In his role as founder of the New College of the Humanities, Britain’s newest and most controversial institution of higher education, A.C. Grayling could have chosen among several titles. The senior academic officer at most English higher-education institutions is known as vice chancellor, with a few rectors and a provost and a president or two in the mix. In Scotland, the customary title is principal. Mr. Grayling, however, has opted for master, an honorific with long antecedents at the colleges that make up England’s two oldest universities, Oxford and Cambridge.
The choice is fitting. Donnish and dapper, Mr. Grayling has a mellifluous voice that without rising in volume still manages to convey erudite authority. Even in his partially furnished central London office, he evokes the weighty academic tradition that his new venture is both laying claim to and subverting.
Mr. Grayling earned his doctorate at Oxford and began his academic career as a lecturer there before beginning a long affiliation with Birkbeck, one of the colleges of the University of London. He simultaneously carved out a niche as Britain’s most famous philosopher, a public intellectual known for his defense of atheism who appears regularly on television and radio and has written for a range of popular publications. A weekly column for The Guardian became a best-selling series of books that examined such eternal philosophical questions as The Meaning of Things and What Is Good? and enhanced his celebrity.
In June 2011, Mr. Grayling announced his intention to establish the New College of the Humanities, with the involvement—and investment—of a handful of fellow academic celebrities, including the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the historian Niall Ferguson, and the psychologist Steven Pinker. (Mr. Pinker’s wife, the writer and philosophy professor Rebecca Goldstein, was later added to the roster.). His goal was to bridge what he sees as the growing gap between higher education and the needs of contemporary society.
Though his concerns are echoed by many other critics of mainstream universities, both in Britain and elsewhere, his solution is unique. Unlike so many other recent ventures, Mr. Grayling’s attempt to devise a new higher-education paradigm for the 21st century is rooted not in the potential of technology and the limitless reach of the Internet but in the American liberal-arts model and the individualized tutorial system that once prevailed at Oxford and Cambridge.
“This is a college for the humanities,” he says, and its emphasis on the study of philosophy, history, literature, law, and economics is designed to provide its students with the intellectual equipment that will enable them to organize ideas and muster arguments, even in the face of challenges that “we can’t even envisage yet.” In marrying those fundamentals of American liberal-arts education to the rigorous training that the classic tutorial system provides, Mr. Grayling says his goal is to create what is sometimes called the T-shaped thinker, one with both breadth and depth.
The premise seems simple enough and, especially for an American audience, relatively uncontroversial. But when Mr. Grayling announced what he was planning, there was an outcry. Critics, calling the venture a vanity exercise, accused him of selling a bill of goods to a set of rich kids and undermining the rest of British higher education while he was at it.
All but two universities in Britain are publicly subsidized, with undergraduate tuition rates capped by the government at £9,000 a year, or around $14,700. Mr. Grayling’s decision to establish the New College as a private institution affiliated with the University of London and charge twice that much means that his students are not eligible for government-backed student loans.
In a blistering article for The Guardian, Terry Eagleton called the new venture “odious” and “disgustingly elitist,” saying its establishment was a cynical exercise by “a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded” from other universities. Mr. Eagleton, the well-known Marxist literary critic who teaches at Lancaster University and is a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame, dismissed the well-known liberal credentials of Grayling and most of the academics he had recruited, saying that where the college was concerned, their argument led “straight to the bank.” His attack was the most harshly worded, and his sentiments tapped a raw nerve. The article generated hundreds of online comments, most of which echoed his views.
A Time of Change
The reaction may in part be a symptom of a deep uneasiness about the rapid changes that many British universities have undergone in recent years. Tuition was introduced only in 1998, when students were asked to pay as much as £1,000 a year. In 2004 the rate in England increased to £3,000 a year, and last year the maximum amount that English universities were allowed to charge rose to the current £9,000 cap. (Universities can impose much higher fees on students from countries outside the European Union.)
Tuition is but one of the forces that have reshaped British higher education in recent generations. Mr. Grayling recalls that when he was an undergraduate, in the 1960s, about 8 percent of high-school graduates “went to university in this country, and the dons who were admitting us to their universities were of course choosing replacements for themselves.” Around 47 percent of secondary-school graduates in Britain now attend college, and the number of universities has expanded accordingly. Government financing has been strained by increasing enrollments. Instruction in the humanities and social sciences has borne the brunt of recent cuts, as successive governments have emphasized STEM subjects in an effort to ensure national economic competitiveness.
Mr. Eagleton, though he may be Mr. Grayling’s harshest critic, is equally unstinting in his assessment of the troubles facing British universities. But he believes the alternative presented by the New College makes the situation worse. “Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich,” he wrote in The Guardian. “As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.”
