New School upon New School!

The New School aged a quarter century in a day! At the university's 90th commencement at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn today, our president referred to ours as a 130-year-old institution. A new story of the New!

It makes sense to start our institutional storytelling with the origins, 130 years ago, of the oldest part of the present institution - the pioneering school of fine and eventually applied art much later (1942) renamed Parsons School of Design. Parsons was saved from collapse by the briefly solvent New School in 1970, before rapidly becoming the most successful and lucrative component of the ensuing hybrid university, but what was happening there before 1970 fits awkwardly if at all into received New School stories. 

It would be good to weave our stories together better. Each is a bit of a shaggy dog story, though. What William Merritt Chase concocted in 1896 is nothing like what the school now named Parsons was to become. And of course the same could be said for the New School for Social Research, started in 1919, which my co-historian J and I have long argued spent a century trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) not to be a university. For its part the serendipitous 1970 merger - a surprise to both parties - only started to make any kind of sense in the last twenty years.

So it's passing strange to think that proto-Parsons was in some sense New School before New School was! It's the sort of thing folks say when they marry into families, but nevertheless more than a little odd. 

When The New School (the one kicked off in 1919) celebrated its centennial seven years ago, we saw first efforts really to combine the two stories. (You'll recall I found that no comparable efforts were made in storytelling around New School's 75th or Parsons' own centennial in 1995 and 1996.) These recent efforts mainly took the form - familiar, too, from marriages - of suggesting that TNS and PSD were meant for each other. The long years spent on their own - half a century for one, three-quarters of one for the other - were a kind of wandering in search of the unexpected partner who was destined to complete them. It was forced but the giddy conventions of centennial celebrations excused it.

If one hundred and thirty, it's funny to think that The New School is in fact a nineteenth-century institution! But it's less fun to think about these differently nested stories at a time when the Graduate Faculty, the distinctive key to The New School for a long time (though only starting in 1934, and never exclusively), seems about to be restructured nearly out of existence. I'm not quite ready to imagine that The New School existed in some nascent way before the New Schools of the twentieth century - and might somehow continue after them, too.