Among the near universal expressions of dismay that greeted the announcement of the establishment of Grayling Hall, renamed the New College of the Humanities, there was some lamenting that iconic self-professed humanists, most of whom had been thought to exemplify the humanities’ most fundamental values, had betrayed the field by setting up an institution so openly tangled with the profit principle. Some argued that AC Grayling has forfeited his membership of the British Humanist Association in so openly throwing in his lot with elitism and venture capitalism; under this pressure, he has resigned as President-elect of the BHA. How could they do this, the refrain goes, or rather, how could they, these distant stars of the pinko galaxy? For Grayling himself, this has apparently been the source of personal grief: “Having been, in some respects, for some constituencies, Mr Nice Guy for some time, it is hard work and upsetting to be Mr Bad Guy.”

In his own mind, he is still very much Mr Nice Guy. This is because Grayling and Co. have explained their establishment of a for-profit educational institution charging twice the recently tripled national fee ceiling of £9000 precisely in terms of a principled but pragmatic defence of the humanities, even “a way of preserving academic freedom and solving the funding crisis in the Humanities”, no less, as Toby Young, influential advocate of so-called “Free Schools” puts it. The argument runs something like this: we all believe in public funding for the arts and humanities but the humanities are not going to be funded by the government, the public support for them has run out, they must be saved from extinction, someone has to do something and here we are, fighting the good fight. Insisting on a continued commitment to the principle of public education, they undertake the practice of privately funded and thus, restricted institutions. As Simon Hewitt puts it in his blog, this is suspiciously close to the formulation, ‘I am not a racist but….’

This rationale is also accepted in principle by many other liberals who profess concern about the move but applaud, as did Gareth Thomas, shadow minister for universities, the ‘enterprise’ it shows. Thus, classics don Mary Beard observes in The Times Literary Supplement: ‘someone has to get off their ass and take the teaching into their own hands…maybe one simply has to set up a new show outside of all that silliness’, as though the sustained and systematic assault by late capitalism on anything not reducible to the profit principle was just so much juvenile tomfoolery. Or there’s academic Sarah Churchwell exclaiming in the Guardian: “At least the NCH believes the study of the humanities is worth £18,000 a year.” The ‘soft’ subjects, in other words, need to ‘get real’, stare the ‘hard facts’ in the face and respond with muscular determination, fighting the privatising cuts through a fierce dose of privatisation.

This is why there’s no point in dismissing the enterprise of Grayling Hall and the handful of celebs who are its stakeholders as entirely Other to the general public-spiritedness of the humanities and its disciplinary liberalism, , or to use Terry Eagleton’s trenchant formulation, “a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded.” In trying to understand the creeping, tacit approval of fully privatized fees-based higher education as the proper way to ‘defend’ of the humanities (which is likely to gather strength unless resisted strenuously), it might be worth thinking about why the humanities have arrived at this pass. For there is a sense in which Grayling Hall is not so much a betrayal as the unsurprising outcome of how practitioners in the humanities as a disciplinary formation—even if not as individuals or even as smaller communities within that discipline—have conducted themselves collectively in the name of ‘pragmatism’, both within in the academy and in the world beyond.

However unpalatable it may seem, Grayling Hall is at least partly a reflection of how we scholars in the humanities have made or failed to make history in institutional and political circumstances not of our own choosing. Writing some months ago in the London Review of Books, Paul Myerscough observed correctly: ‘Rather than bend their minds to ways they might collectively resist the government’s reforms, many academics are, as [Iain] Pears put it… [continuing] their “habitual struggle to game the system as best as they can”.’ It is, he argued, ‘a community divided against itself as never before.’ This enables the oldest trick in the book, divide and rule, to then be deployed with some ease: anyone in universities who has attempted to organise academics in recent months has seen this quite clearly for themselves. Thus, Myerscough concludes, ‘academics, who are unused to the grit of politics and have little taste for it, haven’t yet found the means, or the shared will, to fight back.’

