May as well have a thread about the A. C. Grayling New College of the Humanities thing

There's one thing I hope we can all agree on: Grayling's a wanker

oh indeed

nice choice of Hull as scum synecdoche up there thomp.

now I've got that chip off my shoulder, this bit of challops: I'm doing an OU degree at the moment. Materials and support are pretty good; it does make me wonder how much of the tuition fees are going towards all those red buildings, cheap booze, subsidised halls and all the other things that are about being "at uni" but nothing to do with the actual learning. If a lot of that was stripped away, would it matter? ( not actually advocating wholesale dismantlement in case anyone thinks I've gone raving neo-con but I'd have thought there is room with modern tech to be more... efficient? )

if your goal as a student (or the public's goal in subsidising them) is to cover syllabi and pass tests then yes, universities are spectacularly inefficient.

fuck yes, my goals as a student are to learn (handy if there is a syllabus to guide the learning) and to pass tests.

I think any other social/economic/artistic/intellectual ambitions are "goals as a person", not "goals as a student"

When I was at university my "goals as a person" were about 10 times as important TO ME as my "goals as a student".

Only 10?

other tom, i am sorry! i have no personal animus against the east riding i assure you

xxxp, institutions that serve that have a place, but that's not the only goal of most 18 year olds for themselves or most academics for their students. obviously while the public foot the majority of the bill they get a say too, but academia has been pretty successful in persuading the public of the economic and social merit of the "experience" and more abstract intellectual development (although probably more so in the US).

"only 10?"

I guess I cared a bit about learning stuff and getting good marks, and it did take up quite a lot of my time. So yeah, I reckon about 10.

i mean most people would agree that u.s. universities are (1) not very efficient knowledge transfer institutions (in terms of money and time spent), just like other universities, but (2) responsible for a pretty big share of the US's competitive advantage during the 20th C. so there must be more to it than just acquiring knowledge.

xp lol I know I was only kidding... we're proud of the fact that the rest of the country has the misapprehension that Hull's a shithole, it keeps the wankers out.

As a current student at UCL I am hoping this is a success. Opening a Jack Wills shop next door will also increase the number of twits it attracts, away from where I am.

xp caek, I don't know about US universities, but things have changed even since I first went to university in the mid-90s. Then, you needed to be near the giant! library to research, you had to have access to the computer lab to program, your assignments were marked by hand, you only had one (pay)phone per 10 people ( so no teleconf tutorials ) etc, you made sure you wandered past the dept noticeboard every day. Teh internets and all the rest of the last 12 years of tech mean this is all unneccessary now.

I work from home, I study from home, going to an office or a lecture hall feels strangely old-fashioned now (confessions of a rambling shut-in i know)

don't see what a student's personal goals for non-related activities have to do with it, tbh.

Having studied at a shit technical institute instead of a uni (or even a good institute tbh) i'd say the networking opportunities are more important than the educational content, in terms of having missed out.

that's a myth unless you're in the club in the first place- which, by and large, most students aren't

The OU's great for getting you to a stage where you can pass your exams but the social aspect of education shouldn't be underestimated. Online homework forums are not a replacement for the kind of debate and discussion you get in a good classroom.

xp tbh, it's not really. All of my friends from the same geographical area have used college contacts when either recruiting or jobseeking, and to good effect.

Grayling claimed it would help save humanities education from cuts by bringing together teachers including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Stephen Pinker.

feel like its a good idea to bring these guys together but only if we can lock them in a box and throw it in the ocean

tom, my point is that even if it's now possible to do the knowledge transfer bit of university just as well over the internet or whatever (it's not, but let's say it is), the fact that the US (or the UK) are where it is in terms of knowledge economy and cultural and economic influence is due in large part to its universities. which we all agree are not very efficient at knowledge transfer, and do a lot of other stuff that is not directly related to syllabi (in a way they don't in, say, france or japan). so it seems reasonable to conclude that the other stuff universities do might be useful for the wider society.

