The philosopher, his dream for an Oxbridge in London and a rumpus on campus

Richard Godwin
8 Jun 2011

Arriving at AC Grayling's home is unavoidably like turning up for an Oxbridge tutorial. The professor answers the door, one hand cupping his phone to his ear, one hand restraining his mongrel.

"Don't worry, she's very nice. Misty, stop that!" The 18th-century hairdo is accessorised with fleece and tie. He gestures me into a handsome room, landscaped with books - A Short History of Atheism, a slim volume on the Oxford Tutorial, plus various works by AC Grayling catch the eye.

I hope he doesn't ask me about Aristotle, I'm thinking - but today, it is the professor who faces inquisition.

The philosophy don and soon-to-be president of the British Humanist Association has caused a storm by announcing he plans to leave his post at Birkbeck to set up an elite private university.

The New College of the Humanities will open in London in September 2012 with an X-Men style line-up of academics, including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Christopher Ricks. Based in Bloomsbury, it will charge students £18,000 a year for courses in philosophy, history and literature (and combinations thereof), plus law and economics.

The headlines proclaimed a new rival to Oxbridge. Commentators including Mayor Boris Johnson cheered the enterprise, which will exist outside the state sector, funded by £10million of private investment. Reaction from students and fellow academics has ranged from cynical to hopping mad.

Birkbeck student union president Sean Rillo Raczka said: "I'm disgusted that Professor Grayling has started a private college charging £18,000 a year while professing that he believes in free education. Not only is his so-called 'college' dubious in itself but it will cater to rich students willing to pay exorbitant fees for a celebrity education, excluding ordinary people."

Writing in the Guardian, Professor Terry Eagleton called the scheme "disgustingly elitist" and the 14 dons (who each have shares in the institution) "money-grabbing", warning that if an American-style system of private liberal arts colleges takes root in Britain, it could relegate state-funded universities to second-tier status.

Despite his benign appearance, sipping tea and nuzzling Misty, Anthony Clifford Grayling, 62, is not shy of a fight. For years, he was content to pop up on current affairs programmes pouring a gentle, rationalist perspective on the day's news from the toby jug of his head.

This year, however, he had the brass balls to publish The Good Book: A Secular Bible, which he still claims is an improvement on the original, despite one of the most toothsome literary savagings in recent memory ("The Good Book is unreadable, not merely just because it is boring but because it is nauseating", said the Standard's David Sexton).

If it is disconcerting to be attacked by former associates now, he doesn't seem too dismayed. The rules of the game, he says, have changed.

He is angry at successive governments' reduction in funding for universities and has been gestating the idea for a new institution since tuition fees were introduced in 1998. The problems are most acute in the humanities, where the teaching budget has been eliminated altogether (hence the need for most universities to charge £9,000).

Grayling is adamant that in an ideal world, he would not be doing this - but as a rationalist, he realises we do not live in an ideal world. So "the choice is, you can either scream and yell and complain about what's happening - and what's happening is terrible. Or you can do something about it."

He claims that he is not setting up the NCH outside the public system to compete with Oxbridge. That's "press hyperbole". But there is excess demand at the top end of the education "market", and he does not believe we should continue to lose bright pupils to foreign universities, which are more than willing to court their minds and money. He is not looking for profit, though he admires the American system where students pay the "true cost" of a degree - and the NCH will turn a profit.

So what will it look like? The campus will be in Bedford Square, with teaching rooms and libraries shared with the University of London. There will be around 1,000 undergraduates when it hits full capacity, with candidates applying outside the Ucas system (only those confident of three As need get in touch).

NCH students will graduate with an extra diploma to take into account their extra classes in logic, scientific literacy and applied ethics, plus financial literacy (implemented after consultation with businesses). Students are promised 12 teaching hours per week, including one-on-one tutorials.

It should be stressed that the 14 telegenic X-Dons will not be giving those tutorials - instead, they will be more like visiting lecturers (and handsomely paid for it, Dawkins has admitted).

Most of the teaching will be done by new recruits, who will be offered 25 per cent more than the market rate, plus - and this is quite a promise - liberation from administration. "We're saying to them: you've got to be dedicated teachers, and you've got to be dedicated to your work - and we pay you a premium."

Grayling is irritated at claims that this is an institution for the rich. "Of course we want to be elite in the sense that you want your airline pilot to have been taught at an elite institution - elite but not exclusive, that's the point." To this end, in the first year, 20 per cent of places will be subsidised - with one third of those students (so, 6.66 per cent) being educated for free. The aim is to have 30 per cent of places subsidised in later years.

