Realizing The New School

A downloadable collection of essays documents lessons from the past as a university looks to its future

A century later, the experiment has become an institution, one different in almost every way from the one originally proposed. Psychology and the arts quickly redefined what “social research” could be. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and the rise of fascism inspired The New School’s president to establish a ...
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Realizing The New School

Albert Mayer’s Urban Village: Between The New School and India

A global conversation about using design to foster community

The New School does not look like most other universities, even those in large cities. It has no college green around which buildings are situated; no common architectural style; no grand monument-like buildings with Latin phrases carved into granite. Instead, it is a disaggregated collection of buildings, most in the ...
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The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

Alvin Johnson is the leading man in the history of The New School. He saved it from financial failure again and again and again; he attracted intellectuals to its faculty, most auspiciously those fleeing fascist Europe in the 1930 and 40s and he persuaded artists such as Thomas Hart Benton ...
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The New School’s Leading Man

The New School in Cyberspace

Teaching online? The New School’s been doing it for 35 years

Beginning in mid-March, as the novel coronavirus bore down on the country, The New School moved all of its courses online. A response to the social distancing required to contain the spread of COVID-19, The New School’s students and faculty scrambled to recreate learning environments that had seemed to be ...
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The New School in Cyberspace

Hanging in Union Square

H. T. Tsiang and the New School

Among the challenges facing the New School in the coming years will be navigating the increasingly charged relationship between the United States and China. Links with students and partners in China are a significant part of the life of the New School, but not our institutional storytelling. To counter likely ...
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Hanging in Union Square

Fifty Years of Social Research

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

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 ...
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Fifty Years of Social Research

The New School’s Forgotten President

The controversial tenure of John Everett

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 ...
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The New School’s Forgotten President

When Two Become One

How The New School and Parsons merged

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 ...
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When Two Become One

The New School’s Secular Faiths

At a progressive institution, religion hid in plain sight

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 ...
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The New School’s Secular Faiths

The Ad Paradox

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

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. ...
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The Ad Paradox

Sex and the New School

The Case of Henry Cowell

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 -- ...
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