Stalactite city

Always stunning, Elmhgreen and Dragset's "The Hive" at Moynihan.

New chapter

I want to mark a tense, surreal moment. 

This is the time in the academic year when past and future are all bunched up with the present. We plan courses for the academic year beginning next fall, based in part on our experience of last year. Meanwhile registration for the courses beginning in January has taken place, and some courses with low enrollments have to be cut. If a cancelled course was to be taught by a full-time or annualized part-time faculty member, they might be assigned to a course originally planned for someone more junior, though this rarely happens. 

This year everything is different. The budget crunch caused by enrollment shortfalls means the threshold for course cancellation is higher (and a final cull of courses not at 75% has yet to take place), and course allocations for academic year 26-27 have been trimmed. But that’s only the tip of the restructuring iceberg. Planning for 26-27 is reeling from the pausing and merging of "duplicative" or low-enrollment programs. Last week we learned that the small undergraduate majors in history, anthropology and sociology have been shut down, their faculty enjoined to work out something more streamlined and attractive to students. Their work, we are told, will serve as a "model" for the rest of the "humanities and social sciences unit." Whatever 26-27 portends, 27-28 will be different again.

And that's not the last of it either. In the coming days, notification of budget crunch-forced "reduction in forces" for full-time faculty will begin, with letters offering "voluntary early retirement" and "voluntary separation." We don't know to how many people these will be sent; nor do we know how many of those offers would have to be taken up to forestall the "involuntary separations" which would otherwise ensue - or what determines who will be affected by each of these measures. Against the backdrop of the unmooring of many departments in the "humanities and social sciences unit," this left many of us heading into the Thanksgiving break not knowing if we were soon to be let go.

I'm not dwelling here on my own case, though I would be surprised not to be getting one or other of the kinds of letters promised for this week. I was already senior enough to be "eligible" for "special voluntary separation" when the university was in the throes of COVID five years ago, and my appointment has never been in a department. I expect wrenching choices in the coming week: leave or stay on a possibly sinking ship which might cast me overboard for ballast anyway? I'm far from the only person contemplating these grim questions, though those of us also responsible for curricular planning are experiencing this uncertainty at two levels. Who will teach in 26-27, and who will be designing the curriculum, if there even is one?

The particularly surreal thing is that I'm drafting the syllabus for what is to be Lang version of the core course for the soon-to-be approved major in Individualized Studies (formed from the coming together of the university's two self-design Liberal Arts majors). A pilot was supposed to run next semester but - ha! - is likely to be cut for low enrollment. 

But it's the content of the syllabus that's making me rub my eyes, as I imagine acquainting students with the history and philosophy of education, broadly understood, and more narrowly construed "liberal arts" in its various forms - all in the context of the charmingly quixotic school in which they're designing their individualized course of study. I'm more sympathetic than many of my colleagues to the direction the university is heading (explicitly and intensively bridging liberal arts, design and performance), and can narrate it inspiringly as a new chapter in The New School's storied history... but will I be the one telling the story?

More anon! 

Last Metro

It's the end of an era: 

My last MetroCard expired today! 

New York City is moving to a new system called OMNY, which works directly from people's credit cards, smartphones and even watches - though there will still be a card version. There will still be weekly cards, but the monthlies I've been using to gallivant about the city all these years seem fated to be a thing of the past.

Nation of refuge

I can't let the prez's profanation of Thanksgiving, indeed of the whole American idea, go unremarked on. Abandoning refugees on the day we remember the Pilgrim refugees? I don't know why two National Guardsmen were shot, but, beyond deep sorrow for these people whose oaths to serve in the nation's protection were being exploited, it almost doesn't matter. The manically xenophobic response has been so disproportionate and so comprehensive that it's clearly premeditated. The white nationalists in charge have been itching to gut even legal forms of immigration, and have been waiting for a chance to unleash their venom. This dreary predictability makes it no less of an outrage.

Chlorofilibuster

Gold rush

It happens every year, but late fall ginkgos can be quite dramatic. (I remember streets of gold from when I lived closer to street level!)

Bootleg

The "Practicing Curation" class has offered "A Bootleg Exhibition of the Orozco Room" in a naturally lit basement room. They hung textile reproductions of the original murals - inaccessible during a long process of restoration - around a seating area to try to recreate the way the murals were part of social life at The New School in its first decades, at least until the yellow curtain era, described in an explanatory pamphlet. 

