It was back to familiar turf today, the first of three talks I'm giving on New School history as orientation activities for the new school year begin. Today was super early: I was presenting as part of training for the student fellows who will help with orientation of new students, the first of whom (some international students) arrive Thursday. Academic year 2017-2018 itself doesn't start for another thirteen days!
Of course I can't give the same talk twice (it's hard enough giving it once) so today's was a turbo-charged version of the talk I've given over the years to the first year fellows - also peers who assist incoming students in the transition to college - at Lang. But this was different. Lang students are only a part, not even the biggest part, of the incoming class. Most of the new students - and conceivably most of the Orientation Fellows - are Parsons students. So I couldn't just tell the usual story, where the New School starts up in 1919, has mishaps and adventures of various kinds with adults, artists and refugees before eventually being jolted into its final form by the body blow of the merger with Parsons from 1970! So I told a messier, truer story, where what makes us new now, what (ideally) makes our newness more than mere novelty-seeking, is the fact that we bring together quite disparate legacies which have only recently begun cross-pollinating. The progenitor to Parsons started in 1896! The New School, I extemporized, is the "umbrella," the framework for pedagogical exploration and innovation, but the family is bigger and more complicated than that.
Since these were students I was talking to, I also wound up emphasizing the contributions students have always made to this experiment. Before showing the always popular student updatings of the Orozco mural's now stodgy-seeming "Table of Universal Brotherhood" I talked about Gerda Lerner, whom we celebrate for having taught the first college course on women in American history in 1962. Our promotional story makes it seem like we reliably generate pathbreaking courses decade after decade from some central inspiration but the real story's more complicated, and more inspiring. Lerner's course was a trial balloon, and cancelled for low enrollment the first year it was offered - but The New School was willing to give it a second try, and then it flew. No central vision here, but an infrastructure for experimentation, and an awareness that change takes time. As important was knowing that Lerner was at the time a student here, completing her BA!
Of course I can't give the same talk twice (it's hard enough giving it once) so today's was a turbo-charged version of the talk I've given over the years to the first year fellows - also peers who assist incoming students in the transition to college - at Lang. But this was different. Lang students are only a part, not even the biggest part, of the incoming class. Most of the new students - and conceivably most of the Orientation Fellows - are Parsons students. So I couldn't just tell the usual story, where the New School starts up in 1919, has mishaps and adventures of various kinds with adults, artists and refugees before eventually being jolted into its final form by the body blow of the merger with Parsons from 1970! So I told a messier, truer story, where what makes us new now, what (ideally) makes our newness more than mere novelty-seeking, is the fact that we bring together quite disparate legacies which have only recently begun cross-pollinating. The progenitor to Parsons started in 1896! The New School, I extemporized, is the "umbrella," the framework for pedagogical exploration and innovation, but the family is bigger and more complicated than that.
