Michael Copestake discusses AC Grayling’s New College of the Humanities

Did he know what he was in for? This is the first question that springs to mind at the sight of the do-gooding liberal philosophy professor, AC Grayling, formerly of Birkbeck College, judging by the uproar and opprobrium that his plans for a private, £18,000-a-year tuition fee-paying ‘New College of the Humanities’ have brought raining down upon his head. Students, fellow academics, Guardian readers, lefties – all are up in arms.

Naturally, immediately on being on the receiving end of some hard stick from those sectors of society that he may on better days expect to be applauding him, in rather Clegg-like fashion – though not nearly as tearfully – the good professor complained to The Guardian that he hoped at least people would accept the purity of his motives: “I would like to be given a little bit of credit for trying to do it sincerely,” he says.^[1] What is important to realise is the extent to which Grayling and his other business partners are doing their bit not to ameliorate the state of higher education in England (as they claim) in the light of the recent and severe cuts to teaching grants for the humanities, but to open another door leading to an ever more expensive, pseudo-marketised and class-ridden system of higher education, even if his own experiment fails. In this sense he continues the themes established by the coalition’s existing educational policy.

However, even some of those who one would expect to be the most receptive to this venture are anticipating either its prompt failure or a pained existence as a repository for fools with rich parents whose degrees will be worthless.^[2] The mix of furore and apologetics that has ensued in the media is instructive as to the new situation facing the system of higher education: ‘soft’ humanities subjects lose state support, as students are shunted down more business-friendly avenues.

The details of Grayling’s new private university are emerging and so far they have been contradictory. What we do know is that the university is being established by 14 celebrity academics (some more famous than others), investors from the City of London and a private couple from Switzerland. What could be more wholesome? It will be a for-profit institution that teaches philosophy, history, law, economics and English literature and will be guested by scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones for the sake of well-roundedness. An unimpressed Terry Eagleton, declaring Grayling’s venture to be “odious”, correctly surmised that the celebrity professors will be doing very little of the actual teaching at the new institution, but will enjoy salaries of around 25% more than those paid in the state-funded university system.^[3] This notwithstanding his own allegedly well remunerated guest lecturing at the privately owned catholic University of Notre Dame in the United States.

As of yet, the New College of the Humanities has no campus or academic resources of its own; no books, computers, laboratories, etc. In the true spirit of the ‘big society’ it will, in the interim, be mooching resources off of the University of London. It may well be paying for them, but this hardly hides the fact that the same pool of resources used by students in the state system will be made more scarce by the presence of new and mostly well heeled interlopers. The same problem goes, of course, for private healthcare, the new ‘free schools’ and so on.

Naturally being spared the cost of the necessary capital investments to acquire such buildings and resources is a big advantage for investors. Even the degree courses taken by the new college’s students will be those of the University of London’s international programme.^[4]

Right support

While the core personnel and branding of the New College is impeccably liberal (putting the participation of latter-day empire loyalist Niall Ferguson aside for a moment), its most enthusiastic support has come from the right. Even though, as mentioned earlier, many expect this particular venture to fail, it is the principle that they applaud. Freedom from the untrustworthy state, freedom from quotas of working class students, ethnic groups and the like, the freedom to make fistfuls of cash from a market full up to bursting point.

The cuddly liberals have thus found themselves falling in with a bad crowd. The Economist, the FT, Boris Johnson, members of Ayn Rand societies, Toby Young – all have come out in enthusiastic support. But perhaps our adventurous, caring professors are not all they seem, with their ostensible concern for the humanities and education in the abstract. The mask slips most dramatically when one learns more about the origins and purpose of the New College. Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson’s June 6 Daily Telegraph column had the following delicious subtitle: ‘A private university that will take on the cream of the rejects …’ Johnson goes on to quote from a personal conversation with Grayling: “He explained that the idea had first occurred to him years ago, when he was tutor for admissions at an Oxbridge college. For every person we admitted, we turned away 12, each of whom could have done outstandingly well at the university, he said. The trouble with Britain today, he said, was that we simply didn’t have enough elite university provision …”^[5]

The whole appeal of the New College is to the elite and their emulators in the middle class, who may have a spare £18,000 plus living expenses to throw around. For the sake of comparison that kind of money will also net your boy a year at Eton.^[6] The sweetener is that 20% or so of the student places at the New College will go to the ‘deserving poor’

This combination of professed ‘good intentions’ and the sop of 20% of places to the 98% of the population unable to afford them in the first place, taken together with the reality of the cuts to higher education, has been enough to bring the more pragmatic liberals onside with Grayling’s business venture.^[7] This line of thought essentially boils down to the usual ‘It’s the best we can do right now’, ‘At least the poor are getting something’, and so on. After all, given the cuts, surely it is better to have something than nothing? The leftist fetish of state provision is also attacked, usually with reference to the university system in the United States, whose league-table-topping institutions are mostly private.

Higher education in the United States runs on the basis of public universities supported by the individual states through taxes, on the one hand; and a series of private institutions, who exist on the back of their enormous tuition fees, and in some cases their enormous financial endowments, on the other. After Harvard and Yale, with endowments worth around $27 billion and $16 billion respectively, there is a very large drop-off.^[8] Oxford University in comparison has an endowment fund of around £3 billion ($4.8 billion). Naturally state universities are usually underfunded, pushing up prices at the private universities.

