I've always wondered (well, once I knew about it) why the eminent radical historian E. P. Thompson should have been the speaker at the inauguration of Eugene Lang College in 1985.
Well, it seems that his host, Margaret Jacob, also a historian and Lang's first dean, convened a forum on "The Future of Radical History" with Thompson and fellow British Marxist historians Perry Anderson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm on October 20th. (Anderson and Hobsbawm were regular members of the New School's Graduate Faculty.) The dedication of the new college was the following day. The symposium, attended by 1000 people, "was organized to mark this event and was intended as the first gift of Eugene Lang College to the university"!
Jacob describes the content of Thompson's talks as untimely:
Will Thompson have made any linkage between radical history and the aims of education? I hope soon to know! A tape recording of the dedication turned up in a box in the University Archives, and is being digitized as we speak. But in the meantime, how interesting that, like The New School in 1919, Eugene Lang College should have been ushered into existence by historians! (The New School's recently arrived president, Jonathan Fanton, and the Graduate Faculty dean, Ira Katznelson, were both historians, too, a Committee on Historical Studies established just the year before, in 1984.)
On the symposium, Margaret C. Jacob and Ira Katznelson, "Agendas for Radical History," Radical History Review 36 (Fall 1986): 26-45, 26
The description of Thompson's talks is in Margaret C. Jacob, "Among the Autodidacts: The Making of E.P. Thompson," Labour / Le Travail 71 (Spring 2013): 156–61, 160
