When it was first established in 2011, the New College of the Humanities — now Northeastern University London — operated out of a small townhouse in the heart of Bloomsbury, London.
The New College of the Humanities, or NCH, which merged with Northeastern in 2019, was established at a time when the humanities fields were under threat in higher education. The college’s founder, British philosopher Anthony Clifford Grayling, assembled prominent academics in the United Kingdom and decided to build an institution that would focus exclusively on preserving the humanities.
While NCH’s acclaimed faculty and desirable location made it promising, building an institution from scratch proved to be a challenge. Owned by a for-profit company without degree-granting powers the college generated a negative stir in U.K. higher education. By 2018, the small London school was struggling to meet financial goals and looking for a silver bullet.
When Northeastern — a university with a student body nearly a thousand times NCH’s size — stepped in to acquire the ailing college in 2018, some of NCH’s stated goals were set aside. Now, NU London is trying to weave the humanities throughout its new programs, attempting to reconcile its original mission with the STEM focus that Northeastern often prioritizes at satellite campuses.
“Part of the vision [for NCH] was a little bit of a zoo for endangered species,” said Catherine Brown, who served as the founding head of the English department at NCH after being recruited from teaching English literature at Oxford University. The college, situated in Bedford Square, began with a 210-person student body and was one of the few private colleges in the country. In 2015, the latest official record, there were only eight private higher education institutions in the U.K. with degree-granting powers.
At the time, U.K. universities were incentivizing faculty to turn out more research rather than teaching while students were paying thousands more for university, in comparison to the historically free education previous generations of U.K. residents had access to, Brown said (In 1998, public universities began charging fees for the first time. Today, typical public university fees total £9,000, or around $11,200, per year).
“You can see the contradiction here at the time, that students or their parents or guardians are paying ever more [while] the attention they’re getting from faculty is getting ever less because of these incentives toward research,” Brown said.
The teaching methods NCH employed, namely Oxford tutorials wherein students would receive one-on-one lessons from professors, were suited for better teacher engagement, Brown said. Many of the founding faculty members were former Oxford University professors.
Soon after its opening, however, NCH faced a variety of challenges, including negative press attention due to its fees being double that of a public U.K. university. In response, the college lowered their yearly tuition from £18,000 to £9,325 in 2017, which is about $25,000 to $13,000 in U.S. dollars.
In addition, NCH was further hurt by the U.K. lifting its student enrollment cap in 2012. The cap had originally encouraged students to choose lesser-known or less-prestigious universities by requiring institutions to stop recruiting when they reached a certain faculty-to-student ratio. With the cap lifted, recognizable universities accepted more students, and smaller institutions struggled to fill incoming classes.
“It turned out that it was extremely difficult to found a completely new higher education institution in the U.K.,” Brown said. “It’s not a market — if we want to call it that — that is friendly to new entrants.”
Then Northeastern entered the scene.
In the 2017-18 academic year, before Northeastern acquired the school, NCH’s student body was made up of only 210 students. The acquisition in 2018 increased the number of students at the university twofold by 2021, turning the trajectory of the small college around and tying it to a university with full degree-granting powers. It also made Northeastern the first U.S. university ever with the power to grant accredited degrees in the U.K.
Northeastern took on NCH’s trustees, liabilities and assets, naming the school “New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University” and later “Northeastern University London.” It then began admitting undergraduate applicants directly to the London campus.
In the 2022-23 academic year, NU London had 735 full-time students working toward a U.K. degree, according to the latest public data. The same year, 350 Global Scholar students arrived on campus each semester, a program in which students spend their first year at both Northeastern’s Oakland and London campuses. There were an additional 300 to 400 NU Bound students, now referred to as the London Scholars program, who spent their first year at the campus before moving to the flagship Boston campus. Those numbers have continued to grow as the campus nearly doubled in physical size in November with the addition of a new building.
The acquisition, Northeastern’s first official merger, was the first in a series that now includes Northeastern University Oakland, formerly Mills College, and Northeastern University New York City, formerly Marymount Manhattan College.
The acquisition originally brought uncertainty to the campus, specifically regarding exactly what NCH’s new trajectory would be, said Brian Ball, head of faculty and senior lecturer in philosophy at NU London.
