Classics college wooing Oxford

The Granville County town could be home of a for-profit liberal arts school

DURHAM -- Gary Hull thinks today's colleges are failing, and he believes he has a better way.

Hull, who teaches at Duke University, plans to start a liberal-arts college in the fall of 2007. His plan is to operate it as a for-profit business, with investors, a copyrighted curriculum and a bottom line.

And the school may be coming to Oxford in Granville County, where it has received a warm welcome from the area's economic development commission. The company is also looking at locations in Virginia and Maine.

Called Founders College, the school would offer programs in liberal arts and business and a classic curriculum in philosophy, history, economics and literature, Hull says. He hopes to start with 100 students the first year and build to 500 by the fifth year. Tuition would be about $22,000 a year, Hull says, and the school would have no sports teams.

Hull has some ideas that would be radical to many in higher education. He calls tenure "bizarre" and academic freedom a bogus idea. He believes tuition should drop as universities work to become more efficient. Most of all, though, he says, too many students today graduate from college ignorant because they've been taught hyper-specialized courses with no context.

Hull, 49, is not modest when he talks about Founders' set curriculum, which places heavy emphasis on the "great ideas" of civilization. He says he wants to train students' minds and teach them to write clearly.

"This is, without exaggeration, a revolutionary approach to a college curriculum," he says.

Most colleges have a smorgasbord approach, he says, and give students a catalog stuffed with hundreds of courses, many of them unnecessary electives. Too often, students are bored and have no continuity in their education.

"It's just: 'Welcome to college, now pick some classes,' " he says, "and I think that's a disaster."

Hull says the college will open next year, though it has not settled on a site. He and a small group of associates have looked at land in Granville County. They considered two locations, including the campus of the Masonic Home for Children, but abandoned that idea.

Leon Turner, executive director of the Granville Economic Development Commission, says the town and county are willing to help Founders with water and sewer improvements, even a cash grant. Any package would probably be worth less than $500,000, he says.

Turner says the college would generate tax revenue and jobs and likely attract more business.

"We're still trying to do anything we can to bring them to Granville County," Turner says.

The college has applied for a license to operate in North Carolina; that decision would ultimately be made by the UNC Board of Governors, the state's licensing authority.

Hull refuses to identify the investors but says he has the financial backing.

Not based on Ayn Rand

There are other questions about the college. Its license application says Founders College will be operated by The College of Rational Education Inc., a nonprofit corporation in North Carolina. According to papers filed with the North Carolina Secretary of State's office in March 2005, The College of Rational Education "shall be exclusively operated as to provide a reality-based, rationally grounded education, by applying Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, to all of the Corporation's activities and undertakings."

Hull says that was an idea "that fell by the wayside."

At Duke, Hull is a nontenured faculty member and director of the university's Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace. He is a scholar of Rand, the novelist and philosopher who wrote "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Her philosophy emphasized individualism, rational self-interest, capitalism and limited government.