Here's a lovely map, one of many combinations you can choose on a site called "Transparent New York" from the Skyscraper Museum. Here you've got topography in green, and then skyscrapers color-coded by era: 1893-1916 yellow, 1917-40 white, 1945-64 light blue, 1965-75 blue, 1980-89 red, 1999-2005 orange. Enjoy!

Just two weeks to go!

 

New quarters

Happened on the plaque put up for the University in Exile's fiftieth anniversary in 1983 today, on the 10th floor of the leased building at 6 East 16th Street where most of the social science departments now reside. In 1983 they were in the converted Lane's department store at 14th Street and Fifth Avenue, which has been torn down and moves closer each day to becoming our new "University Center." I wonder if the plaque will stay with the social sciences, move (with them?) to the new hub, or even back to the 12th Street building which housed the exiles...

Little truths and big

In New School Century we've arrived at the University in Exile, the point in 1933 at which many of our colleagues think The New School really came into its own. The UiE - soon renamed Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at the request of its first members - was a remarkable venture, "one for the history books," you might say. Like many events one might call "historic," though, it's clothed in myths, many of them simply untrue. It's worth unwrapping, and knowing for what it really was.

My co-teacher J started the class by debunking a series of myths, and then considering a few senses in which this really is myth material. So, in case you didn't know:
• The Frankfurt School did not come to The New School. Yes, they came from a place called the Institut für Sozialforschung (social research) and they came to New York, but they went to Columbia. To our knowledge, Horkheimer and Adorno were not on the lists of scholars the University in Exile reached out to.

• Hannah Arendt, while an exile and a theorist of totalitarianism (a New School staple from the thirties and into the fifties), was not one of the scholars rescued by The New School. Although she apparently taught a few classes in the adult division in the fifties, she did not join the faculty until 1967. She joined in part because the culture and reputation of the place matched her own, but to the extent The New School is Arendtian, it became so without Arendt.
• The University in Exile was not a leftist institution. If it had a prevailing sentiment it was social-democratic or liberal, but it may be best described as anti-totalitarian. There were conservatives, too, including Leo Strauss, father of modern Neoconservatism, who was known as "The Philosopher" during the glory days of 1938-48. Social science, the University, civilization and even German intellectual culture were among the things described as being saved. Relatedly, the refugee scholars were not all Jewish, although the majority were.

• The University in Exile did not save The New School. Histories focused on UiE depict The New School which received them as a shriveled husk at best, if they bother to describe it at all. The standard narrative jumps from the 1919 Columbia academic freedom moment right to 1933. But, as we've spent several weeks showing, The New School was alive and well, housed in a spanking new building, a center for important new movements in the arts, psychology and adult education, and the hub of the massive venture of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. It is true that its original mission to be a research center had been sidelined by financial limitations but that wasn't the only original mission. (Also, the integration of the UiE was no more harmonious and organic than were the first years of the institution, when founding visions competed and founders jumped ship.)
• Finally, academic freedom, while an important value of The New School from its founding, wasn't its sole ideal. Academic freedom is an indispensable part of the mix, but engaged forms of adult education in new and newly relevant fields were central, too. It also represented particular ways of understanding "social research." The permanent faculty of the UiE was not a cross-section of refugee scholars but a hand-picked group exemplifying particular academic traditions.

On the other hand, in the University in Exile things sometimes said metaphorically were literally true.
• Can a university save a life? This one helped save the lives of 180 scholars and their families. That this was literally the case is confirmed, tragically, by the stories of scholars it tried but was not in time to save.
• We've been naming and challenging the "great man" way of telling history, in the New School case taking the form of making its first president Alvin Johnson single-handedly responsible for the nature, vision and success of The New School, but in the case of the UiE he really was the great man. He saw the need to reach out to scholars fired from German universities in April 1933 sooner than anyone else, mobilized more resources and more quickly, defied the prevailing antisemitism of American academic life and battled the nativism and anti-socialism of the State Department, and set up a truly self-governing intellectual world to preserve and give voice to European scholarship. A magnificent achievement. J showed us examples of Johnson's vision and savvy, like this letter to the Rockefeller Foundation from March 1935.

