Buds

Our new semester begins today. (My class starts tomorrow.) In the midst of uncertainties large and small, the show somehow goes on, for now.

Constructed environments

While the Lang courtyard enjoyed its last day before the new semester, I was in a place new to me - the "Sky Room" atop the Parsons building at 2 West 13th, booked by a Faculty Senate co-chair who teaches in Parsons' School of Constructed Environments. These spectacular vistas are to the southwest and northwest. You can't see the original New School buildings, home to the Lang courtyard maples, from here. 

Not playing

This cartoon by Ruben Bolling is from a few days ago, but sadly no less relevant today. Generations of Americans have grown up with Richard Scarry's books, which show the vim and vigor of a society with all sorts of people (shown as all sorts of cute animals) busy playing many complementary roles to make our shared world hum.

The lawless siege of Minneapolis Bollen is describing represents a siege on the idea of such a society itself. Speaking of Minneapolis, I heard from my choir friend whose daughters teach in elementary schools there that at the public schools, parents are forming "human walls" at the entrances of schools to make safe corridors for children to be dropped off and picked up. I picture the whole Scarryian menagerie lined up there, warmed by their shared determination despite the icy cold.

Long may she wave

A little snow

This process of change

This cheerfully colored word-cloud synthesizes responses of faculty who participated in a day-long discussion on the future of the liberal arts last semester. The question to which they were responding: "How are you feeling about this process of change at The New School"? While not many of us actually in the liberal arts were able to be part of the discussion (it was announced on short notice and fell on a a teaching day), it is apparently the basis for work we're invited to participate in this semester, too, "re-imagining humanities + social sciences." Today we had a "kick-off" webinar laying out how the sausage will be made.

Until your light outlasts the night

A rather lovely prayer penned by the Episcopal bishop of Missouri, Deon K. Johnson. I'm tempted to post it on my office door.

The stones weep

Multifaith prayer vigil at Columbus Circle for Renee Nicole Good and thirty-nine others who have died in or fleeing ICE abuse in the past year. After some prayers (including one from the Episcopal Bishop of New York), Buddhist and Sikh chants and a mourner's Kaddish, each of the forty name was read, as the names and pictures of all were held aloft, with the person's age when known. When a soprano then sang "Ave Maria" I pictured those whose names we had heard sheltered and united beneath her cloak, as in that statue I so love in Vienna. The vigil ended with Good's widow's poignant tribute to the beloved whose murder she witnessed, a Hindu invocation of the rage at evil and cosmogonic love of dancing Mahakali, and a rendering of "Amazing Grace."

I sometimes think interfaith events dumb traditions down to an uninspiring lowest common denominator but these prayers didn't downplay the differences. Their fierce particularity heightened our shared grief at each of these senseless deaths, and our determination that hatred and cruelty shall not prevail.

What can we do but sing

So happy to be back singing with the choir this morning. Our anthems were some Haydn and Copland's setting of "Shall we gather at the river." 

For several us it was a return after a few weeks holidaying with family, and catching up we registered how frighteningly the world is changing around us. Our young tenor lead was in Colombia for his grandfather's funeral when the US attacked neighboring Venezuela. An alto told that her two daughters, school music teachers in Minneapolis, reported zoom classes as public schools, which had already instituted "ICE drills," had closed: students were too scared to show up. The soprano lead described herself as shattered by the realization that the government could just kill you and claim you were a terrorist. 

The choir director suggested we might, as a body, join a demonstration sometime, an idea we all welcomed. In such terrifying times, the tenor reflected with a wisdom beyond his years, "what can we do but sing?"

Eye-opening

The New School's new semester begins in twelve days. But what new school will that be? Cancellations of courses with less than 75% enrollment continue (one of mine was a casualty*), but the biggest question is which faculty members will voluntarily or "involuntarily" leave the school, and what will be produced by the three months of liberal arts "academic re-envisioning" announced the day after fall classes ended (!). I had my first meetings as a University Faculty Senate co-chair today, one of them with good people from the Provost's Office, and I'm not sure folks have any idea how tumultuous, not to say traumatic, this semester will be.

At Public Seminar, the online journal based at the graduate faculty, someone decided it might be useful to look at New School history at this juncture, and stumbled on two essays from the New School Histories vertical my friend J and I edited for the university centennial in 2019. One is one of mine, which I'm always glad to share... though I guess resonates in unforeseen ways in this moment.

The thought has crossed my mind a few times these past months whether it might be time for a new New School history article for Public Seminar, but what would it say? The thought arose in response to the mobilization of variously one-sided versions of that history by the advocates for restructuring and by those threatened with restructuring. But this is no time for "demythologizing the New School," or adjudicating among the myths - even with the rider that what New School actually has been is stranger and more inspiring than most people know.

*This means I "owe" the college an extra course in 2026-27

Killers

Today an innocent American citizen was killed by ICE in Minnesota. 

A few days ago, several score people were killed as a U. S. military raid abducted the president of Venezuela, a few days after a village in Nigeria was showered with U. S. missiles.

In the weeks before, the U. S. military executed over a hundred people operating boats suspected of carrying illicit drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.

"I'm not looking to hurt people," says the president, but his murderous lackeys know his definition of "people" excludes most of us.