I welcome this enterprising pinko academy

AC Grayling is founding New College of the Humanities in Bloomsbury to rival Oxbridge. But at £18,000 a year, is it only for the bright and loaded?

So AC Grayling the pinko philosopher and atheist with the impressive mane of clever hair is starting a new university. "Almost everyone associated with this [project] is a pinko academic," he says. It's true enough of most of the band of "star' academics behind his New College of the Humanities, a for-profit rival to Oxford and Cambridge in London's Bloomsbury. They include famous lefties such as Professor Linda Colley and Sir David Cannadine: the only prominent non-pinko exception is historian Niall Ferguson.

I think it's a splendid scheme. So does Boris Johnson, who says he is continually having to listen to people wailing about the unfairness of university admissions procedures and wondering if there is "some kind of secret Pol Pot-style persecution of the children of the bourgeoisie" going on. Johnson even contemplated starting a "Rejects' College" himself. "Three cheers for Grayling," he says: his project will gladden the heart "of many a grieving parent and frustrated academic".

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