Quite a strategic intelligence at work here, willing even to play on the anti-semitic worries of some of the folks at the Rockefeller. It's hard to get students today to realize the extent of anti-semitism in mid-20th century America, too, and how uniquely well-positioned the quota-less New School was to accommodate Jewish refugee scholars.

In sum, the story of The New School's rescue of endangered scholars from Europe is truly a remarkable one, and worth getting right. It has no need of mythical embellishment, though collective memory works more with mythic Gestalts than with carefully-parsed historical details and tensions. But what was its true Gestalt?

Did I say "Gestalt"? Indeed I did! My task in class was to discuss two essays from the refugee faculty, in the context of the world-historical situation, one by the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, and one by the fly in our allegedly lefty ointment, Leo Strauss. Strauss's "Persecution and the Art of Writing," which appeared in Social Research in 1941, is a handful, so I'll save him for another day. Wertheimer's "A Story of Three Days" (1940), which I supplemented with his essay for the first issue of Social Research in 1934, "On Truth," is more than enough for today.

Max Wertheimer was the father of "Gestalt psychology." He was in the original dozen faculty members Alvin Johnson assembled in 1933 (second from the left in the back row of the photo above), and very important for the intellectual life of the fledgling UiE/GFSPS, directing a weekly methodology seminar in which the whole faculty participated. What might a psychologist have to say about the methodology of the social sciences more generally? Lots, especially if it's a Gestalt psychologist.

 

Here are some well-known illustrations of the Gestalt claim that the mind detects patterns before parts, and that (as fellow Gestalt psychologist and fellow New Schooler Kurt Koffka put it) "the whole is other than the sum of its part." That triangle, that sphere, those worms - we see them clearly although, strictly speaking, they're not there. This has all sorts of implications for cognition, and also for communication. But the implications are broader than this, and really open a way to an engaged and interdisciplinary social science. 

But first, have a quick look at these figures from a pathbreaking article of 1923. Here the question is not how we might see things which aren't really there, but how one might arrange things so that we fail to see something which is there. The coffin shape at top left recurs in each of the other images, but it's hard to see it, even when you look for it.

I don't know that Wertheimer was thinking of the hiding of coffins at this point, but by 1934 his examples have clear resonance beyond the illustrative point. "On Truth" asks us to consider someone who hires another to break into a desk for him. The thief is caught, but when the person who hired him is asked if he broke into the desk, he of course answers no. I'll bet you anything Wertheimer was thinking about the arson attack on the Reichstag a month after Hitler came to power in 1933; progressives were convinced the Nazis had hired the unstable Dutch communist who "did it." (But you saw that coming, yes?!)

Wertheimer uses this cases to argue that a theory of truth as correspondence of propositions to facts is inadequate, since something could be true as far as it goes but lead ineluctibly to a larger false view. He suggests a terminology where the truth or falsity of parts is in lower-case, and of wholes in capitals. Accordingly, the hirer's not having broken into the desk is tF. To really understand the truth of a situation you need more than the sum of its parts. And, as the Reichstag case makes clear, how the Gestalt is defined is enormously important. The question to the one who hired the desk-robber is, a culpably badly formed, designed to shut things down rather than open them up.

(To say that a whole is different than the sum of its parts is also to acknowledge that a given part may be part of other wholes.) But, you might ask, who's to say that a needs to be understood as part of abc in a given case, rather than amn (let alone just as a)? It might seem that anyone could craft a Gestalt to suit her agendas. This is a version of the relativist (really nihilist) view that "everyone has their own interpretation." Wertheimer acknowledges it, indeed emphasizes what a serious challenge it is to the search for knowledge and communication, and proposes a solution. Truth will never reliably be understood in terms of propositions. Our best hope is to define it with reference to the people who make claims and their whole attitudes toward reality.