“My impression is, in a way, Northeastern didn’t really know what they wanted to do with the London campus when they acquired us,” said Ball, who was recruited from Oxford University in 2012 and became a founding faculty of NCH. “They had some idea, but … weren’t really sure of it. And that was very disruptive.”
Northeastern’s media relations office declined to comment on professors’ claims the transition caused disruptions.
Ball said he thought Northeastern lacked a clear plan for what role NCH would play in the university’s broad global network.
“It has been, and probably continues to remain, an open question as to what the role of Northeastern London should be within the Northeastern global university,” said John Wolfe Ackerman, an assistant professor in politics and international relations at NU London.
The blending of the two national education systems was complicated and took Northeastern on a largely untested path. One of the first puzzles was figuring out how to translate U.K. grades into United States grades. While in the U.S., a 70 is a letter grade away from a failing grade, a grade of 70 or more on a paper in the U.K. is “exceptional,” Brown said. In the U.K., receiving a 100 on a paper is very rare.
Now, nearly every course in the small college has been changed to match its Boston equivalent, and traditional U.K. humanities degrees, such as Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and Political, Philosophy, and History, known as PPE and PPH respectively, were scrapped (Northeastern’s politics, philosophy, and economics major is only offered on the Boston and Oakland campus). Moreover, year-long courses and tutorials — one-on-one, essay-based lessons— are no longer offered.
Northeastern implemented program changes quickly and without much warning, and professors were left to make the adjustments in only a few years’ time. Northeastern media relations did not provide responses to questions from The Huntington News about how many professors were hired after the merger and how the university decided who would oversee the new departments.
“That had to happen relatively quickly. It has been labor intensive,” Ackerman said of transition to U.S. curricula.
The college also had to contend with the national differences in approaches to courses required for degrees. In the U.K., students typically only take classes related to their major, and changing their field of study midway through a degree is not possible. However, students on Northeastern’s Boston campus are expected to complete classes in disciplines outside of their major to satisfy NUpath requirements.
“We’re on a learning curve with regard to how to present your own discipline to people” studying outside of that discipline, Brown said. “There is a bit of recalibration to do when you’re teaching people your own subject but their major is something different.”
The professors who signed on to teach at a college with an exclusive focus on the humanities are now being asked to accommodate seven new STEM degrees, such as data science and psychology.
Brown said she embraces the university offering subjects beyond the humanities. Recently announced as the dean of humanics, it is now her job to make sure humanities remain central to the university by adding elements of the humanities into other fields.
“My role is not only to promote the humanics, it’s more broadly to strategize for the humanities,” Brown said. “And to say to the world, ‘We were founded as a humanities institution and the humanities remain absolutely essential to who we are and what we do.’”
After the acquisition, Ball read Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun’s 2017 book “Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” At the time, he understood it to mean that the humanities should be collaborating with STEM fields, something he quickly gained interest in.
Ball, whose academic training is in philosophy and linguistics, was tasked with overseeing computer science and psychology — two disciplines that hadn’t been offered previously at the college. He has advocated for how humanities fields such as philosophy, history and politics could use computing to further their research.
“It’s wonderful to be [full spectrum] and to have interdisciplinary research collaborations possible within the institution which weren’t possible before,” Brown said.
The university remains focused on honoring its roots in the humanities. Ackerman, who joined the college in 2019, said he hopes the university continues to advocate for the subjects that are being neglected by a wave of STEM-focused institutions.
“It’s still a moment when universities seem to be turning away from the humanities to a large extent,” Ackerman said. “I don’t think we will, but I think there’s this pressure that everybody is facing from lots of different directions.”
The university is continuing to find a place for itself in the Northeastern network. To Brown, NU London is a means for Northeastern to prioritize the humanities in an institution with a large population of STEM majors while also building a bridge to Europe. Northeastern’s media department also did not answer The News’ questions regarding any efforts it is making to honor NCH’s roots in the humanities.
This semester, the university expanded its Humanities Center — a center to support humanities and social sciences research — to the Oakland and London campuses, which Brown said will help “facilitate humanities conversations across the network.”
“Being part of Northeastern should make it more possible for Northeastern London to be, in some ways, more nimble and creative, through taking advantage of those connections and the possibilities that being part of Northeastern offers,” Ackerman said. “But the challenge at the kind of institutional, organizational level is to enable that to be the case, rather than it being the case that everyone ends up being swamped by double burdens.”
