Trunk line call

4 eyes: better than 2! Look at that tree in the river, I said as we crossed the creek on a visit to friends in central Pennsylvania, wondering how its carcass had been moved into the middle. But my companion thought I meant the other tree, which I had entirely missed, the new one!

Gone

One of the most important ideas in Timothy Snyder's warnings about tyranny is "don't obey in advance."

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

I found a chilling example of this in today's Times. From this A Pile of Rubble headline you'd never guess that the president has trashed a wing of the people's house not only without permissions and precautions but without even admitting he was doing so. He said his vanity ballroom would leave the existing structure untouched. Oops. 

The formulation Critics are enraged (as critics always are) while Others say it was time for a change is what anticipatory obedience looks like. It frames a crime against history and tradition as fodder for "X was right about everything." 

But there's even more anticipatory caving to abuse of power in the ratification of his crime. Just a day ago his $300 million ballroom, for which no formal plans have been publicized, let alone reviewed or approved, was a "$250 million ballroom" and just last week it was a "$200 million ballroom." This Makeover will be a temple to bribery!

Full circle

My series of alumnae/i-led classes in the "DIY Religion" first year seminar came full circle today! 

Our speaker was an anthro-pologist who's just defended a fascinating dissertation on non-Turkish Muslim ummah in Istanbul. But fifteen years ago he was in a first year seminar here himself. It was called "Religion in Dialogue" - with yours truly! 

Launched

The exhibition is up! (Pics soon.) We kicked it off at a celebration of Eugene Lang College's 40th anniversary, which was attended by current staff, faculty and students, alums - and a dozen descendants of our namesake benefactor. The team which put together the exhibition was represented by our stellar undergraduate research assistant, above!

Liberal ats unbound

Tomorrow's the celebration of the 40th anniversary of my school, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts! 

The process of putting together a commem-orative exhibit at the same time the university as a whole contem-plates a restructuring has been, it must be said, a little surreal, though perhaps not that different from the New School's day-to-day! In any case, we're telling the big story of the liberal arts at The New School, which goes back twice as far and involves other programs and populations. We focus on the special freedom and responsibility of self-designed liberal arts education, the relationships formed both in seminars and in reaching across to other university communities... all of which allow us to imagine next chapters of many kinds!

I love this poster our director of communication designed after listening in on one of our conversations. She came up with the exhibition title "Unbound" too!

Redefining presidential

Whose streets? Our streets!

You won't see this in the newspapers - I looked in vain in my usual sources, particularly disappointed by the grey lady though I should know better - but those of us there know it happened. I don't want to wait another four months for the next one.

No Kings, Morningside Heights

 

 

We want justice,

 

We want peace! 

 

We want ICE 

 

Off our streets!

 

 

Morningside Heights was out in force for today's epic No Kings protest. Hand-made posters ranged from the cerebral to the visceral. 

 

No kings!

It's been a while, but it'll be good to stand for democracy tomorrow.

Tangents come round

Another chance to talk about New School history - what turned out to be the only faculty-led session at "family weekend." Scheduled in the very pleasant but very non-classroomy Faculty Lounge, I had to do without visuals but this turned out fine. The organizers promised an experience of a New School class, so I put the good people who showed up to work in groups interpreting and then updating the 1918 "Proposal for a New School of Social Science for Men and Women." Thinking of the who, what, where, when, why and how of the "Proposal" gave us a template for thinking of the future New School: Who, what, where, why, how is demanded today? (Between those assignments we had a crash-course in how The New School came to look so completely different from what its planners envisioned, and why that frees us to think boldly about how its future might need to be different again.) 

 

We didn't have heaps of time - five minutes in groups, and five minutes to hear from all the groups (!) - but it was enough to get some rich suggestions for creating an accessible, diverse and idealistic space that nonetheless prepares students for a non-ideal world riven by misogyny, racism and xenophobia... This is unpretty 2025, after all.

 

At the end, it being 2025, I also thought it only fair to bring in what I'd advertised on my schedule as a "surprise guest" - Claude, my AI of choice. Given the same prompt I'd given them, it came up with an impressive list of reasons for new thinking (including "AI disruption"!):  

You need to know that this is how the writing of most college essays starts these days, I quipped, exaggerating perhaps less than I thought I was. There's nothing wrong with using the best tools available to you, I added, but even our short time together today showed what AI can't give you: the reality that human meanings are many, and that we learn best and think most creatively when engaging with diverse others. The small group pedagogy which has always characterized The New School is perhaps even more urgently necessary today. A little pat, but what the occasion demanded!

 

Chatting afterward with some parents, including the parents of one of my students (who was there too), I found myself building a whole pedagogy out of going on tangents - something AI can't give you but something our students do very well indeed. I always start with Dewey's idea that we only really absorb new knowledge if we can connect it to knowledge and concerns we already have, but today it seemed that it's precisely in tangents that we see that connecting happening. 

 

And it's not just about how individuals learn. The magic of a seminar or discussion-based curriculum is that you get to see other people making connections with the same new knowledge you're grappling with, which might lead you to course-correct your tangents, and will also surely set you off on new tangents together. AI definitely can't do that! 

 

The only thing better than this social dance of tangents would be if you could do it in a structured way and more than once, engaging other new things together - perhaps once or twice weekly for a semester? What a community this would be - and of course the more accessible and inclusive the better. Would it prepare students for success in a frightened and suspicious world reeling from algorithmically charged atavisms? It shows there are alternatives...

Best kept secret

Funny story, sorta. The self-design Liberal Arts major which I direct is introducing its first dedicated course, modeled on something in the far larger Bachelors Program for Adult and Transfer Students self-design program with which we currently merging. Deans have long hoped more of our students would choose this path, but many apparently don't even know it exists! So we had a talented student designer come up with this poster for us. ("Best kept secret" was my idea.) Student workers are the best! Except when they're not. The student charged with reproducing and posting them claims to have put them up but there are none to be seen. The secret remains secret.

Stackable

These last two weeks I've been watching with mounting excitement as cardboard and wood "stackable seats" are assembled near our dean's office. These ingeniously versatile structures will form the skeleton of the Lang 40th exhibition, "Unbound: Liberal Arts at The New School."