[Inset quotes from "On Truth," Social Research 1:1/4 (1934), 137, 145]

The Gestalt approach takes us from "piece-meal" understandings to a more holistic understanding of truth-telling (and its opposite). Truth will be found not by isolating individual bits of reality and studying them, but by developing an attitude to do justice to reality - an attitude which others can recognize from the way you behave in all of your doings. Similar conclusions might be drawn about institutions, whether of criminal justice (asking the right questions, or questions like "did you break into that desk?") or universities, and even of societies as a whole.

The essay we read, "A Story of Three Days," was published in 1940, and makes a similar argument for the Gestalt of freedom by way of a tour of various disciplines. It tells of a man who, disheartened and confused by what was happening in Europe, asks for help in understanding the nature of freedom, which he feels to be important, but others are attacking as an illusion. A sociologist gives him a relativist view, a novel suggests that the history of freedom is really a history of slavery, a psychoanalyst's book says civilization requires the suppression of instinctive urges, and a philosopher assures him that freewill is itself an illusion. Unsatisfied by what seem at best negative and piece-meal accounts of freedom, the man turns to his own experience of free and unfree people, and this solves the problem for him - while also defining a whole new research agenda beyond the disciplines he's so far sampled.

This is much the same as the illustration of truth in the 1934 essay, but here Wertheimer takes it further. Freedom is an attitude, but the considerations raised by the sociologist, psychoanalyst, novelist and philosopher, while incomplete and misleading on their own, each help one understand the complexity and importance of the question of freedom. They show that freedom is also something which is made more or less likely by conditions of various kinds. Different ways of raising children can make or break their capacity to act freely. Adult social and political experiences can have similarly positive or negative effects. Freedom is a social and political question. Returning to the distressing situation of freedom in Europe, Wertheimer echoes the theories of totalitarianism to which several New School thinkers contributed.
[Inset quotes from "A Story of Three Days," in Documents of Gestalt Psychology, ed. Mary Henle (Berkeley & LA: U of California Press, 1961), 63. Henle is another refugee psychologist who taught for many years at The New School, she's seated in the middle of the far side of the table in the late 1940s seminar picture above]

Do you get a sense of the earnest, truth- and freedom-loving discussions of the University in Exile, ranging across disciplines in their quest to respond to the pressing human questions of the day? I do. Well done, New School for Social Research.

Ouch!

One of our graduating seniors is writing for the school newspaper this semester. He writes well and has much to say! Is the piece "The New School for Religious Oppression" an opinion piece or reporting? I favor the latter interpretion, recalling when some students who recently graduated played with the idea of forming a student group for "Out Christians" at Lang - to be called OUCH - and then didn't dare.

Rescued

Scholars and artists The New School helped escape from fascist and Nazi Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Something to be very proud of.

Trump!

My very clever nephew has amplified the offerings of his deck of cards with a diamond-heart Emperor and a club-spade Prince.

Local glyphs

At an exhibition on the Photo League at the Jewish Museum I happened on a 1950 picture by Arthur Leipzig called "Chalk Games, Prospect Place." My street! The street where "The Wiz"'s Auntie Em lives, too!

Not sure how long I'll stay here, though. Burglars broke into the third floor kitchen on Tuesday - that window's accessible from the fire escape, as mine on the fourth floor is not - and in response the landlady is having bars put on all our garden-facing windows. (They call them "gates" to make them seem less oppressive.) Can I live without the uninterrupted views of sky and Manhattan to which I've become accustomed? I know, loads of New Yorkers live with gates on their windows, and better safe than sorry. Still... at least until I find another housemate I may dream of flying away.

Wood art

Dropped in on my editor in Princeton today (he was very encouraging), and then convinced a friend to go with me to the woods by Terhune Orchards. There's no sign of Spring here, but beautiful nonetheless.

Three weeks to go

We haven't had a political cartoon here for a while...

1927, 1929

at The New School (Kallen!)

