Eagleton on Grayling University

[sawyl]

Today's Guardian featured a furious opinion piece by Terry Eagleton, raging against Grayling et al. and their plans for a private university. While it's rather entertaining, I'm not sure it's terribly rigorous. For example, Eagleton claims that:

To mention Mill in the same breath as Grayling, however, is to do a great liberal a grave disservice. Mill refused to allow his passion for freedom to blind him to gross inequality. By contrast Grayling is the kind of liberal who is prepared to let equality go hang.

And yet it's perfectly possible to imagine a Rawlsian liberal accepting just such an inequality, provided that charging rich kids 18k a year for a liberal arts education is offset by something that ensures that the worst off benefit more than they would otherwise, by, say, providing them with educational opportunities that they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise, subsidised by those paying through the nose for Grayling's super expensive college.

Indeed Rawls himself somehow managed to combine his work on distributive justice with a 40 year career at Harvard, so there are prima facie reasons for suspecting that it may be possible for people to reconcile their own liberal values with the private provision of university education.

Whereas Eagleton's position on private universities looks slightly wobbly given that he's "Excellence in English Distinguished Visitor in the Department of English" at Notre Dame, where the fees are, ahem, a mere $39,919 a year...

ETA: Sarah Churchwell's response to Eagleton (and Grayling U) is sharp and informative:

What the US system shares with the UK is that most of its state-funded universities are going broke, partly because both nations are full of people who fervently believe in the principle of universal education and just as fervently object to paying higher taxes or tuition fees...

Let's be clear about one thing: the people selling out the study of humanities in this country are not AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins, but those on both sides of the political aisle in Whitehall who agreed to publicly fund only the Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). The government already plans to rely solely on fee-paying students to finance university humanities. At least the NCH believes the study of the humanities is worth £18,000 a year.