Some critics are particularly rankled by the idea that New College founders may make money off the project. The tumult inside British higher education has allowed for-profit providers to make inroads, raising alarm that the problems seen in the United States will follow. The New College is not-for-profit but is owned by a for-profit company, whose board members and investors include Mr. Grayling, other professors, and outside businesspeople, and which provides all the administrative services.
Des Freedman, who teaches communications and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-edited a recent book, The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, says the college “crystallizes people’s real concern that education is being lifted out of the hands of publicly funded institutions and accountable groups and into the preserve of private investors and equity.”
Mr. Grayling says his critics are misguided. The New College’s private status is not, he says, all that different from current norms. In truth, he says, in Britain “all universities are private, and all universities engage in commercial activities, and all of them charge fees.” By being explicitly private and not relying on government subsidies and the accompanying constraints, he says, the college is simply being more upfront about its approach. “Despite all their howls of protest at the thought that a private, fee-charging institution is set up, most of the people who were doing the complaining misunderstood their own institutions,” he says.
The college has nonetheless outsourced media relations to a PR company that now carefully controls access, meting out interviews with Mr. Grayling and selected faculty, staff, and students.
Based in a converted Georgian townhouse on one of Bloomsbury’s iconic squares, the New College of the Humanities sits at the geographic hub of literary and academic London. The white stucco-and-brick building bears no signs indicating its affiliation, and the entry vestibule is spare, furnished only with a table topped by information brochures beside a vase of white lilies—a design touch repeated throughout the building. Although larger lectures are held in rented space nearby, the townhouse, known as the Registry, is the heart of the college. The 60 or so students who make up the first cohort attend most lectures, classes, and tutorial sessions here, congregate in the upstairs common room during their free time, and meet daily in small groups with Mr. Grayling in his office for informal discussions over afternoon tea.
The degrees that New College students earn will be awarded by the University of London, in an extension of the self-governing arrangement that has long existed between the federated university and its various member colleges. In addition to the 12 modules, or courses, over three years that are required for their University of London qualification, students will complete an additional eight modules to earn a New College diploma in economics, English, history, law, or philosophy. Mr. Grayling says he “pinched” the idea from Imperial College London, which, until it left the university, in 2007, also awarded University of London degrees plus an additional diploma.
That arrangement is central to Mr. Freedman’s objections. “It is a finishing school for particularly privileged people, relying on the curriculum of the publicly funded institutions, funded by wealthy private equity, trying to create a precedent for much-higher-level involvement of the private sector,” he says.
The academic extras that set a New College diploma apart include a core curriculum of courses in logic and critical thinking, science literacy, and applied ethics—the last of which is designed to ensure that students “come out at the other end having some good understanding of the great dilemmas that we face, as individuals and as a society,” says Mr. Grayling. Students will also take a set of preprofessional courses, like marketing and technology, to prepare them for the world of business.
Bait and Switch?
Those courses will be taught exclusively by junior faculty, not the jewel-in-the-crown academics that the well-connected Mr. Grayling announced would be on the faculty. Critics have accused him of a bait-and-switch, touting the participation of those intellectual heavyweights merely to lure investors and students.
But Mr. Grayling points out that some of those big-name academics helped him devise the curriculum, and that each has signed on to deliver several lectures—to what is, after all, a small audience. “Not a week goes by without several lectures by one or other of the stellar, visiting professoriate,” he says. They are, in his words, “the icing on the cake,” but truly distinguish the college’s offerings.
“A quality university education is not about icing,” retorts Mr. Freedman. “It’s about the rest of the cake. It has to be a solid foundation, where you have regular access to well-established academics. If I were a student and the institution has been marketed on the basis of these very well-known academics who are not there on a day-to-day basis, I would feel cheated.”
The notion that the celebrity faculty members stand to reap big investment profits seems unlikely, though. Steven Pinker, who will deliver a total of four lectures this year, says he has not invested, because of restrictions by Harvard University, where he is a permanent faculty member. (He would have been interested in investing, he says, “although perhaps not my whole life savings.”)
Sir Partha Dasgupta, a University of Cambridge economist, is one of nine visiting professors who have invested in the college, but says he was attracted by the vision behind the institution, not its potential return. He helped devise the economics curriculum and even sat on the hiring committee for permanent staff. The college’s emphasis on the humanities appealed to him, Sir Partha explains, noting that even Cambridge is, “broadly speaking, a science university.” As a full professor there, he had never presided over tutorials, and his experience of teaching in small groups was limited to graduate students.