Picturing The New School

I opened today's session of New School Century with a 1931 snibbet from a newspaper in Danish (or is it Norwegian?). (See leaf 19 of scrapbook 4.) On my first skim of the scrapbooks I exulted in our being important enough to be written about in Europe, but attention to the ads makes clear that this is a New York newspaper (the name is lost), a reminder of what a polyglot city this has always been. It confirms also that The New School was of interest not just to one or two communities in the City.
The list of classes being offered at The New School is pretty awesome too - and this snibbet includes only Torsdag and Fredag! Robert Frost on poetry, Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture, Sidney Hook and Horace Kallen on philosophy, Doris Humphrey and John Martin on dance, among others, and one Thomas H. Benton on "Craftsmanship and Art." That Benton is, of course, the muralist of my favorite lost New School space. Here's the Benton muraled conference room on the 5th floor in 1931.

You've seen the colors of the murals, but I've learned that the overall effect was brighter still, with a varnished walnut floor, black-lacquer furniture and walls, a russet-red ceiling surrounded by subtle lights, and curtains in cerulian blue. In any case, I argued, along with a few other spaces like the Orozco Room two floors up, this room was the most distinctive of The New School and its engaged worldly ethos, and so came to represent the distinctiveness of The New School experience.

It certainly will have produced an enveloping experience whether for discussions or lectures (more so than the Orozco-muraled cafeteria, whose figures are not life-size and in your space, but abstracted and located at eye level and above). It was the ideal setting for showing that the refugee intellectuals of the University in Exile were indeed in America. And in promotional materials for the BA program and the Institute of Retired Professionals from the early 1960s, the Benton Room showed that this was no ordinary school, with ordinary rooms. Later, in the Seminar College and early Eugene Lang College, the Benton Room was where the life- and community-defining orientation (later called "tally") happened - here copies of catalogs from each of them.

 

When the murals were sold (mainly to raise money, but also for conservationist reasons, as they were suffering from scuffing as people leaned chairs back against them, and suffused with cigarette smoke), part of New School identity went with it.

One of the readings for class was from Berenice Abbott's A Guide to Better Photography, yet another important popularizing book which grew out of a course at The New School. Abbott is, indeed, credited with creating the country's first photography program at The New School, starting in 1935. Abbott is encouraging to her readers - anyone can be a photographer - but doesn't downplay the hard work of taking better photographs. A good photographer works with what she knows, and composes her shot to let the truth of the object show. Abbott illustrated this with two pictures she took of the NY Stock Exchange.
The first was taken on a weekend, since traffic made setting up a tripod hard on a weekday, but the building was in shadow and the street deserted. She returned and returned to the spot until she found out when the light was on the facade just right - just twenty minutes each day! - and when the flag was hoisted - only holidays. In the end she persuaded the president of the Stock Exchange to have it hoisted just for her, since on holidays the street is deserted, too. For the bigger problem was people: when there was too much traffic she couldn't take a picture, but an empty street won't work, for two reasons.

Human activity, flow of crowds in the narrow street, was needed to offset that static neoclassic facade ... Most of all, of course, the Stock Market without feverish human movement is totally uncharacteristic. (25)

The characteristic feverish movement takes place inside the building, but a photo even of the outside has to convey it somehow if it is to be an effective portrait of the Stock Exchange! The resulting image shows a concatenation of light, people, cars, flag which, in fact, never happens, but it became iconic because it shows the true life of the building.

We asked the students what picture they would take to show what's characteristic of The New School... You can see why the Benton Room was so much photographed to represent us: it brought the busy world into the classroom - sort of the obverse of what Abbott did in her Stock Market portrait. I'll let you know what they come up with!

A clean well-lighted place

 

In the New School scrapbooks there's an article from Lighting Magazine in 1931, featuring the advanced lighting of the new building. Included are pictures not only of my crush, the Benton Room (above) but the lecture hall where The New School Century is happening 81 years later!

Scientific credo

In an article I was reading for the New School History course, I found a reference to a novel of Sinclair Lewis' called Arrowsmith, which apparently perfectly exemplifies the philosemitism of mid-20th century understandings of the purity of the scientific project. One can't trust film adaptations, I know, but it's a long novel and the 1931 film is directed by John Ford. Here's the protagonist (played by Ronald Colman), who at one point offers a scientific prayer:

God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste.

