Save Higher Education (From Itself)!

A federal bailout for students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities

More than three months into a national emergency, neither the leaders of America’s colleges and universities nor our elected officials have offered any plan to uphold higher education or any vision for its future. The ad-hoc responses of individual institutions do not suffice. Without federal relief and concerted reform, our ...
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Save Higher Education (From Itself)!

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

#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Universities can immediately bypass feckless state and federal legislatures and finance themselves directly with “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve.

In truth, however, the collapse of the American university is far from inevitable. As the present health emergency suggests, moreover, it will take more than business-as-usual to remediate its long-standing structural inequalities and injustices, according to an emerging minority of educators, staff, and students. In our capacity as a 501(c)(3) dedicated to bringing accurate and ...
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#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Commencement

A commencement that will be historic and unforgettable in ways we could never have imagined

I love commencement. With my near-religious connection to higher education and firsthand experience of its life-changing power, I hold commencement as a sacred and ecstatic ritual. It is traditionally one of the few occasions where we academics indulge in a bit of fanfare and grandeur, bringing out our elaborate scholarly ...
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Commencement

School Closings

Past Present Podcast, Episode 222

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Schools all over the United States are closed for weeks, perhaps months, in an effort to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. Natalia referenced this New York Times article about the particular challenges faced by homeless students. ...
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On The Hatred of Literature

Liberalism is about life and everything it contains

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical ...
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On The Hatred of Literature

The Cultural Counter Revolution in Brazil

Fascism’s advance in education

The government is not only restricting our freedom of expression, though. It is more than that. They are attacking our educational system, and thus attacking our common culture. Brazil is a very diverse country, in terms of culture, and unequal, in terms of wealth and opportunities. It is not at ...
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The Cultural Counter Revolution in Brazil

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