Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The New School for Social Research, now a thriving institution (well, it always was a well respected and busy one)

 MY NOTE: Oops, when I wrote about this for Google Plus I think I said John Kerrey had been the head of the School recently-- it was Bob Kerrey. (Right church, wrong pew as they used to say).

Intellectually speaking, the New School for Social Research at the North End of Greenwich 
Village has always been an active and academically very respected place. It has long outgrown its old building on East 11th Street, though...and currently rents office space all over the area...you can see these "New School" banners hanging every which way...

These days  its new main building at  Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street is nearing completion..

The New School became intellectually so prominent when it offered a home to many scholars fleeing Hitler in Europe in the 1930's. Pretty much all leftish, and almost all Jewish...

Around 1970 I had a friend from high school, Deborah Eisenberg (now a MacArthur "genius" short story writer and teacher at Columbia) who attended classes there. She said it was a strange place to go to school but she obviously enjoyed it very much.

She worked to put her way through as a waitress and a lot of jobs such as being a photographer's model for what were pretty much girlie shots...she found it fun.  Sort of like when Gloria Steinem worked as a Playboy bunny...

The only anecdote I remember about someone from the New School was the social scientist Theo Adorno, who did a lot of very erudite work and went back to Germany to teach at a University there in the 1960's.

Such was the zealous serious minded political nature of the students that one young woman disrobed defiantly during one of his classes as a protest against his "praxis," ( academic jargon meaning he did not live totally according to the ideas and values he taught in his classes).

This of course produced some amusement and titillation at the time...especially because it involved some so starchy and respectable as Theo Adorno, the Herr Professor incarnate.

Here is what we get from the internet...I myself find it extremely interesting, but you won't find too many accounts of young women stripping off in class or anything in this history..YES, this is definitely high brow intellectual territory


The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University. The university and each of its colleges were re-branded to their current names in 2005.

The school is renowned for its teaching, housing the international think tank, World Policy Institute, and hosting the prestigious National Book Awards. Parsons The New School for Design is the university's highly competitive art school.

Some 9,300 students are enrolled in graduate and undergraduate degree programs, organized into seven different schools, which teach a variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, liberal arts, humanities, architecture, fine arts, design, music, drama, finance, psychology and public policy.[7]
The graduate school of The New School began in 1933 as the University in Exile, an emergency rescue program for threatened scholars in Europe. In 1934 it was chartered by the New York state board of regents and its name was changed to the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, a name it would keep until 2005 when it was renamed New School for Social Research.

History

Founding

The New School for Social Research was founded by a group of university professors and intellectuals in 1919 as a modern, progressive free school where adult students could "seek an unbiased understanding of the existing order, its genesis, growth and present working."[8] Founders included economist and literary scholar Alvin Johnson, historian Charles A. Beard, economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson, and philosophers Horace M. Kallen and John Dewey. Several founders were former professors at Columbia University.

The school was conceived and founded during a period of fevered nationalism, deep suspicion of foreigners, and increased censorship and suppression during and after the involvement of the United States in World War I.[citation needed]

In October 1917, after Columbia University passed a resolution that imposed a loyalty oath to the United States government upon the entire faculty and student body,[9] the board of trustees fired Professor of Psychology and Head of the Department James McKeen Cattell for having sent a petition to three US congressmen, asking them not to support legislation for military conscription.[10] Other firings included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana (grandson of the poet) and Leon Fraser. Charles A. Beard, Professor of Political Science, resigned his professorship at Columbia in protest. James Harvey Robinson, an associate of Beard's at Columbia and Professor of History, commented on the resignation: "It is not that any of us are pro-German or disloyal. It is simply that we fear that a condition of repression may arise in this country similar to that which we laughed at in Germany."[11] Robinson would resign in 1919 to join the faculty at the New School.

Founder Charles A. Beard had, in 1899, collaborated with Walter Vrooman at Oxford to start Ruskin Hall, a progressive institution of higher learning for workingmen. The New School would offer the rigorousness of postgraduate education without degree matriculation or degree prerequisites. It was theoretically open to anyone, as the adult division today called The New School for Public Engagement remains.[12] The first classes at the New School took the form of lectures followed by discussions, for larger groups, or as smaller conferences, for "those equipped for specific research." In the first semester, 100 courses, mostly in economics and politics, were offered by an ad hoc faculty that included Thomas Sewall Adams, Charles A. Beard, Horace M. Kallen, Harold Laski, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson, Graham Wallas, Charles B. Davenport, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Roscoe Pound.[13] John Cage later pioneered the subject of Experimental Composition at the school.[14]

University in Exile

The University in Exile was founded in 1933 as a graduate division of the New School for Social Research to be a haven for scholars who had been dismissed from teaching positions by the Italian fascists or had to flee Nazi Germany.[15] The University in Exile was initially founded by the director of the New School, Alvin Johnson, through the generous financial contributions of Hiram Halle and the Rockefeller Foundation. It was later renamed the "Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science", and bore this name until changing to its present one in 2005. The University in Exile and its subsequent incarnations have been the intellectual heart of the New School. Notable scholars associated with the University in Exile include psychologists Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer and Aron Gurwitsch, political philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, and philosopher Hans Jonas.
The New School played a similar role with the founding of the École Libre des Hautes Études after the Nazi invasion of France. Receiving a charter from de Gaulle's Free French government in exile, the École attracted refugee scholars who taught in French, including philosopher Jacques Maritain, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and linguist Roman Jakobson. The École Libre gradually evolved into one of the leading institutions of research in Paris, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, with which the New School maintains close ties.

