My second class for the semester starts Friday. The latest fruit of my longstanding collaboration with my friend and New School history colleague J, it's something old and something new.
With New School history, though, old and new can be hard to distinguish. This will be in a format new to us - a 1-credit intensive mini-course taught over three weekly 3-hour sessions online - but we've been trying out new formats from the start: lectures and seminars, online journals and e-books, exhibitions and podcasts. And if the subject matter - New School in the context of higher education - isn't that new, it has a new urgency at this moment of existential crisis for the university ("tumultuous and anxious times," the university ombuds says), worlds apart from the valedictory warmth of the short-lived interest around the centennial three years ago.
We didn't actually plan to teach in this format: a standard issue seminar was the original plan, though of course team-taught. But registration for spring classes ended before last semester's strike and soul-searching, and not enough people signed up! Undaunted we proposed replacing the original course with two linked but independent intensives, each in a slighty different format. Both are called "What Is College For?" and will offer 1 credit for 10 contact hours. "Higher Education in Society" meets online over three Friday mornings. Its complement, "Making a Liberal Arts Major," will meet in person three mornings in a row over a weekend next month. Small-scale intensives like these exist in other parts of the university; we're game to experiment with their efficacy in a liberal arts context.
Thinking outside the box is of course a very New School thing to do.
