Campus close-up: New College of the Humanities

Source: Alamy

Independent move: funding crisis will push universities to strike out on their own

Settling back on a chesterfield sofa at the £18,000-a-year New College of the Humanities, Anthony Grayling, the college’s master, reflects on a tumultuous three years.

When the college, situated in a smart Bloomsbury town house in London’s Bedford Square, opened its doors in 2012, Grayling was one of the most controversial figures in academia.

With his band of celebrity friends-turned-guest professors, he was accused of betraying the humanities and ushering in a high-fee, for-profit model that would put elite university education out of reach for the majority of students.

However, with the college’s first students due to graduate this summer, Grayling says that he feels more vindicated than ever in setting up his institution.

That is partly down to the academic performance of NCH’s first cohort, who he says achieve at least one degree classification higher on average than other students taking the University of London International Programmes – the degrees the college offers.

“Our students walk away with all the academic prizes,” he says, adding that several are heading to Oxbridge colleges for postgraduate study this autumn.

“That validates how we pick students and the teaching by my faculty, who are all research active,” he says.

However, despite the blaze of publicity that heralded the college’s opening (it featured on the front page of The Sunday Times), student numbers of about 160 are still well below the 1,000-student body mentioned three years ago. “The 1,000 students was our aim after 10 years,” Grayling points out, saying that student intake will pick up soon as the college is poised to gain the Home Office accreditation it needs to recruit international students.

“The silver lining is that we can iron out any wrinkles in how we approach teaching before we start to grow,” he says.

Nonetheless, Grayling believes that the NCH has received “not a jot of help” from the sector as it sought to navigate a “Byzantine system of obstacles”.

“Higher education is a closed shop and existing universities are not keen on competition,” he says.

“Those who sit on bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency and the Higher Education Funding Council for England do not make it easy for the new kid on the block,” he adds.

In addition to the college’s success, an impending post-election shake-up of higher education will further justify Grayling’s argument for an £18,000-a-year college, he claims.

“I feel the ground shifting under our feet,” he says, adding that an “earthquake is happening under the landscape of higher education”.

“If the Tories get in, there is a real expectation that fees will rise, while it is almost certain any deficit created by Labour’s plans for £6,000 fees will not be made up,” he predicts.

“Labour’s plans will mean universities cannot make [a deficit] up by taking more students,” he says.

Independence beckons

Whichever party – or group of parties – takes office next month, the “funding crisis will speed up the process of universities going independent”, allowing them to charge far higher fees, with the University of Cambridge likely to go first, Grayling predicts.

“They are losing about £70 million on undergraduate teaching a year while having to observe all these restrictions from the Office for Fair Access,” says Grayling, who believes the endowment model at NCH, which has raised £2.5 million so far, is a more effective way to support poorer students.

But would elite universities risk cutting themselves off from public research funding by going private?

That would not happen, argues Grayling, as UK research could not afford to cut itself off from a world-class institution such as Cambridge.

“All sorts of agencies are going to need their research,” he says, adding that “Cambridge is losing money [on teaching] big time” and “it is unsustainable”.

If private institutions were able to access large amounts of public research cash, might the NCH consider submitting itself to the next research excellence framework?

Grayling rules it out, claiming that the REF represents a “Thatcherite, industrialised idea of academic life” and the need to publish constantly is unsuited to promoting humanities scholarship.

“To mimic the sciences is to miss the way that advances are made in the humanities,” he says, adding that he would rather his academics produced a good book “every 50 years” than write endless journal articles that go unread.

“[To] produce three or four publications every four years is to fell forests for no good purpose,” he says.

jack.grove@tesglobal.com