It's quite successful in its bootleg way. The reproduced murals are even more immersive than the originals, which sit a little higher on the walls and are ventilated by windows on either side of the "Table of Universal Brotherhood." I wonder if it was also intentionally that the murals to left and right were inverted. I know two students in the class, will ask! 

Change of season

Revolving doors

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's great for crazy juxtapositions. Here I juxtapose two already juxtaposed things from recently opened exhibitions on subjects worlds and millennia apart, Divine Egypt and Man Ray: When Objects Dream. Above is an apparently unfinished but much-touched 3000-year-old statue (on loan from the Louvre) of four aspects of the goddess Hathor - a crowned cow surrounded by serpent-, lion- and human-headed manifestations. Entirely unrelated but somehow resonant in my image-saturated mind, Man Ray's 1916 collage-like painting "Legend," source of one of the brightly colored prints in his almost animated 1919 "Revolving Doors" (the exhibit's recreation of which someone kindly filmed). Have these less than nothing to do with each other? Precisely. For good or ill, a museum like the Met functions like a collage, a revolving door, maybe a many-faced goddess.

Redesigning curricular systems and well-being

The liberal arts world is in a tizzy over a proposed reorganization of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State, which would rehome (or perhaps dissolve) nineteen departments in four new schools. Besides the two provisionally-named schools in the rather dark graphic from the Chronicle of Higher Education above (final names to be decided by the faculty involved), there would be

{Human Narratives and Creative Expressions}

English; Classics & General Humanities; Philosophy; World Languages & Cultures; Spanish & Latino Studies

 

{Interdisciplinary Programs and Writing Studies}

BA in Interdisciplinary Studies; Medical Humanities; Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies; Writing Studies; Language; Business & Culture

The reorganization has been rejected by the Montclair State faculty, their Senate demanding that disciplinary chairs at least be retained. But the plan (led by a professor of Religious Studies, for what it's worth!) has been offered as a way of trying to save these areas of the curriculum which, at Montclair as nationwide, have seen steep declines in majors. Not only students but younger faculty, too, are already more interdisciplinary in orientation, the proposers argue, and might flourish in these new constellations, freed from the drag of departmental structures. But would this be new curricular freedom or just a new kind of constraint, now by administrators freed from faculty oversight?

The question isn't just academic. Similar things are happening elsewhere, including just 20 miles to the west, chez nous at The New School. 

The university restructuring plan, details of which were officially announced in various larger and smaller meetings this week, will see the shuttering, at least as distinct undergraduate majors, of several small social science departments, with the implications of the consolidations of several humanities programs still up in the air. We're told a budget crisis makes already planned changes more urgent than ever, but nobody quite knows what's going on.

Our provost argues that the last nine years have seen an "unnatural stasis" in our "academic portfolio." "Change," he reminds us somewhat oxymoronically, is "in the DNA" of the school! Meanwhile the president argues that a bright new future lies in defining the "distinctive proposition" of a liberal arts college in a university primarily committed to art and design. I'm not averse to such a reorientation (which isn't to say there'd necessarily be a place for me in it) but the faculty as a whole is restive, and anxious for our future. Is the plan really to save the social science and humanities programs or to do them in?

Aflame

Religious revival meeting!

This was the week for the first years in "DIY Religion" to present what they learned from interviewing fifteen of our alums. We have more work to do, drawing some more general conclusions from what were apparently warm and thoughtful conversations; that's work for next week. For this week we basked in the idiosyncratic accomplishments and inspiring ideas of our fabulous alums! 

We got the world religions in there too, somehow - and then some! Our fifteen included folks who've found their DIY way to being a devotée of Guanyin, an Islamic feminist, the director of an avant garde theater company inspired by Jewish textual exegesis, an intimate of Ram Dass, three Christian priests (MCC, Episcopal and... it's complicated), a Radical Faerie, a rap-recording reviver of traditional Taíno language and spirituality and a young Zoroastrian. Wow...!

Fly me to the moon

"It's so cool how faculty advertise their courses here," one of my first years enthused. 

Having done my fair share of flyering in recent weeks, I didn't have the heart to tell her that this is exceptional, a response to the provost's threat to cancel classes which don't get at least 75% enrollment.

Plutocracy blues

Mood these days? Check out this image from this month's cover article in the progressive Christian magazine Sojourners, "The Big Steal: How Billionnaires are Upending our Lives and our Economy."