Incidentally, the American system is also in the throes of a student loans crisis, as costs rise, defaults increase, student loan-based derivatives collapse and the whole thing moves closer to the precipice. From the point of view of capital there are also far too many humanities students – liberal arts graduates, who may in future simply be denied loans due to their collapsing work prospects. As in the UK, this leads to the idea that each student must view themselves as a small business of one and take a degree that will increase their ‘economic viability’. We move from receiving an education to receiving ‘training’, often at the expense of the individual or the state, and for the benefit of capital.^[9] Education becomes a commodity for the elite and the few lucky winners of the paupers’ academic lottery (though even here let us also remind ourselves that there is no obligation for a private university to extend any places whatsoever to working class students: that is left purely to the charitable feelings of the investors, as with the Grayling enterprise).

This whole mess, here and across the Atlantic, comes down to the problem in capitalist society of who will pay for the higher education that the economy seems to demand, as fees rise. However, we should also note that employers’ organisations now complain that there are too many graduates.^[10] The state is less and less willing to fund higher education directly out of taxation. This appears irrational, as the state is paying for higher education in a way that will only cost it more in the long run if present trends in university uptake persist. But ideology dictates that the universities must run and be funded like businesses. The choices end up being a system of public or private loans and the eradication of the degrees that are not in the interests of business. But what the government saves in cutting teaching grants it loses in increased costs in loans, as tuition fees rise to cover the gap. On top of this is the recovery rate on debt, that the Student Loans Company puts at 70% – a 30% write-off. The increased fees themselves have left a ‘black hole’ in the governments education budget for the coming year.^[11]

Many universities, of course, are simply cutting the humanities subjects altogether rather than trying to make the sociology or history department ‘pay their way’ in the world by attracting private investment from Mars or BAE or whoever. Just because someone studies accountancy or engineering rather than history or philosophy, however, does not decrease the cost of the course, the rate of default or the black hole in the budget. Nor does the production of more x graduates over y graduates automatically produce economic growth. An ‘oversupply’ of nurses and engineers rather than media studies and philosophy graduates changes nothing.

One could suppose that the whole aim is simply to reproduce clearer distinctions between social elites and the masses, and to discourage excessive participation in frivolous educational pursuits. How this will affect the state’s long established goal of disguising youth unemployment through more open higher education remains to be seen.

Whose universities?

The fact that the workers’ movement as a whole, and the Marxist left in particular, does not seem to have answers to the education cuts beyond ‘Fight them harder’ and ‘Tax the rich’ only exacerbates the problems we face. Sure, one can point out why the idealisation of the American system is ill-founded and would not work here; one can point out that only a small increase in the tax take could provide a higher education for all, and one can point to AC Grayling’s crazy haircut, but this will all come to nought without a wider strategy.

As Marxists, we are not automatically in favour of state education any more than we are of state healthcare or state-owned industry. After all, we are dealing with the bourgeois state. Demands such as ‘Save our NHS’, or in this case, ‘Save our universities’, ignore the fact that these are not our institutions: they are institutions of the capitalist state and its adjuncts. Naturally if the capitalists want to flog them off there will be little chance of stopping them, and even if we did they would only return to the safe proprietorship of the bourgeois state. Even to achieve this the working class would have to be able to exercise substantial political power in society, at which point the question of our own schools, clinics, workers’ education centres and cooperatives would all be posed. The attendant questions of democracy, the nature of the state and the need for a party cannot be ignored.

Communists oppose the further marketisation and the privatisation of the higher education system, just as we do with the NHS. We support the struggles of education workers and students against all cuts, all bureaucratic intrusions, and every new layer of self-serving. overpaid bureaucrats, who live at the expense of the lower pay grades (in some universities – Liverpool and Sheffield amongst them – they are having their pensions cut by up to two thirds^[12]). However, we understand that our tasks extend far beyond mere opposition, and even less a default position of defending bourgeois state property. We have a duty to pose to the working class the question of political power and running society itself – including education. This, in the long run, is the only real way to chase off the cuts on the one hand and the Graylings on the other.

Our immediate tasks must be to unify the opposition to the cuts – an opposition that is at present divided and unable to achieve the limited tasks of reform and resistance that it has set itself, let alone change the world. The unification of the anti-cuts campaigns could be the first step to a united communist party which actually might.

Notes

1. www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/09/grayling-abused-over-new-college-plans
2. blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/indialenon/100090894/three-reasons-why-the-new-college-of-the-humanities-will-fail
3. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/06/ac-graylings-new-private-univerity-is-odious
4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_the_Humanities
5. www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/8558621/At-last-an-Oxbridge-for-those-who-cant-get-into-Oxbridge.html
6. www.etoncollege.com/currentfees.aspx
7. ‘Give AC Grayling’s new college a chance’: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/07/give-grayling-new-college-humanities-chance
8. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
9. See Y Mather, ‘Defend academic freedom from corporate conformism’ Weekly Worker April 21.
10. www.agr.org.uk/Content/AGR-A-manifesto-for-graduate-recruitment
11. See www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2011/jun/07/university-tuition-fees-controversy-live-blog?INTCMP=SRCH
12. Unison Sheffield leaflet, June 10.