God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretence and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.

God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error.

God give me strength not to trust to God!

I don't know if Arrowsmith learned this from his tall gaunt Jewish mentor Dr. Gottlieb, nor am I competent to judge its relation to philosemitism. In any case, the secular but not Jewish Arrowsmith fails to live up to the creed, at least in the part of his life narrated in the film. One's wife's' death of a disease one had a serum to cure would addle most minds, surely. But there is hope yet. At the novel's end Arrowsmith leaves his cushy Bell Labs-like set-up in New York City for the woods of Vermont, where a manly fellow researcher invites him to a life of boy scout-like adventure and research.

A usable past

The "new historian" founders of The New School James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard were opponents of antiquarian, institutional and nostalgic histories. The encounter with the past should be helpful to the present, not in justifying it but in letting us understand how we got this far and how much farther we might yet be able to go; it might well also show where we have lost our way. Here's a good recent illustration:

As you know, we were able to digitize a number of scrapbooks The New School maintained in its first decades, and then left to moulder in boxes in a back room. Students in our class were each given a 12-page section of the scrapbooks to explore. We haven't had a chance to work through all the scrapbooks ourselves, so students have encountered primary material it's possible nobody has read in the better part of a century! We didn't know what students would find, or think of what else they might do with it besides write it up for us.

Well, several members of the staff of the New School Free Press are in the class, and, through one of them the editorial above got its most compelling argument for the inclusion of students in the university's Board of Trustees: we did it once before, indeed, in the glory of our founding moments. We've "tragically fallen to a state unrecognizable to those who created it"! Scrapbook evidence follows:

In 1921, the Evening Post reported that two members of [The New School's] Student Council were elected as representatives to the trustees’ meetings, where faculty members also had representation. The meetings “[were] far from the cut-and-dried performance, being rather a clearing house for ideas from the three points of view,” wrote the Post.

Before concluding that we have broken faith with our founders, the editorial makes some other pretty convincing arguments. The founders (even those who left before students like Clara Mayer were given positions on the Board of Trustees) would be proud!

Nationwide, many public and private universities elect student representatives to the board of trustees. In New York State, all boards in the SUNY system have at least one student with full voting privileges, Bard College has two, and Rockland Community College’s tenth board member is always a voting student.

The New School should act swiftly to do the same and enact the recommendation brought forth to the board three years ago. Student tuition and housing fees accounted for roughly 90 percent of The New School’s operating budget in 2010, according to the most recent figures provided by the university’s website. The student body of The New School does their part for this university by almost single-handedly supporting it financially, and it’s about time the university gives something back: fair representation at the highest level of the decision-making process.

It's still winter at farmer's markets, but that doesn't mean there aren't
lovely surprises, like these side-splittingly gorgeous German kohlrabi.

God in the details

Went with my Japanese friend H to see the revival of Margaret Edson's sublime play "Wit" on Broadway last night. I was lucky enough to see the original production with Kathleen Chalfant, its final scene indelible in my memory, her character too, and it's a different story with the younger-seeming Cynthia Nixon (I'm also closer than I was then to the age of the protagonist, who's forty-seven). It's none the less amazing as a piece of theater, as my friend's profoundly appreciative reaction attests. (She's a theater person but her English is shaky; what compelled her wasn't verbal ingenuity but the show's theatricality.) If you've seen the play - and if you haven't, you should - you might know what The Runaway Bunny is doing here. Amazingly, I'd forgotten the scene, and was tearfully grateful to be reminded of it. Awash in tears.

Live action

Today's round table discussion of lived religion was a blast! We had promised discussion of "Buddhist environ- mentalism, Jewish humor and queer Christians," and delivered on every front. B, a Canadian scholar I heard at a conference last year, spoke about her research with Wind Horse Farm, a Shambhala forest village. J, a colleague who teaches Jewish history spoke about how "A priest, a minister and a rabbi ..." jokes record a subtle refusal of Jews to be classed as a religious group. And I spoke about the icons of Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, reproductions of some of which are important parts of American queer Christianity.

