Who’s Afraid of Grayling Hall?

Or, as it is to be known, the New College of the Humanities? I must say that the prospect of a dozen or so celebrity dons attaching their names to a new private college in London has provoked rather more outrage than might be thought necessary. It is not, after all, as though it is going to be a major enterprise. On the contrary, most of its applicants seem likely to be from overseas or public-school types who fail to win places at Oxford or Cambridge.

If that proves so then Grayling Hall will benefit students from less affluent backgrounds by freeing up places at top tier universities that might otherwise have been taken by the NCH’s students. This seems a reasonably worthy cause. In any case, the appeal of a liberal arts college, presumably modelled on the New England model*, is likely to be limited. Especially at £18,000 a year.

Terry Eagleton has a pleasingly hyperbolic reaction to it all:

If this catches on, the current crisis in universities will escalate into educational apartheid of the kind that we already have at secondary school level. There will be a number of private unis where students are assigned fags and expect to stroll into the Foreign Office with a third-class degree, and a lot of other places which cannot afford to paint the walls. Just when the real Oxford and Cambridge have been dragging themselves inch by inch into the modern democratic world, an ultra-Oxbridge is being proposed which will probably have an even lower intake of working class students than Cambridge did when I was there in the 1960s. Grayling’s scheme is odious.

*Though sharing facilities with the University of London and thus, one imagines, asking students to pay a hefty premium for the pleasure of receiving a few lectures and tutorials from the celebrity dons.