterstones or on amazon.
Ferguson for instance may be an annoying right-wing prick but he has done some very solid (and very dense) work on economic history which even Marxists can learn a lot from.
Grayling or Singer may indeed be overrated, but Pinker and Dawkins and Dworkin all have very significant bodies of work to their credit.
If they are disliked by some of their ‘peers’ that is simply because academia is as unequal, unfair and over-managed as anywhere else in late capitalism: so the star performers are bitterly resented by those below them because they have risen far above such onerous duties as teaching undergrads, marking piles of semi-literate exam papers and attending interminable departmental meetings.
I have read Ferguson’s works, inclusive of the stuff relating to the development of banking. It is indicative of the man that this stuff appeared as a result of his D.Litt, rather than any post doctoral research. Fergusons has been heavily promoted for ideological reasons, not because of exhaustive research, which he has not undertaken since his post grad days. Grayling is exactly what Osler claims him to be-a whiggish narrative weaver devoid of any faculties for complex analysis. Your other points stand regarding teaching versus research universities. I also agree it is no longer viable to allow half of the population to fuck around studying three hrs a week for three years, whether at their own or the public expense.
To be honest, we all know who this will end up attracting. The sons and daughters of the newly rich from the newly developed countries. That’s who, and that’s all it’s supposed to do. As for whether the big names have time to do the work….do you seriously think they will be sticking stamps on envelopes and showing students around the building on their first day? I expect tehy will show up for special ‘Summer Schools’ where they will do their concentrated 100 hours of teaching, while the day to day work will be done by ‘grunts’.
I was astounded tolearn the other day that, according to Andrew Marr, Beijing has 7,000 (yes, seven thousand) billionaires. All that lovely lolly has to spent somewhere.
We are currently at the beginning of the Great leap backwards. Hospital waiting times are creeping back to pre New Labour days, the idea of education as the preserve of the elite is again in vogue (as seen from some comments above), Mary Whitehouse like morality is back on the agenda (sexualisation of children), thousands on the streets for Royal Weddings, Royalty in general is coming out of the shadows and back with a higher profile (the Queen had a horse running in the Derby don’t you know). All I am now waiting for is the slick, glossy remake of Mind your Language and the project will be complete.
We both blame the AWL for all of this.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/26/private-universities-academic-standards?showallcomments=true#CommentKey:ab2e1847-129c-455e-a17c-08da94a6fef8
ha ha — LOL even.
What is rarely mentioned is that Buckingham is not a model of free intellectual enquiry, it has an explicit, right-wing, neo-liberal bias. It employed Chris Woodhead for his politics (otherwise unemployable) despite little discernible academic qualities. An upmarket madrasa for the free-market right. Despicable. Shud be shut down immediately and all its inhabitants set on fire.
dean…The Queen always has a horse running in the Derby. It’s what she does. WANKER.
Sewer,
The level of hype about the Queens horse this year was different to previous years. The tone of the talk around the queens horse harked back to yester…………oh whats the fucking point responding to you!
Indeed Buckingham was a pet project of the 80s Thatcherite right.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s model of two year degrees isn’t worth copying – that is what the bourgeoisie is for: to develop new ideas and products some of which might actually be worth stealing (or rather repossessing).
Interesting 5 of the new intake of Tory MPs went there – so although Oxbridge and the major private schools are the true Madrasas of the Right it obviously has its role.
Also a good piece by David Allen Green who points out that ‘Grayling’s Folly’ actually won’t be able to award any degrees and really looks like the sort of scam designed to separate rich investors from their money that liberal academics are so surprisingly adept at devising:
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/06/college-humanities-students
Dean. Tens of thousands turn out for the Queen and Royals. Millions punt on the horses. Some punt on the Queen’s horse. How would you change this Dean. By persuasion or lefty dictate.
The scamminess is also well illustrated by this:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416422&c=1&sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4dee04f0f4f2075f,0
You’ll actually be paying £18K for a Eng Lit course delivered at Goldsmiths in the 1990s…
So not exactly cutting edge stuff.
Leave Ludwig Wittgenstein out of this, Dave – I very much doubt he would want to lecture to rich kids like this, even if he was still alive; still less do I think such kids would actually want to listen to him.
There’s room at the top they are telling you still,
but first you must learn how to smile as you kill
JOHN LENNON, Working Class Hero
Jonathan – I would hazard a guess that that would go for Russell as well, though if you bring them back as zombies they should be relatively easy to control.
What they really need are supervillains. Other than Niall Ferguson.[Shit,Will, I've worked out how to blame the AWL: Jim Denham luvs Niall Ferguson, therefore he's to blame for NCH. Though,to be fair, Jim has finally found out about A Gay Girl in Damascus after the rest of the left]
Well what do you think Wittgenstein was doing all those years in Cambridge.
Did he only tutor the poor kids?
In 1940s Cambridge?
And if you can extract a left-wing message from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophus you’re a better philosopher than I am.
(Sadly Wittgenstein’s legendary barney with Karl Popper – in which a poker may or may not have been brandished – seems to have been over some abstruse point in the theory of causation rather than because of Popper’s attacks on Marxism).
