Grayling and Dawkins set up new humanities college

Fourteen leading academics, including AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson, have announced plans to set up a private university college. But will these stars of their respective fields have time to break away from their busy careers to teach their students?

The New College of the Humanities will be based in Bloomsbury, in the shadow of University College, London and will be funded to the tune of £10m by City investors, Grayling and the professors themselves, almost all of whom have bought shares in it, according to the Sunday Times.

The college, which will award its students University of London degrees, is hoping to rival Oxford and Cambridge educationally. It will certainly surpass both of those venerable institutions in terms of tuition fees, which will be £18,000 per year.

In return for paying double the maximum fees permitted by the government in publicly funded universities, NCH students will be taught by the cream of British and American academia.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, historian Niall Ferguson and geneticist Steve Jones will join philosopher AC Grayling. Interestingly for a humanities college, more than a quarter of the named professors are most noted for their work in the sciences.

This is because, although students will be able to choose from degrees in Literature, History, Philosophy, Economics and Law, they will all take courses in Science Literacy, Logic and Critical Thinking, and Applied Ethics.

Grayling says he realises that eyebrows will be raised at the sight of professors, "almost all" of whom are "pinko", founding a private college with fees double the maximum allowed in public universities, but the group believes arts and humanities courses are going to close thanks to government cuts and something has to be done. Grayling calls NCH a ''new model of higher education for the humanities in the UK''.

For Britain, maybe, but Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, points out that what Grayling et al plan is essentially an American liberal arts college, where students are exposed to a range of academic subjects before choosing their 'major'.

Beard suggests that the professors are giving up on mainstream university education too soon: "Directing their considerable energies to the new independent enterprise will mean that they have much less energy to direct to what is happening across the state funded (or 'unfunded') humanities in general."

She also warns students planning to stump up £18,000 that they may get less than they were bargaining for because the academic stars will probably not have much time for their students: "I really don't imagine that those with full-time jobs in the USA will be giving those jobs up; they will make it to New College at most for a few weeks a year." ·