Horace Kallen Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

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 ...

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

Education

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

Inventing a parable of pluralism

February 7, 2019 • by Val Vinokur

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 ...