The New School Archives - Page 2 of 3

History

Fifty Years of Social Research

Arien Mack reflects on her half-century stewardship of The New School’s flagship quarterly journal

March 1, 2020 • by Arien Mack and James Miller

James Miller [JM]: Let’s start at the beginning. What year did you come to The New School for Social Research? Arien Mack [AM]: 1966. I had just gotten my Ph.D. JM: At that time, how much did you know about the legacy, the traditions of The New School? Did you know anything at all ...

The New School

The New School’s Forgotten President

The controversial tenure of John Everett

February 18, 2020 • by Anna Robinson-Sweet

It’s likely that the end of Everett’s tenure, which found The New School in a precarious academic and financial position, is also to blame for his historical neglect. Now, thanks to recently processed records from the presidency of John Everett at The New School Archives, we have access to a ...

The New School

When Two Become One

How The New School and Parsons merged

January 17, 2020 • by Molly Rottman

Parsons was founded twenty-three years before The New School for Social Research (NSSR), in 1896, which means Parsons had its own history for seventy-three years before merging with The New School in 1970. By the late 1960s the school was in dire straits, with Parsons running an annual deficit of ...

The New School

The New School’s Secular Faiths

At a progressive institution, religion hid in plain sight

December 20, 2019 • by Mark Larrimore

From its earliest days, a fraught engagement with religion characterizes The New School -- a school conceived just as Max Weber was delivering his lecture “Science as a Vocation.” If it was pioneeringly secular from its beginnings, as it has been glibly suggested, this is not because The New School has ...

The New School

The Ad Paradox

Writing advertising for a university that doesn’t believe in it

November 21, 2019 • by Ricky Tucker

This year marks The New School’s centennial celebration, a paradigm example of that disparity. For October, ads for our “Learn something New” awareness campaign and The Festival of New, a series of events reflecting on our past, made up the majority of advertising in and around Union Square subway station. ...

The New School

Sex and the New School

The Case of Henry Cowell

November 11, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes

This incident, in particular the impact imprisonment had on his musical output and reputation, overshadows Cowell’s legacy. What had been a career steeped in daring experimentation became one more conventional and careful. Who supported Cowell and who did not -- notably the composer Charles Ives, who abandoned his friend -- ...

The New School

Alvin Johnson on the Importance of Lifelong Teaching and Learning

October 17, 2019 • by Judith Friedlander

Johnson predicted that other academic institutions would follow his lead. The demand was clearly there, he proclaimed. In the years following the Second World War, over 30,000 Americans had enrolled in continuing education programs. But these programs, for the most part, were “badly taught, unauthoritative, uninteresting and not very successful.” ...

The New School

Listening to The New School

Why podcasts?

October 3, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

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 ...

Multi Media

New Histories

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

September 29, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

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 ...

Art & Design

The Writing on the Wall

Orozco, Benton, and Arnautoff

September 25, 2019 • by Jennifer Wilson

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 ...

Education

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

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

September 12, 2019 • by Mark Larrimore

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 ...

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

Art & Design

True to the Paradox

An exhibition for the centennial of a contradiction

August 21, 2019 • by Macushla Robinson

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 ...