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

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

and dont forget jeremy clarkson

was william empson a public intellectual? he was the man

even I'm not old enough to remember if Williams or Empson had media profiles. our media was pretty different back then so it's quite possible. don't really think Grayling or Dorks are fit to be mentioned in the same breath.

also lol max

clarkson should start a university

University of Real Life, son

williams was fairly well known, empson not really. more of a specialist, not involved in any public causes. but not completely obscure.

also what's the god vs atheism angle?

oh eagleton (who made his name shitting on williams as it goes) is the most prominent hater so far.

yeah i picked that up in the Crazy Terry thread after i asked the question in here. also lol Marx not being total Whig History

also what's the god vs atheism angle? i missed that in the articles, except obv Dorkins' involvement.

grayling has been doing press lately for his new 'atheist's bible' (or whatever it's called) which compiles wisdom literature and i guess bits of philosophical reflection in a manner deliberately meant to mimic the bible, without being theistic (or supernatural, or something like that).

not like Grayling to publish a cut and paste job

Really Grayling should have got Toby Young on board, just before we shoot the lot of them into the sun.

Grayling seems to me to be similar to Alain de Botton, in the sense that his "philosophy" is along the lines of Rabbi Lionel Blair "that's like life" homilies, IMO.

Trying not to be drawn into this too much, but yeah, one thing that really strikes me is that I don't actually consider these people to be good draws as academics at all - they're mass-market paperback pulp pop humanities people. You'd get a much better class at a normal bloody university.

How about making attendance at NCH compulsory for anyone who goes to Young's "free school"?

Toby Young didn't come to any harm in Camden's state schools. Tosser.

i see that as an argument against Camden's state schools.

I don't actually consider these people to be good draws as academics at all - they're mass-market paperback pulp pop humanities people.

kinda groaning here. not even a big fan of colley or cannadine, but they're not what you just said.

yeah i think saying this guys don't have chops in a strictly academic sense is trying a bit hard

fucking philosophy anyway, what's the point of it?

Young draws on his own experience and offers Grayling the following advice: “Don’t give an inch. No compromise, no surrender.”

I'm sure he could fit in an hour a year to teach English Lit.

When it comes to "public intellectuals", Freddie Ayer stomps A.C. Grayling into a thousand million billon zillion particles

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.

― модный хипстер (ShariVari), Wednesday, 8 June 2011 15:56 (4 weeks ago) Bookmark

Four weeks ahead of the game!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14011448

This is just the start. Much more significant a story than Grayling's finishing school.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/18/ac-graylings-university-open-60-students

lol

yuk yuk yuk