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."

Triumph of western barbarity

The indispensable Heather Cox Richardson draws our attention to the language of the recent presidential proclamation reclaiming "Columbus Day" from the haters. I'm struck by the Christian nationalist story which the writer of the proclamation (surely not the prez) is setting up. Some excerpts:

Today our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus — the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory. ... 

He was guided by a noble mission: to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands. ... 

Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith. Though he initially believed he had arrived in Asia, his discovery opened the vast frontier and untold splendors of the New World to Europe. He later ventured onward to Cuba and other islands in the Caribbean — exploring their coasts and engaging with their people.... 

Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.

Jesus Christ and Western civilization, virtue and steadfast prayer, "thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason and culture" and "America's proud birthright of faith" - all of them culminating in the Declaration of Independence, "the ultimate triumph of Western civilization," oh my! This is a submarine sandwich of white nationalist tropes, tropes long associated with the figure of Columbus. 

Richardson draws attention to how explicitly Christian it is. But haven't I said I think the storyline for 1776-2026 is going to be the less overtly Christian "faith, family, freedom"? That's in the proclamation, too, in its nod to the Italian Americans who created Columbus Day. (There's no mention of the civilizations of the Indigenous People of Turtle Island smothered by the Christian "birthright.")

To this day, the United States and Italy share a special bond rooted in the timeless values of faith, family, and freedom. 

How do you think Giorgia Meloni understands the three f's? I won't nauseate you with more of this tripe; there is doubtless lots more of it to come. (This bombast will surely characterize the captions of the promised National Garden of American Heroes for which the NEH was eviscerated.) But I have to rub my eyes at the realization that the folks behind this belligerent chauvinism believe themselves to be the ultimate fruit of Western civilization! 

Where's Sylvia Wynter when you need her?

Feel the love

At a time when hatred and fear are being celebrated in the highest places, and cities are vilified as particularly hellish, it was a wonderful balm to explore the exhibition "Dear New York," in Grand Central Station. The work of Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, this exhibition replaces all the station's advertisements for two weeks with portraits and interview snippets. Most news images of the exhibition show the iconic central hall of Grand Central, but it's actually the least changed (except for being advert-free, I suppose). 

Images from Stanton's work snake along the corridors connecting the three levels of subways beneath the station, mixing with the people making their way to and from trains. Taking pictures of my own I was initially torn between waiting for people to pass so I'd get an uninterrupted view of Stanton's exhibition, and trying to stage the people hurrying obliviously by with it. Looking at my pictures now, the most satisfying are those in which you feel that the folks in his photos and in mine are the same, all New Yorkers with stories you may never know, but which work like Stanton's assures you are worth the knowing.

 

In Vanderbilt Hall, there's new work from other photographers - profiles of the work of ten local neighborhood photographers (one focusing on the homes of the formerly incarcerated), and surrounding them on three sides, portraits by New York schoolchildren describing people "who have had an impact" on their lives. Lots of cleverly posed mothers and fathers and siblings and friends, grandparents, teachers, priests, neighbors... 

 

It's impossible not to feel buoyed by all the love surfaced and celebrated here. (The interactions of people viewing the exhibition were unusually kind and tender, too. I think many of us had tears in our eyes.) I think something like Humans of New York could be done anywhere ... and probably should! 

Lived religion

Unplanned, both my classes are reading from Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion this week! In both, we're not only getting to know a recent direction in research, but pushing back against narratives which presnet current American pluralism unprecedented. McGuire refers to work by historian Peter Burke, who draws on Bruegel's "Fight between Carnival and Lent" to argue that pre-Reformation European Christianity had a much broader understanding of religion, one encompassing feasting as well as fasting in prescribed rhythms. Way fun to have that image overlooking our class discussion! 

In "Theorizing Religion" we also watched a witty video by the young scholar who produces the series "Religion for Breakfast," one of whose exhibits is an amulet from late-Roman Anatolia which happily mixes together Christian and non-Christian images; the class really got into it when I pointed out that such an amulet won't just have been an individual's syncretic secret but produced on a wider scale for many people. Both helped the class see beyond individualistic conceptions of private spirituality. As McGuire puts it: 

[I]ndividual religion is, nevertheless, fundamentally social. Its building blocks are shared meanings and experiences, learned practices, borrowed imagery, and imparted insights. (Lived Religion, OUP 2008, 13).  

Wishing blue skies

A morning view for a change... 

Come into my parlor

 

Frog mouths galore

Headwinds

At a meeting of our University Curriculum Committee (where I am one of the Faculty Senate reps) today, someone from the Provost's Office reported that she'd been losing sleep over recent EAB and WEF reports. She may be privy to newer ones (I asked if she might share them) but I found one of each, EAB's "The Future of Student Success," which included fun graphics like the one below, a backgrounder for variously dire scenarios for the future of American higher ed institutions. The 

World Economic Forum "Future of Jobs Report 2025" predicted that in a rapidly changing economy the majority of people employed today will require additional training within the next five years. The hastening obsolescence of "skills" makes the case for liberal arts education stronger, my Provost's Office colleague told me in a private zoom chat. But good news is otherwise hard to discern in these reports. And the two I found are from 2024 and January 2025, respectively, before the US government's war on universities was launched! Fasten your seatbelts.