that's a myth unless you're in the club in the first place- which, by and large, most students aren't

― sometimes all it takes is a healthy dose of continental indiepop (tomofthenest), Wednesday, June 8, 2011 2:35 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that's not true. and it's a good example of the another thing british universities do (inefficiently, perhaps, but much better than distance learning): promote social mobility.

what's the deal with stephen pinker? i thought he was one of the less assholey public intellectuals.

evolutionary psychologist

ohhhhhh

terrible hair, too

i've been informed he is Wrong About Linguistics but couldn't comment

i always get him confused with stephen jay gould who actually seems like a good dude

me too

terrible hair, too

AC's is worse

SJG would have been a lot more fun to hang out with, thats for sure. better writer, too.

but he claimed to be a yankees fan and a red sox fan at the same time, which is just...

"yankees and red sox are Non-overlapping magisteria"

i hope one of the entrance criteria for this place is that you self-identify as a "bright"

so if you go to this university are you automatically a Bright oh COME ON I JUST READ THE WHOLE THREAD XP

lol

God, I'm glad I didn't meet too many people at university who thought it was all about networking.

ts, 'networking' vs 'making friends while attending college', i suppose

Feel staff recruitment might not be such a problem for them - there must be hundreds of humanities PhDs graduating each year into a brutal job market, some of whom will be happy to take a teaching job to tide them over until they land that British Academy Fellowship.

As for students, their market has to be "rich people who want to study in London". If it succeeds, NCHum is going to be less an educational institution than a luxury brand.

yep, its a finishing school basically.

The real concern for state universities will be whether companies like the one i work for want to muscle in on the game - offering standardised, high-quality, brand-name education in London / Shanghai / Mumbai / wherever, undercutting fees and hoovering up staff with no requirement to provide unprofitable / niche courses.

Max's box, the ReTARDIS, has plenty of room for all these libertarian/conservative types who think this place is a good idea. FWIW, there are a few private universities in London (from the Architectural Association/Royal College of Art to that shitty US-accredited college in Marylebone) but they don't really have much of an impact on the larger system.

I explain it to Americans thusly: for a few generations, British people have been able to earn funded places at university - regardless of parental circumstances - so long as they earned high grades. The same high taxes underwriting the NHS also underwrite the university system, and for years the people got a lot for their money. They were encouraged to look at their achievement as earned, even if they were old Etonians with wealthy parents able to smooth all the rockiness out of getting to that point. Because fees were paid and you got a maintenance grant, there was some weight to the idea that being a student was your job for three years, a job you'd earned. It also leveled the playing field as much as possible and freed rich and poor parents alike from many of the now-mandatory obligations for parents to subsidize their kids. I find it bizarre that students in Britain seem no longer to think that they earn their places and parents who earned free educations think it's OK that their kids don't have the same opportunities as they did.

The best advice I can give someone who just misses getting into Oxbridge is to work hard on your BA, get a first or a 2.1, and do your MA at Oxford or Cambridge. That gets you the network with only one year's effort. I will totally cop to choosing the university with the best networking potential later - I was accepted at all the schools I applied to so the final choice depended on a) amount of financial aid offered and b) opportunities afterward - and because my college has a tangental relationship to Oxford I've never, in this country, felt excluded by people educated there.

BTW, it is not exceptional that Euan Blair got a partial scholarship to do an MA at Yale (or any other US school). People with worse degrees get scholarship wonga from many top US schools all the time.

for a few generations, British people have been able to earn funded places at university - regardless of parental circumstances - so long as they earned high grades. The same high taxes underwriting the NHS also underwrite the university system, and for years the people got a lot for their money. They were encouraged to look at their achievement as earned, even if they were old Etonians with wealthy parents able to smooth all the rockiness out of getting to that point. Because fees were paid and you got a maintenance grant, there was some weight to the idea that being a student was your job for three years, a job you'd earned. It also leveled the playing field as much as possible and freed rich and poor parents alike from many of the now-mandatory obligations for parents to subsidize their kids. I find it bizarre that students in Britain seem no longer to think that they earn their places and parents who earned free educations think it's OK that their kids don't have the same opportunities as they did.

