While we angst about the future of our university in the face of hostile government headwinds, planning continues, including not just for next year but eight-year "culture of assessment" plans mandated for every unit. Yet the fall will also be the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Eugene Lang College, so one kind of forward planning gives me an excuse to look back. New School's histories have been an object of interest for a long time, of course! But somehow I've never had occasion to look at the history of my own division (though I did the
prehistory).
Now I'm working with a student researcher to put together what seems to be the first timeline of this now not quite so young member of the New School family. (It was still a teenager when I arrived in 2002!)
We began today in the University Archives with two boxes of files from the President's Office, covering the years 1983-85, the immediate lead-up to the transition from the Seminar College (or The College, or The College at The New School for Social Research, judging from various letterheads) to Eugene Lang College in 1985. Two studies on possible expansions of the school had been commissioned by a new university president and they were different enough that the long-time leader of traditional age undergraduate experiments at The New School, Dean Elizabeth Coleman, resigned. That was December, 1983. The money to realize some of the proposed changes wasn't secured until the "Eugene Lang Gift" in early 1985.
These images are from a 1983-84 recruitment flyer, as all these changes were in the air. The somewhat ramshackle looking courtyard (what happened to the Alvin Johnson Oak?) looks ready for a change.
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