New School Archives - Public Seminar

New York City

Where Is New York?

Like so many newcomers, I was looking for my city. Then I reached for E. B. White’s 1948 classic, Here Is New York

April 26, 2023 • by Naman Vakharia

Naman Vakharia ponders on his personal yet collective experience of moving to the dirty, dreamy, and historical city: New York....

Announcements

Conference Announcement: Memory Studies Group 2021 Online Conference

January 29, 2021 • by Linus Glenhaber

Call for Papers (February 15, 2021 Deadline) Augustine of Hippo (353-430 AD) stated in his Confessions that “if the present were always present, and did not pass into past time, it obviously would not be time but eternity” (Book 11, section 14.17). Uncannily, this phrase echoes our suspended present enforced by COVID-19. It is ...

The New School

Hanging in Union Square

H. T. Tsiang and the New School

May 28, 2020 • by Mark Larrimore

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

Feature

The Dyer’s Hand

Ann Snitow’s retirement from The New School

August 13, 2019 • by Ann Snitow

Ann Snitow gave the following talk on the occasion of her retirement from The New School on April 9, 2019. In their introduction, the two current directors of Gender Studies, Margot Bouman and Lisa Rubin, pointed out that Snitow, now emeritus, had the distinction of having founded the Gender Studies ...

The New School

Sex for Fun: Reflections From Ann Snitow’s Przegorzały Classroom

Ann Snitow helped change the discussion around sexuality in Poland, and she also changed my life.

August 12, 2019 • by Agnieszka Kościańska

In 2017, I published a book about the history of sex education in Poland. To See a Moose describes how Polish sex education textbooks under state socialism and after dealt with sexuality related issues. Although in many ways progressive, these books treated sex elliptically. Instead of talking about sex, they were full ...

Feature

On the Death of My Dear Friend, Agnes Heller

“Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas”

August 9, 2019 • by Andrew Arato

Such was Agnes’ principle: she valued her friends and of course her loved ones, but truth was always her highest value. For me, friends have always come first. Hers was the principle of the philosopher, mine that of the political. In philosophy, truth is everything. But in politics nothing is ...

Feature

The Biggest Dog You’ve Ever Seen

Interview with National Book Award Winner Sigrid Nunez

January 8, 2019 • by Sigrid Nunez and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In November 2018, the prestigious National Book Award for fiction went to The Friend, a novel about grief, writing, friendship, and a Great Dane named Apollo. The author of The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018) is Sigrid Nunez, a long-time faculty member of the New School Creative Writing Program. Nunez has published seven other books, ...

Feature

What We Know About Parsons School of Design’s Namesake

The story behind Frank Alvah Parsons, the man who made art and design accessible to New Yorkers

January 4, 2019 • by Molly Rottman

A hundred and fifty miles from Parsons’ campus in New York City is a small town in the foothills of the Pioneer Valley called Chester. With a population of 1,380, Chester’s only claim to fame was emery, a mineral used in the nineteenth century for grinding metal (and later finger ...

What We Know About Parsons School of Design’s Namesake

Education

Student Workers Ratify A Strong Contract

Worker organizing holds The New School to its foundational values

December 6, 2018 • by Angela Butel

After more than fourteen months and 64 bargaining sessions, Student Employees at The New School -- United Automobile Workers (SENS-UAW), the union for academic student workers, has voted to ratify a contract with the New School administration. This hard-won agreement will provide substantial economic increases and important workplace protections and ...