For all that, he admits that "it's, er, not unlikely that, er, a substantial proportion of pupils will come from that kind of background," he says - meaning from public schools. Grayling himself has two grown-up children from his first marriage, plus a stepson and daughter from his current marriage to the novelist Katie Hickman: they school at Marlborough and Queensgate respectively. The NCH fee "seems like a lot of money from one point of view, but if you're really committed, you'd do anything to provide your kids with a good start". Provided you have the means. "Well, you make the means."

For all his rheumy-eyed evangelism, there are a couple of worries. He tells me that students will graduate with University of London International degrees, but the university has said that there is "no formal agreement concerning academic matters". He also says that NCH students will be able to take out loans in the normal manner, which contradicts what the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills tells me: loans are a form of government subsidy, after all, and NCH exists outside the state system. "Oh! Does that mean they've changed the game again?" Grayling says when I mention this. Does that mean it will be even less affordable for poor students?

I am also puzzled as to the name: he admits that the Warden of New College, Oxford has emailed him wondering why he chose that. You could have called yourself Bloomsbury College, I say. "Yes, but then you think of Virginia Woolf looking mournful. No, we think New College of the Humanities works pretty well, has the right kind of resonance."

At around this point, the doorbell rings and I nip to the loo. I count no fewer than nine canisters of hairspray on the "his" side of the sink (Pantene's Ice Hold would appear to be the favourite). I am still processing this information when I return, to be greeted by Misty. The photographer has arrived: "Misty likes having her photo taken but everyone will say on Twitter that we have the same hair," Grayling observes.

Tempting though it is to dwell on this (were some of the products Misty's?), I broach the personalities of some of the academics involved.

"The answer to the question you're about to ask is a higher education institution exists to teach how to think, not what to think. So the fact that there are a bunch of atheists involved in this doesn't mean anything."

Actually, I was going to say that they're all quite publicity-seeking. He seems rather taken aback. "Ooh is that really so? Well, I don't know about that so much. Are they? Richard Dawkins gets noticed a lot because of his firm views about things who else?"

Niall Ferguson, who constantly complains that he has been shunned by British academia for his pro-empire worldview?

"Yes, Niall Ferguson yes. He could conceivably be described as fitting the description you mentioned. And Richard Dawkins is perceived as fitting the description "

And you yourself did commit the not entirely self-effacing act of rewriting the Bible. He mutters that the timing of the university announcement, with The Good Book fresh in mind, is "a nuisance" and even speculates about the coincidence of both of these long-gestated projects coming into the world at the same time: "It does make you think maybe the disposition of the stars has something to do with it." That's not very rational, AC!

But still, about that rather astonishing book. He considers the charge of arrogance "a bit surprising" as he feels himself to be "a very modest character. Not, er, aspiring to be a deity or anything like that. But a lot of the criticisms if I allude to Teucer firing his arrows behind the shield of Ajax, you might grasp what I mean." I don't. "I mean, the Good Book is made out of Aristotle and Pliny, Seneca and Confucius and all these great people, and I've just brought together their insights. So when they criticise it, they're criticising them, not me."

But you rewrote them all - and you didn't credit them!

"Yeah, it was great fun. Terrific!" He giggles. "You think it's an act of hubris." He explains that Shakespeare never quoted his sources, so why should he? "And when were Aristotle and Cicero last in the Top 10 of the Sunday Times bestseller list? Now there's something." A clever way to make money off someone else's ideas, I suppose - a charge levelled at him by former UCL colleagues, who claim he has copied their courses for the NCH.

We move on to God, the belief in whom he equates to a belief in fairies, which strikes me as weirdly childish. It leads him to offer the observation that "people who do not unthinkingly adopt the religion of their culture, which 99 per cent of people do, are under a special duty to think harder about ethical questions". I wonder if, as part of that one per cent of the elect, it was his philosophy that animated him into action. This seems to please him.

"If you're in a position to make use of the resources you've got, like a reputation or money, I think you should. You can't fiddle while Rome burns."

As for those who decry him (a protest is planned at his appearance at Foyles today), he would like to remind them that he is on their side.

"There's a lot of anger around - about the fees, about the constraints," he says, giving Misty one last stroke. "There is also anger of a different kind, that there a fees at all. I'm angry about that. We wouldn't be doing this if there were proper resources for universities. It's an unhappy environment. What we must hope is that really good intentions somehow get us through it."

Additional reporting by Joshua Neicho

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