The unifying theme was "lived religion," and we explored its methodology and fruits in different and complementary ways. B's work is ethnographic, J is working with materials from folklorists, and I was engaging with material culture. In another way we generated a cohesive discussion as all of us are trained as text people, philosophers and ethicists, and have come to the study of lived experience for many of the same reasons. I don't have time to summarize all our arguments, but I'll give you one of the takeaways of B's talk, one of the jokes from J's, and the itinerary of my talk.

B's work is in what has sometimes been called "empirical ethics," and as a result of five years' regular visits to Wind Horse Farm she has been able to document how the intentionally Buddhist community has worked through a number of different understandings of their life sustaining community and working the forest. Some of the Buddhist concepts which Buddhist ecology scholars say should be important are - especially interdependence and ahimsa. But you can't understand their role in the life of the WHF community without also grasping the Shambhala understanding of Buddha nature ("basic goodnesss," "nothing missing"), and the importance of meditation in the forest ("forest mind"). Attention to the lived experience of life with the forest can "complement, challenge and transform" philosophical understandings of the meaning of Buddhism, she concluded.

J used collections of jokes to suggest that the promotion of Judaism as part of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" underlying American values, promoted by the National Conference of Christians and Jews in the 1930s (they sent "tolerance trios" of Protestants, Catholics and Jews across the land, the airwaves and newsreels) and given official presidential imprimatur by Eisenhower in 1952, was not unproblematically accepted by Jews, who started telling jokes like this (I paraphrase, except for the punchline):

A priest, a minister and a rabbi are asked what they hope people will say of them after they die. "I hope people say I faithfully presented the mysteries of the Trinity," said the priest. "I hope people say I saved many souls for Christ," said the minister. And you, the rabbi was asked, what do you hope people say after you die? "Look, he's breathing!"

J suggested that in this and kindred jokes the Jewish voice, presented as down to earth and a bit crass, conveys a "deep ambivalence," an angry refusal even, of Christian understandings of religion, a rejection under the surface acceptance of the idea that Protestant, Catholic and Jew are in fact the same kind of thing. The jokes also represent a vindication of the everyday, making them doubly interesting as an object of reflection in "lived religion."

My remarks, finally, were an extended infomercial for the Queer Christianities conference, which is exactly one month away! I drew on William James and Robert Orsi to suggest that lived experience is the most creative part of religious life (systems, etc., are what James calls "second-hand religion"), and that the discovery and veneration of saints is a good example. I proposed that every age or group finds the saints it needs, including queer Christians today, and worked my way through six icons by Brother Robert, allowing them to accumulate in the screen above our heads like an ikonostasis. Icons are figures that you don't so much look at as looked at by, doing a little more than just representing a Christianity in which you can live. Behold (and be held):
 
St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes (and also, Orsi argued, of a generic American Catholicism); Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker and not a canonized saint (and someone whose most devoted followers would hate to see her coopted by the church); Mychal Judge, the gay Franciscan FDNY Chaplain who died on 9/11 (also not likely to be canonized, although a campaign is underway and miracles claimed); two icons of early Christian martyrs, Polyeuct and Nearchus, and Perpetua and Felicity, both presented as couples; and as a final provocation, since he wasn't any kind of Christin, Harvey Milk. Images of these and other icons of Brother Robert circulate widely. A lived religion study of them would look at who uses them and how, and what they think they are doing, both to understand this particular community now, but also to understand better what must have been happening for all Christian communities at all times.

Together the three presentations, with the rather exciting discussion which followed, made for a very satisfying afternoon, with lots of interesting new perspectives on various religions, and useful methodological and ethical reflection, too. In particular, do we think that "lived religion" can escape being a corrective, a reaction to older tradition-based understandings of religion? (Yes, for various reasons, hopefully... but it's a good question!) Thanks, everyone!