I couldn't let the recent hoo-ha regarding AC Grayling's efforts to launch a new private university concept in London pass without some kind of comment.
It's not that I particularly care what a bunch of semi-retired professors do with their spare time, how they fund it or how much they think its worth, ultimately commercial value is whatever someone is prepared to pay. We live in a society (UK) that is organised around freedom to pursue personal financial and developmental goals within the law, if we allow this for some then we should allow it for all, and let's face it paying for education is hardly a precedent past, present or future.
What interests me in this is the content and nature of the criticism levelled against this initiative, there seems to be two sides to it, firstly we have a bunch of students who are focusing on the money and secondly we have the religious apologists who seem to be fixated on some cocktail of anti-atheism, loathing of science and general scaremongering against sliding toward an "American system".
Students recently heckled and smoke bombed a launch talk that Grayling held in Foyles bookshop in London, leading to people having to be evacuated from the building. From the commentary about the event and a related heckling of Richard Dawkins at an event hosted by the British Humanist Association, it seems that the students are against people wanting to charge for education services or perhaps the concept of private education generally. Whilst I can agree that a universally free system may be an ideal worth fighting for as a safety net for everyone, it can never be the only solution, one size fits all doesn't work and ultimately (within the law) who should dictate what people spend their own money on? It seems somewhat hypocritical of a bunch of higher education recipients complaining about professors wanting to make money when getting a better job and making more money is generally the whole point of getting a higher education for most people in the first place. It seems to me that it would be far better and more fruitful if the students focused their attention on our Government; IMO the primary source of cock-eyed and short sighted educational resource decision making.
Then we have the apologists, there are a bunch of theological commentators out there who appear to want to attack the so called "new atheists" at every turn, regardless of the subject. I suppose I can understand this, after all we are diametrically opposed to most of their views, chalk and cheese, oil and water, cats and dogs, natural adversaries you might say. In a piece in the Guardian Terry Eagleton bitterly criticised the initiative, calling it "odious". Eagleton is a well known literary critic and religious apologist, raised a Catholic he exhibits may of the a priori laden intellectual positions in his writings that are characteristic of that organisation. I came across him in connection with his critique of Dawkins book "The God Delusion", which I can summarise for you simply by saying "how dare a mere scientist criticize theology?". I found the whole premise of his book that a scientist can't comment on theology totally vacuous, especially when that's not what Dawkins actually comments on; Dawkins focuses on reality and science, something Eagleton demonstrates scant regard for and hopeless ignorance of and yet feels amply qualified to comment on it ad nausea, such is the mind of the theologian. We don't need to study the arcana of drawing up horoscopes to know that astrology is bunk in the same way that we do not need to spend years poring over the scribblings of Aquinas to see that his God is a phantasm, Eagleton's argument is a grand exercise in avoidance.
Putting Eagleton's Christian indoctrination laden rantings to one side I feel there is an idea much more central to this debate; that of the two cultures war thesis first popularised by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow. In a lecture back in the 50s Snow put forward the idea that there exists a widening divide between the humanities and science in our society, a rift that may be harmful if allowed to continue unchecked. I am somewhat sympathetic to this idea, I certainly see and read some strange perceptions of science among non-scientists and even in trivial ways many people think it's cool to be ignorant of our understanding of reality, preferring illusion or magic, the reality TV effect perhaps. Snow sums it up well in the following quote,
I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, Have you noticed how the word "intellectual" is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me? It does seem rather odd, don't y'know.
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
So is this really an argument about money and privilege or are there deeper divisions being played out here, can we honestly say that selecting rich liberal students by charging a big fee is any more elitist than selecting students by which church they attend? Does the ideal of providing free higher education trump giving adults the freedom to educate themselves however they wish, I for one hope the experiment will succeed and become more accessible over time, it will certainly be interesting to see how it plays out.
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