Between 1940 and 1949, the New School was host to the "Dramatic Workshop", a theatre workshop and predecessor of The New School for Drama that was founded by German emigrant theatre director Erwin Piscator. Important acting teachers during this period were Stella Adler and Elia Kazan. Among the famous students of the Dramatic Workshop were Beatrice Arthur, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Michael V. Gazzo, Rod Steiger, Elaine Stritch, Shelley Winters and Tennessee Williams.[16]

Following the collapse of totalitarian regimes in Europe, the University in Exile was renamed the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. In 2005 the Graduate Faculty was again renamed, this time taking the original name of the university, the New School for Social Research.
I attended The New School for Social Research for only a year, but what a year it was. The school and New York itself had become a sanctuary for hundreds of extraordinary European Jews who had fled Germany and other countries before and during World War II, and they were enriching the city's intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time.
Marlon Brando, actor (former New School student[17])
Jack Kerouac also attended the New School in the fall of 1949 under the G.I. benefits scheme for returned service men and women, which included a stipend and book allowance. Kerouac took Meyer Shapiro's course on the French Impressionists, Alfred Kazin's course on Melville's Moby Dick, and Harry Slochower's course on myth. Shapiro's and Kazin's teaching was described as "brilliant" and "inspiring"; Slochower however "was a bore with a Marxist viewpoint who treated myth like merchandise."[18]

Philosophical tradition

The New School continues the Graduate Faculty's tradition of synthesizing leftist American intellectual thought and critical European philosophy. True to its origin and its firm roots within the University in Exile, The New School, particularly its Department of Philosophy, is in the minority in the United States in offering students thorough training in the modern continental European philosophical tradition known as "Continental philosophy." Thus, it stresses the teachings of Parmenides, Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et al.[19] The thought of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School: Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, et al. holds an especially strong influence on all divisions of the school. After the death of Hannah Arendt in 1975, the philosophy department revolved around Reiner Schürmann and Agnes Heller.

2000s

Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey became president of The New School in 2000. Kerrey drew praise and criticism for his streamlining of the university, as well as censure for his support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, generally opposed by the university's faculty.[20] In 2004, Kerrey appointed Arjun Appadurai as provost. Appadurai resigned as provost in early 2006, but retained a tenured faculty position. He was succeeded by Joseph Westphal, yet on December 8, 2008 Kerrey announced that Westphal was stepping down to accept a position in President Barack Obama's Department of Defense transition team. Kerrey then took the highly unorthodox step of appointing himself to the provost position while remaining president. This decision was strongly criticised by faculty and other members of the university community as a power-grab involving potential conflicts of interest. This was seen as a threat to scholarly integrity since the role of provost in overseeing the academic functions of a university has traditionally been insulated from fundraising and other responsibilities of a college president. After a series of rifts including protests involving student occupations of university buildings, Kerrey later appointed Tim Marshall, Dean of Parsons The New School for Design, as Interim Provost through June 2011. Marshall has since been reappointed in this role.
On May 7, 2009, Kerrey announced he would fulfill his presidency at the University through the end of his term and expressed his intent to leave office in June 2011.[21] However, he ended up resigning a semester early, on January 1, 2011.[22] His successor was Dr. David E. Van Zandt.[23]

Academics

Curriculum

Unlike most US universities, The New School has a "student-directed curriculum", which does not require its undergraduates to take general education courses. Instead, students are encouraged to explore before focusing on a major, selecting topics that are of interest to them. Although all "New Schoolers" are required to complete rigorous core training - usually of a literary, conservatory, or artistic nature - students are expected to be the primary designer of their own individualized and eclectic education.

The New School's curriculum is highly experimental and avant-garde, offering classes such as: "Heterodox Identities", "Games 101", "NYC: Graphic Gotham", "Punk & Noise", "Masculinity in Asia," "Queer Culture", "Theories of Mind", and "Play and Toil in the Digital Sweatshop".[24]
The university offers 81 degree/diploma programs and majors, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 9:1.[25] This small class size allows The New School to teach most of its classes in the seminar style — especially at Eugene Lang College, which consistently ranks at the top of The Princeton Review's "class discussions encouraged" national listing.[26]

The New School Institutes and Research Centers

There are several important Institutes and Research Centers at The New School which are focused on various study fields. Their work is concentrated in the following areas:
  • International Affairs and Global Perspectives
  • Philosophy and Intellectual Culture
  • Politics, Policy, and Society
  • Art, Design, and Theory
  • Environment
  • Urban and Community Development
  • Education
  • The Center for New York City Affairs

Academic journals

The New School publishes the following journals:

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