Radical Teaching Then & Now

Complexities And Power, Justice and Equity Pre and Post 1968

Of course, it’s all these things. Indeed, it’s hard to engage in radical teaching without engaging both the micro and the macro structures in both K-12 and higher education. After all, as Christopher Newfield argues in The Great Mistake, it’s hard to separate the disinvestment in public higher education from the ...
Read More
Placeholder

Listening to The New School

Why podcasts?

At the time we began this project, we also began work on a series of podcasts (available here). Our engagement with New School history already spans multiple genres -- a website, an exhibition, all manner of talks and the current seminar here -- in its effort to invite more and more ...
Read More
Placeholder

New Histories

A new three-part podcast on the histories of The New School

Episode 1: A Place to Go for Adult Values The centenary of The New School offers a chance to look at a university that began as an educational experiment and critique of higher education. Nothing has changed more than the school’s shift away from its original mission as a school devoted ...
Read More
Placeholder

The Writing on the Wall

Orozco, Benton, and Arnautoff

Student and activist groups have campaigned for the removal of the murals, arguing they were detrimental to the education and well-being of students of color, who had to confront these images as they walked the halls or ascended the staircase. On the other side of the debate, art historians and ...
Read More
Placeholder

The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College

100 years in, the New School’s experimental ethos lives on

Most American universities start as 4-year colleges, eventually adding masters and doctoral programs, professional schools and conservatories, and ultimately continuing-ed programs. The New School did things pretty much back to front. It took the better part of its first 100 years to establish a 4-year undergraduate college. This wasn’t an ...
Read More
The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College

Language Matters

How do we teach classic literature if we cannot discuss offensive words?

Since the spring of 2016, I have taught a seminar in the New School’s MFA program on writing and literature as radical questioning. As I put the syllabus together, I sought out texts that would challenge our most basic assumptions (for instance, that a novel has a plot; an author’s work must ...
Read More
Placeholder

True to the Paradox

An exhibition for the centennial of a contradiction

This essay was originally published on August 21 2019. To mark the centennial, The New School approached Anna Harsanyi and myself (we are both alumni of The New School) to curate an exhibition in the Sheila Johnson Design Center. For me, the task raised many questions, bringing me back to the ...
Read More
Placeholder

The Reviews Are In

Will Durant’s The Life of Greece

Will Durant’s The Life of Greece, the second volume in the “Story of Civilization” series, was published in 1939, a grim year for “Western Civilization.” Despite -- or perhaps because -- the book was such a popular success, it was reviewed in a handful of academic journals. Two reviews of this volume ...
Read More
Placeholder

Sex for Fun: Reflections From Ann Snitow’s Przegorzały Classroom 

Ann Snitow helped change the discussion around sexuality in Poland, and she also changed my life.

In 2017, I published a book about the history of sex education in Poland. To See a Moose describes how Polish sex education textbooks under state socialism and after dealt with sexuality related issues. Although in many ways progressive, these books treated sex elliptically. Instead of talking about sex, they were full ...
Read More
Placeholder

The Scholarly Reach of Popular History

Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization

The full eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s popular history of (mostly) the “Western world,” take up exactly 22” of shelf space, fitting perfectly on the top shelf of one of a couple of unfinished pine bookcases I recently bought to accommodate the spillover from my ...
Read More
Placeholder

Racism, Disavowed History and White Fragility

Notes from A Public Seminar at the New School

On February 1st, 2019, a powerful daylong seminar was jointly organized by the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School, the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass., and the Psychology and the Other Conference. It was the latest gathering in an ongoing seminar (to which we would invite interested participants: ...
Read More
Placeholder

Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of The New School

The longest-serving member of the faculty was instrumental in helping Alvin Johnson to organize the University in Exile in 1933

Kallen's name, it seemed, was indelibly connected to the New School. And yet, it was only an accident of circumstance that this was so. Horace Kallen was among the first lecturers at the New School in Spring of 1919. Probably no one was more surprised at this than he. Beginning in ...
Read More
Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of The New School