Alvin Johnson Archives - Public Seminar

Orozco’s Rainbow

An alchemical analysis

April 23, 2026 • by Jaime Arredondo

José Clemente Orozco’s first experience in the United States was colored by Jim Crow–era violence. At the border entrypoint of Laredo, Texas, guards burned 60 of the young artist’s drawings. This was 1917; it could have been worse. At least 124 people of Mexican descent were lynched in Texas between ...

Rethinking Orozco

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

On the woman behind the brotherhood

April 17, 2026 • by John Reed

In January 1931, journalist and art-world impresario Alma Reed attended the unveiling of A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood, a cycle of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco and the first mural commissioned for The New School's bespoke building in New York City's progressive haven of Greenwich Village. ...

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

Education

The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

July 30, 2020 • by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...

History

The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

June 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

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 ...

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.” ...

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 ...

The New School

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

June 27, 2019 • by Matthew J. Kaufman

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 ...

Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of The New School

Education

A Multi-Campus University in Exile

Then and now

February 21, 2019 • by Judith Friedlander

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 ...

Education

On the Origins of the University in Exile

An Excerpt from “A Light in Dark Times”

February 20, 2019 • by Judith Friedlander

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, ...

On the Origins of the University in Exile

Feature

Are the Arts a Critical Facet of Social Research?

At The New School, artists have shaped the institution’s agenda

November 14, 2018 • by Mark Larrimore

This vertical is called New School Histories not just because there is an embarrassment of riches, but because these legacies don’t all fit into one story. A case in point is the extraordinary and unplanned efflorescence of the arts at The New School in the 1920s and 1930s. The school’s first slate ...

Are the Arts a Critical Facet of Social Research?

Education

What Does It Mean to Educate Adults?

The Case of the New School

November 6, 2018 • by Julia Foulkes

There is much in question about the future of higher education, but one trend is clear: the average age of undergraduates is rising. As a college degree replaces a high school degree as the basis for more jobs and the possibility of economic stability, more people are starting or returning ...

Education

Exile as Haven

On The New School Dorm Room Doors Vandalized with Swastikas

November 14, 2016 • by Julia Foulkes

Those of us at The New School received news on Saturday that dorm room doors had been vandalized with swastikas. The president has acted swiftly, calling it a hate crime and enacting a zero tolerance policy for such actions. Since this may be an act of students -- entry to ...