In this accurately described scenario, far too many liberal-minded academics, even ones who express concern about the erosion of publicly funded teaching in the humanities, are now inclined to regard Grayling’s initiative as a form of fighting back, an admirable ‘Plan B’ even if they have reservations about it. This is indicative of how Grayling Hall is, in some ways, a monster created both by academic passivity and by a narrowing of the scope of the humanities itself. In their attempts to ‘game the system,’ many dons accepted the idea that the humanities had to provide narrowly defined ‘transferable skills’ with applications outside the field and more recently, despite a lot of muttering, that their research had to show measurable social ‘impact’ in order to maintain funding levels for departments. In the name of ‘pragmatism’ or ‘realism’ (words which tend to mean little other than ‘let’s accept the way things are since it’s easier than fighting’), academics have failed to challenge the terms set out by the corporate, industrial and business interests that have annexed the terrain of thinking altogether. And so the Grayling Hall prospectus informs prospective graduates: “Professional Skills will give you the tools to write well, present your ideas, lead and work in teams, read a balance sheet, and understand the worlds of finance, business and employment. You will be ready to make an immediate contribution in business, government, media or the arts following graduation.” This is not so much a new and monstrous development as a reminder, as one blogger on Arts-Emergency.org put it, “of the failure of passive liberalism – of what happens when leading thinkers simply accept the cards laid out by the government.”

In the midst of the understandable focus on the institutional and ideological implications of setting up a private college (with aspirations to university status) with professors as shareholders, let us not overlook the way in which the humanities are being defined by Grayling Hall if its unique selling point, a glitzy international (i.e. British and American) professoriate, is anything to go by. The luminaries listed on the blingversity’s website include many of the world’s most renowned votaries of the superiority of Western civilisation, advocates of a narrow and parochial humanism defined as a Western possession, indeed in some cases, specifically, if implicitly, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. This is the kind of narrow humanism which is also embedded in a constitutively elitist institutional rationale, notwithstanding the paternalist nods to the Deserving Poor who will get scholarships. It’s the kind of parochialism masquerading as humanism which Edward Said once described as ‘condemning whole races and classes to eternal backwardness….in the worst Darwinian sense that some people deserve ignorance, poverty, ill-health and backwardness, according to the free market, while others can somehow be fashioned by think-tank projects and policies into the new elites’. Alongside the intolerant high rationalism of some of its luminaries, the Grayling Hall pantheon also represents, of course, a return to class homogeneity.

So what can we academics do if we are not to be deluded into thinking that this kind of ‘initiative’, a caving in to the interests of corporate capitalism, is the way to save the humanities? What can be done? For one thing, it is essential that academics and scholars in the humanities start mounting a serious defence of what they do as a social and public good. In the process, they must challenge the privileging of financial profit as the only measurable and legitimate form of good, and do so far more strenuously than they have done so far. There is also, as Masao Miyoshi once remarked, a certain lack of self-respect within the humanities that has accounted for its ongoing vulnerability to attrition and assault by corporate interests. At best the humanities are seen as harmless, at worst, useless. This must change and the only way to do that is to recover and demonstrate the power of independent and critical thinking. We must stop being complicit in this assault through passivity, silence and what can only be regarded as a form of learned helplessness that likes to call itself pragmatism.

Cocooned in their professional circuits, academics have become ‘harried, docile, and disempowered’, as William Deresciewicz put it in an article for The Nation about the state of American universities: ‘For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially non-existent as a collective voice’. Although many have started speaking up in recent months, academics, those in the humanities in particular, have failed to mount a sufficiently robust defence of the university and their own fields. The case of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s despicable and corrupt designation of the Conservatives’ ‘Big Society’ slogan as an official research area is a case in point. Although a handful of courageous members of the Peer Review College have resigned in protest at this open complicity with a partisan political agenda, and although a few thousand academics did indeed sign protest petitions, over 90% of Peer Reviewers have remained quiet and quiescent in the face of this scandal. This is an unacceptable and harmful level of passivity.

Grayling Hall’s own roster should remind us of the fundamental difference between media-savvy elitist dons and public intellectuals who genuinely speak for the idea and reality of the public. Real intellectuals do not just endorse and amplify the status quo; they must retain a sturdy independence and, as that great public intellectual, Edward Said reminded us, seek to speak out against the normalization of greed and elitism. The role of the intellectual is to publicly confront orthodoxy, power and privilege. Not, like Grayling Hall and its roster of designer “pinkos”, produce and entrench them.

Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She writes political and cultural comment for the Guardian and is the author of ‘The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration’.