New College of the Humanities

I finished my undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Bristol in June, 1962. In September 1962, I boarded the Empress of England out of Liverpool bound for Montreal in Canada, and before the month was out I was a graduate student in Philosophy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. I had made the move to North America where, for all that I have spent time back in Europe (mainly England) studying and on sabbatical, I not only have lived ever since but have always intended to live ever since. From the week when I crossed the Atlantic at the age of 22, I have never wanted to return to the land of my birth to live and work there. For many reasons, most of which have come tumbling out in my posts in the past 18 months, I like the New World and what it means and stands for.

One of the things I like most is the undergraduate education offered in both Canada and the USA, as opposed to my native England. When I was an undergraduate, you went to university and studied the subject of your choice and that was it. Nothing less but absolutely nothing more. I remember my first year at Bristol. We had four courses in mathematics, two pure and two applied, and that was it. No physics, no philosophy, no languages, no nothing. At the end of the first year, going screaming mad at the restricted fare, I discovered that, because I had taken Latin at high school, I was qualified to join the Faculty of Arts and that there was a joint honors course in Mathematics and Philosophy to which I could transfer.

Which I did in short order—or at least, which I did after whining and moaning and going to see deans and begging and getting told off because I was a pain in the butt and should have made the decision before I came up university and so on and so forth. I was still restricted to those two subjects, but I had doubled my scope. (Part of the problem with changing was that departments chose the students to admit, not some central administration. So if they lost a student, it was a mark against them, especially since generally they were not about to gain a substitute.)

In 1965, I joined the faculty at the University of Guelph in Ontario. It had been formed the year before by combining the long-existing Ontario College of Agriculture (famous graduate who hated the place—John Kenneth Galbraith), the Macdonald Institute of Domestic Science, and the Ontario College of Veterinary Science, and adding on a College of Arts and Science. Philosophy was a growth industry back in those heady days, and we young, all newly appointed faculty, hit the ground running, working hard to design and build a four-year undergraduate degree. I think we succeeded and by the middle of the 1970s had a program that made us truly and justifiably proud. Looking back on a career that is closing in on 50 years, for all that my own main thrust has been towards writing and publishing, I don’t think there has been anything I have done in my life to equal my contribution to that degree program.

I am not saying that it was perfect, but it was a huge amount better than what I—and several of my British-born colleagues—had experienced in their undergraduate lives. Most importantly, we built on the North American system—an honors degree, taking eight semesters, involving 40 courses in all. To major in philosophy, as I remember, students had to take 18 courses in the department, covering history and contemporary issues. (Being Canada rather than the USA, continental philosophy was always considered an essential part of contemporary philosophy, along with analytic philosophy. Although I am not a continental philosopher, over the years I have grown to appreciate this breadth.)

What about the other 22 courses? Students had to do some language courses. They had to take some science courses—true, for the most part, courses put on by science departments for arts students. They had to do some other humanities courses, and some social science courses. In other words, as part of their education, students were expected to sample material from across the spectrum, not only getting some exposure to human learning generally, but also being offered ideas and thinking that they would not have got at high school. Together with this went the opportunity to change one’s mind. If for instance you took an economics course and liked it, you were not locked in to what you had come up to college to study, but could change at the end of the first (or even later) year and do a major that you had never before contemplated.

I have always thought that this makes the North American undergraduate degree immeasurably superior to the English undergraduate degree, for all that no doubt the best and brightest of English undergraduates at the end of their courses are more advanced in that one chosen subject than are their North American counterparts. (A gap closed by the differences in graduate programs with North Americans having course work to a degree not known in Britain. But that is another matter, as are such things as the ludicrous British system of piling the evaluation onto end-of-three-year final exams rather than continuous testing through the degree. At the end of my third year, I was examined on a logic course I had taken in my second year.)

Why am I bringing this up now? It is not entirely the quirk of an old man, whose long-term memory is better than his short-term. It is rather that I have been reading about this new private, for-profit college that is being founded in London, by the philosopher Anthony Grayling and various chums including Richard Dawkins and others. As and if it gets off the ground, I am sure that at lot is going to be written about this in The Chronicle, and I expect that I shall be contributing to the debate.

So let me say this now. I don’t want to rush into the overall rights and wrongs of the whole enterprise. People are already making such judgments and I have some thoughts of my own, starting with the suspicion that since the fees are going to be double the next layer of fees in England, the undergraduate population is probably going to be mainly foreign, which in itself raises some interesting issues. But I do want to note that the people starting this new college are clearly with me on the limitations of English education. As well as doing a formal degree, students must take a diploma that will cover Logic and Critical Thinking, Science Literacy, Applied Ethics, and something known as Professional Skills (which seems a little bit like a junior MBA). I applaud this strongly, even though I would want to throw in more like languages. So whatever else will be said, by me and by others, let me go on record now as saying in this respect I see a concern about education that I think deserves full support. It has mine.