Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History

While Orozco’s murals now speak of the past, students at Parsons today continue to learn about the Modular sequence in architecture and other courses.

In his autobiography, José Clemente Orozco described his murals at the New School for Social Research as an opportunity to investigate the “geometric-aesthetic principles of the investigator Jay Hambidge.” Hambidge, an aspiring writer, was the inventor and proselytizer of a newly-popular compositional theory, Dynamic Symmetry. Orozco learned of Hambidge’s ideas through his ...
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Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History

Centering Human Relations in Learning

Human Relations Center at the New School: a place for women to come learn and to socialize

In Spring 1973, the author and women’s rights leader Betty Friedan taught a course on “Women in New York” at The New School. The eight sessions focused on the problems females faced in the city, in work and beyond, and it drew a large crowd. Enrollment consisted of 97 women ...
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Centering Human Relations in Learning

Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

Towards a Genuine Collaboration

What if the president of the United States, along with Congress, cancelled student debt and made public college tuition free? Just a few years ago, these goals would have seemed like the pie-in-the sky dreams of a marginal sect. Today, free public college is supported by major presidential candidates, including ...
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Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Anatole Broyard at The New School

Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. … All the courses I took were about what's wrong: what's wrong with our government, with the family, with interpersonal relations ...
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New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Why Teachers Are Striking in Poland

Faced with the biggest strike since 1993, the Polish government suggested teachers get pregnant and collect a child-care benefit

“We want to teach, we want to work. Please, understand us.” —Teachers’ general strike in Poland, 2019 Poland’s striking teachers have three messages for the right-wing government of the Law and Justice (PiS) party: we care about the future of education, we are fighting for our dignity, and we are definitely fighting ...
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Why Teachers Are Striking in Poland

Nurturing Subversive Seeds

What The New School’s Mobilization taught me

Most folks at The New School today haven’t heard of “the Mobilization,” the series of protests over questions of diversity and inclusion which convulsed the campus between 1996 and 1998. But I learned about it on my first day as Eugene Lang College’s first Director of Civic Engagement and Social Justice. ...
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Nurturing Subversive Seeds

Teacher Insurgency

What Are The Strategic Challenges?

The following post was the basis for a talk by Leo Casey, the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute, which was delivered at “The Future of American Labor” conference held February 8th and 9th in Washington, D.C. There is every reason to celebrate the “Teacher Spring” strikes of 2018 and the more ...
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Teacher Insurgency

A Multi-Campus University in Exile

Then and now

The New School opened on February 10, 1919 in the name of academic freedom -- a cause it heroically defended a second time when Hitler rose to power. In April 1933, Alvin Johnson, the New School’s director, called on American intellectuals to protest the dismissal of hundreds of professors in ...
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A Multi-Campus University in Exile

On the Origins of the University in Exile

An Excerpt from “A Light in Dark Times”

The New School for Social Research opened in 1919 as an act of protest. Founded in the name of academic freedom, it quickly emerged as a pioneer in adult education -- providing what its first president, Alvin Johnson, liked to call “the continuing education of the educated.” By the mid-1920s, ...
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On the Origins of the University in Exile

What’s So “Jewish” About The New School?

Inventing a parable of pluralism

So what’s so Jewish about The New School? Well, it depends on what you mean by “Jewish.” The simplest -- and most awkwardly Nixonian -- way to answer the question is to count the Jews. When King David tried to do that in 2 Samuel 24, God smote the Israelites with three ...
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What’s So “Jewish” About The New School?

New York is the Place

How the city has defined The New School

The 1918 proposal to create a “new school” ended with a rousing declaration of the innovation of the idea, the significance of the moment, and, most of all, the importance of New York. The proposers believed that this city -- “the greatest social science laboratory in the world” -- would attract scholars ...
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New York is the Place