the New School history Archives

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 ...

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

A global conversation about using design to foster community

July 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

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 ...

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 ...