well hang on. this bit would be valid until about 20 years ago. it's a lot different now. until about 20 years ago a small number of people got those funded university places, and other people, if they stayed at school went to polytechnics, which were not universities. there wasn't a level playing field: same as now, if you went to a private school or 'the better sort of state school', which is not unrelated to your parents' social class, which is a factor anyway [via cultural capital, via other stuff too], then you had a better chance of getting good grades and going to university.

n e ways, then the polytechnics got turned into universities, it wasn't possible to fund the increased number of university students as before, so in came the system of paying fees, i.e. going into debt aged 18 to go to university. there are way more university students now than twenty years. you might think the polytechnic system wasn't 'that bad' except that there was a degree (wordplay} of snobbery towards it, which changing their names hasn't actually altered that much. the last government wanted 50% of everyone to go to university, which is a lot. you don't need high grades to go.

the tories probably want fewer people to go to university, but don't say so.

I was accepted at all the schools I applied to so the final choice depended on a) amount of financial aid offered and b) opportunities afterward - and because my college has a tangental relationship to Oxford I've never, in this country, felt excluded by people educated there.

I may be v naive, but the thought of choosing a uni for "opportunities" never crossed my mind. I chose mine based on the city it was on, pretty much, and on the fact that it asked for better grades than the other offers I got. I was lucky enough to start in 1996, though, which meant I was one of the last years' intake not to have to pay fees.

HM, points taken but you're suggesting (inadvertently, I think) that poly students didn't get fees or grants paid. I still think whenever rich people emote about there being no money for whatever, that they are probably lying or don't want to spend it on people who aren't just like them.

My family's finances were pretty much set to 'skint' and I wanted to get the fuck out of Dodge. These things tend to sharpen the mind, as does growing up somewhere fairly egalitarian where you nevertheless discover how the world works versus how you'd like it to work. My dilemma was whether to do trad journalism at Northwestern (best course in the US for undergrads) or go to an art college with excellent fiction and expository writing courses. The college was near NYC, which I saw as the ultimate opportunity, so it won. It wasn't until I arrived there that I saw how starry it was or how the alumni were very good at looking after each other.

i couldn't find the example of grayling being an asshole that i wanted to, but i did find this at the new humanist, which is headlined 'AC Grayling politely rebukes an attempt to reconcile religion and science'. the word 'politely' is being used in some newfangled sense that i don't actually understand, in that headline, i think.

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2009/03/ac-grayling-politely-rebukes-attempt-to.html

― thomp, Wednesday, 8 June 2011 13:37 (6 hours ago)

lol i remember that
http://blog.voyou.org/2006/11/25/curse-you-richard-dawkins/

http://versouk.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/cimg2348.jpg

o shi huge image. massive apologies to anyone whose browser didn't downsize it.

Grayling seems to me to epitomise a certain kind of academic/intellectual who is like a super-high functioning version of Steve Carell's character from Anchorman. They've somehow immersed themselves enough in the patterns and movements of a tiny culture to be pretty significantly successful in it, but whenever they overstep those narrow boundaries they're revealed to have an IQ of 58.

pfft, who knows. it's evidently open season on the guy; but it's 'richly amusing' to me that this whole thing has opened up another front in the war between the neo-god-bothering 'left' and #team_atheism.

Grayling doesn't seem so much like Brick as like those Doctor Hilary or Raj Persaud dudes who turn up on morning TV all the time i.e. maybe he is qualified to be a populariser but i'm not sure he's done any work ever that isn't just tabloid hackwork

also what's the god vs atheism angle? i missed that in the articles, except obv Dorkins' involvement. jesus our public "intellectuals" are lame, at least the French guys have the decency to take themselves difficult to understand

you guys had raymond williams