“What was nice at NCH,” he says, “was the opportunity to try out ways of getting students at a very young age to begin looking at the social world outside,” he says.
Matthew Batstone, director of the college, who has overseen its business plan, says a substantial portion of any eventual profits will be reinvested in the business, although he would not provide specifics on that or other financial matters. “Our backers are all people who have social-sciences or humanities degrees and have invested ... because they believe in the mission of the college,” he says. “Nobody is doing this with the goal of getting rich.”
If Mr. Grayling wanted to get rich, Mr. Batstone says, “he would be doing a lecture tour, probably in the United States, and being paid gazillions to do the academic equivalent of strutting his stuff.”
‘We Can Talk and Ask Questions’
Nearly two months into the inaugural term last October, the students had settled into the routine of college life. An atmosphere of easy informality prevailed, despite the observance of certain conventions of university life, such as referring to Mr. Grayling as “the master.” The affiliation with the University of London allows students access to university libraries and other shared facilities, but their academic and social lives revolve around the college building.
For Mr. Freedman, “the fact the they have only been able to attract 60 people, with the caliber of names and the degree of publicity they’ve had,” was an early indicator that the experiment was faltering. College officials said that the numbers had not been a disappointment, and that the college was being so selective that it had turned away some students with top grades because they weren’t the right fit.
Most of the students had compared notes with enough of their friends at other universities to feel that they were getting their money’s worth, and were outspoken in the college’s defense. Several spoke of their excitement at being part of a pioneering experiment, and some had signed up to take part in recruiting presentations.
“I think we’ve had a very large say in what’s gone on, because we’re such a small number,” said Tosca Lloyd. “We see our lecturers every week consistently, and they are some of the best people in their fields,” said Jess Dunn, referring to the teaching faculty. Paula Erizanu agreed, noting that, because of the college’s size, lectures are more akin to seminars at other universities. “We can talk and ask questions, and that doesn’t happen in a bigger university,” she said.
The full-time academic staff, who do the bulk of the teaching at the college, conducting the tutorials that are an essential part of Mr. Grayling’s vision, were recruited from other institutions. Attracting them to his new venture was easy, he says. “Morale is not great in British universities, because of all the changes, so this was low-hanging fruit, you might say.”
Suzannah Lipscomb earned her undergraduate and D.Phil. degrees from the University of Oxford and had taught history at the University of East Anglia for a few years when she was recruited, in 2011, by Mr. Grayling. She describes East Anglia as “a great institution with a great faculty” but says students in larger universities don’t tend to prepare as rigorously for class, because they know there is little chance they will be singled out to participate.
Mr. Grayling has told his faculty not to worry about the kinds of administrative responsibilities that would detract from their teaching and research at other universities. He has also tried to relieve them of another source of stress: the emphasis on publishing regularly in peer-reviewed journals, one of the key metrics by which universities are allocated public financing. His institution will not be receiving public money. “I’ve said to them, if it takes you 20 years to write the great book, that’s fine by me. But do it, be active.”
College officials would not specify how much they are paying faculty members and would not comment on reports that the visiting professoriate is paid much more in relative terms. Ms. Lipscomb says the pay is higher than that at most British universities, where academic salaries “have essentially been frozen in real terms since the 1970s.” Lecturers’ salaries elsewhere average around £30,000, or $48,000, “and we pay more than that, so it’s healthy,” she says.
“It’s expensive to do education really well,” Mr. Grayling says, and those salaries and small classes surely contribute to the New College’s price tag. His goal, he says, is for the college to remain small enough to ensure that kind of individualized attention, with around 1,000 students in 10 years. He hopes eventually to be able to establish a sizable-enough endowment to support a need-blind enrollment policy, although for the moment only 16 students have their tuition fully covered, through the roughly half-million dollars that has already been raised.
As the New College matures, another challenge will be for it to establish an identity distinct from Mr. Grayling, who is clearly, as Mr. Batstone puts it, “very much the heart of the institution.” Although the college will eventually need to migrate away from being so closely identified with one person, the connection has been “very helpful to start with,” says Mr. Batstone. “He keeps you going in the dark moments and makes it kind of fun and enjoyable. We’ve all kind of fallen in love with Anthony, and that’s a really important ingredient for the success of it.”
Mr. Grayling himself, however, is under no illusions about where the key to the success of his new venture lies. If the criticism of the college proves true, and it ends up being little more than a comfortable berth for those whose parents can afford the tuition but who lack the intellectual heft to gain entry to the best mainstream universities, the college will be doomed.
“We don’t recruit more students unless we’re very good. We don’t get that endowment built up unless we’re very good,” Mr. Grayling says. “We live or die by the quality of the educational experience and the outcome.”
