Had a grand time rewriting history this evening! I've been in charge of a project to make more people (students especially) aware of the history of The New School, in this its ninetieth year, and this was the time for me to officially unveil the online reader we've put together, and to suggest that and why this history is worth getting to know. (Above are six "splash" images from the reader website, running the gamut from social science publications and Hannah Arendt through student protests and course catalogs to dance and the particular niche The New School has long played in New York culture.) The finale of my presentation were the Benton murals, which you've heard me rhapsodize about before. But the way I got there was kind of neat, if I say so myself.Before we began, I played a video of a dance choreographed by Doris Humphrey, our founding modern dancer, and the amazing video above (found on youtube, of course) of music by Henry Cowell, one of the composers who made The New School a center for American contemporary music in the 1920s and 1930s. It's as fun - or as daunting - to watch as to listen to!
The main argument came in three "questions" I posed to the received view - one which our first year students in fact received in an orientation speech just a few weeks ago. The received view is that we were founded by two historians who
resigned from Columbia in protest at restrictions on academic freedom during WW1, Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson; the philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey; and the economist and cultural critic Thorstein Veblen. Grand founding figures and inspiring. Our orientation speaker actually called them "founding fathers," and contrasted them with the founding fathers of older and more established universities (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia). I wonder if that's is or even should be our aspirational peer group, but my first question was: "fathers?"In fact, it wasn't just men who set up The New School, so I replaced "founding fathers" with "founders" and inserted a picture of Emily James Putnam, who was indeed one of the founders, and among the most radical. The first woman in the US to get a PhD in classics, she had been dean at Barnard before
joining the New School experiment, and it was she who insisted on some of the most innovative aspects of the structure of the new institution (like the absence of tenured positions, or an endowment); she signed her suggestions "your anarchist"! But she's just one of many women who supported, taught at and studied at The New School at a time when there were few vehicles for educated women outside of women's colleges. Remember that this was 1919, the year women first gained the vote. (And some day I'll tell you abut Clara Mayer, the forgotten woman who ran The New School for forty years.)My next question was to "university" - was it really a new improved university the founders were after? They offered something much more radical. Not a place where the future leaders of society were licensed after a few years' discipline, but a place where anyone wishing to learn more could and keep coming. Not to get a degree, not as a transition from youth to adulthood, but as long as there were things they wanted and needed to learn about. The true peers of The New School, if it has any, are other cultural and
educational experiments in the same vein, from the (socialist) Rand School of Social Science, the Bureau of Social Research (later a part of the Columbia School of Social Work), the LSE in London and the Institut für Sozialwissenschaft in Frankfurt. In particular, the hopes of the school, both in terms of audience and impact, are better understood by seeing it in the context of other institutions created by progressives steeped in the social sciences in turn of the century New York than by seeing it as a species of the genus university.My final question had to do with "social science." The original proposal (1918) was for an "Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women," but what they founded was called The New School for Social Research. Why "social research"? What does - what did - that even mean? I've asked a few historians and nobody quite knows, but all think it an important question. My suggestion was that "social research" meant something like what we now describe as "engaged scholarship."
The social sciences were important to it, but as part of a broader attempt to bring the methods of modern scientific inquiry to the humanities, which - Beard and Robinson had written - were still "medieval" in character. But it was broader even than this suggests. Psychology and sociology and anthropology and economics had to be pursued. But the modern arts, too, were forms of social research - explorations of the conditions, challenges and significance of modern forms of living. It was not an accident or a distraction, and certainly not an embarrassment, that The New School within three years of its founding became a center for the study and practice of the arts.And so I got to end with the New School murals - Benton of course, but also José Clemente Orozco, whose murals "A Call for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood" we still have. Powerful on their own (yes, that's Lenin, and next to him Uncle Joe), but even more stimulating when juxtaposed with the murals Benton painted at the same time for The New School's first permanent building, in Greenwich Village in 1930 - very different in aesthetics and theme. In all this I hope to have given
students a sense of the excitement with which the histories and ideals of the school fill me, and what's sometimes called a "usable past." Or better, multiple usable pasts, materials for a "choice of inheritance." We are a university now, we give degrees, and mainly to students transitioning to careers (or at least lives as self-supporting grown-ups), but the flame kindled by folks like Putnam, "your anarchist," burns on. I hope our New School history project feeds the flame!