The Tractutus was early juvenlia. It’s the Philosophical Notebooks that are teh mature stuff. I think Russell was well practiced in lecturing to trustafarians; he taught at one of the New York Universities until he was barred for immorality. One of the female mothers found out that he wasn’t a Christian.
Dean, it’s hardly surprising that there was a big fuss about the Queen’s Horse this year. You may or may not have noticed that her grandson, one Prince William of Wales, got hitched to a miner’s granddaughter. Next year is going to be even worse, what with the Diamond Jubilee so I would advise you to emigrate if you don’t have the stomach for it. Preferably not to a Commonwealth country, unless it’s Pakistan.
Jimmy,
You missed my point entirely.
Another thing I have noticed that indicates we are at the beginning of the Great Leap Backwards, as I walk around town I notice more litter clutters the pavements.
The point about the Queen is that besides an actual attack on living standards and public services we, in my opinion, are seeing subtle ideological attempts to row back progress. The Tories want to take us back to their traditional values, just this time they are more nuanced about it. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when you wake up one day and we are back in Victorian England. That would make a good satirical Dr Who episode, he attempts to go back in time but ends up exactly where he is. Though in the episode this is put down to a time loop quantum inbalance in the third hydrualic anti matter time stabilizer in the Tardis. But we all know!
“You may or may not have noticed that her grandson, one Prince William of Wales, got hitched to a miner’s granddaughter.”
Who can think of a better way to get the Royals back into the publics good books through the delusion that they are just like us and we can all live the dream through them.
Daean…you have proved conclusively that you are a nerd by quoting Dr Who.
Slightly off-track but…OMG!!!! Has anyone else seen the Olympic torch? It looks like a bleeding cheese grater. LOL!!!!
Sewer – what was victorian England like by the way.
“OMG!!!! Has anyone else seen the Olympic torch? It looks like a bleeding cheese grater. LOL!!!!”
OMG! LOL! – How embarrassing, an octogenarian trying to get down with the kids!
deaN doesn’t do irony. another thick cuernT.
keep on keepINg on Sewer rattter. and keep on eating the crisps of random meant varieties in your loft.
that wooUllD bee MEAT Varieties of a random kind.
“and keep on eating the crisps of random meant varieties in your loft.”
Genuis!
“deaN doesn’t do irony. another thick cuernT.”
Is there something wrong with your keyboard comrade?
Dean, having spent the afternoon listening to Jefferson Airplane and reliving my glory days, not even you can rattle me. Truck on. Is that sick enough for you? (Sick means cool for today’s youngsters I’m told.).
Here’s cheese and onion of a crisp for you…Hazel Blears, in a story on the BBC website, says she wants to encourage working class people to apply for internships at Parliament. They will be paid the London minimum wage. Fine, but she continues that the image that is driving her is of the woman on the till in Tescos who wants to do something for her community, to effect change, and doesn’t know how. An internship would enable such a person to learn about the political process. Sorry, excuse me while I throw up…I thought that was the task of teh Labour Party and trade unions. And all those myriad community organisations that flourish at all levels in society. What’s wrong with telling the Tesco worker to join a union, to get involved in local working class campaigns against hospital closures, or nursery clousures or just plain poverty?
Now we know that Pete Singer’s animal liberation does not include human beings.
Rich Kids’ College will be issuing University of London degrees. Now London degree certificates have ‘University of London’ across the top, then the name of the college, then the name of the degree. Any prospective employer or college (should a graduate of RKC wish to go further) will see this college’s name on the certificate, and immediately realise that the graduate has been spoonfed for three years at the cost to his dad of 54 grand (plus yearly increases), rather than actually working hard largely on one’s own, as happened to me and thousands of others at proper University of London colleges.
Also, anyone whose dad can cough up that sort of money will also be able to pay bright but impecunious undergraduates and unemployed graduates to write his essays for him. This college is likely to be a real-life version of the fictional Porterhouse at Cambridge.
Re Singer IIRC he used to advocate the expulsion of humans from a significant part of East Africa to form a new state of Gorillastan.
This puts me in mind me of the wonderfully elegaic section of Alan Clark’s diaries where he shoots a kingfisher that is eating his baby carp (or whatever) – the description of the kingfisher and its untimely demise are worthy of Tolstoy – but he then embarks on a rant about why it is that he has to shoot such a beautiful creature when there are so many loathsome members of the lower classes who he is not allowed to shoot at all….
Scratch an animal rights activist and you’ll all too often find a closet Nazi.
“Scratch an animal rights activist and you’ll all too often find a closet Nazi.”
Hmmmmmm. Bit more like an animal rights activist who happens to be a Nazi or an hunting enthusiast who happens to be a Nazi. In the USA there are many a White supremicist who loves nothing better than going out and hunting animals, same with their kin in South Africa. And who can forget the Royals love of Hunting and their Nazi sympathies. Also a few of the Nazi top brass themselves were fond of hunting. No wonder, the amateur psychologuist in me says Nazi’s hunting ‘lower beings’ round fields and then killeng em makes total sense. But the truth is they are hunters who happen to be Nazi’s.
I think the backlash against animal rights was a similar coalition of rabid right wing old colonialists and sensibles who were ‘protecting’ science that periodically come together to defend the old imperial adventures.