Tell me a story about The New School

Huzzah - The New School aged almost a quarter century! 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 novel story of the New! An argument could be made for starting our institutional storytelling with the origins, 130 years ago, of the oldest part of the present institution: the pioneering school of applied art much later renamed Parsons School of Design. Parsons was saved from collapse by The New School in 1970, before rapidly becoming our most successful and lucrative component of the ensuing hybrid university, but what was happening there before 1970 fits awkwardly into the standard stories, especially those starting only in 1919. 

It would be good to weave them 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.

Still, it's strange to think that proto-Parsons was in some sense New School before New School was! It's the sort of things 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 efforts to combine the two stories. They 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 casting about for the unexpected partner who, hindsight confirms, was destined to complete them. (You'll recall I found that no comparable effort was made to find a place for The New School in storytelling around Parsons' own centennial in 1996.) It was forced but the giddy conventions of centennial celebrations excused it.

At one hundred and thirty, it's funny to think of The New School as, now, 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 heart of The New School for a long time (though only starting in 1934, and never exclusively), is being restructured nearly out of existence. I'm not quite ready to imagine that The New School existed in some meaningful way before the New Schools of 1933 or even 1919 - and might somehow continue after them, too.

National rededication

The Christianist nationalists are staging a jamboree on the National Mall today to "rededicate" the United States to their God. I feel, not to be frivolous, like the indigenous Taino must have felt when Columbus claimed to claim their land for his God and the king who had sent him. As many of us learned from Sylvia Wynter, one Taino, invited to endorse the new regime, is reported to have said "The Pope must have been drunk, the king of Castile a madman!" I want to say, too: this isn't theirs, isn't theirs to take, and the God whom they claim entitles them to is not the true God!

But of course it's more complicated, especially for someone descended from Columbus', not the Tainos' world. 

The easy thing would just be to say - and with justification - that the story the Christianist nationalists are telling about the Founders 250 years ago is untrue. The Founders, though some were inspired by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were part of an imperial European Christian world uninterested in other cultures. But they did not dedicate their independence to the Christian God, and certainly not to an Evangelical one who hadn't even been invented yet. Most of the thirteen colonies had their own established church, but the federation of rebelling colonies who called themselves the "united States" was to establish none. The First Amendment made explicit what was implicit about religion in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

That said, the Founders didn't have the pluralistic religious panorama that the United States has become in mind, either. (I've been wanting to find a way to say this for a while.) We need to tell a story that admits and embraces growth, maybe one that shows how, over time, the US comes more fully to embody its founding ideals, "a more perfect union." A ship, one might quip, founders if it doesn't move. (The Catholic in me says that the Protestantism of many Christianists makes them unable or unwilling even to imagine such development.) 

But as I contemplate what's being said on the Mall, I balk at the very framing. How dare we start the story we tell - however the last two and a half centuries are narrated - in 1776, as if if nothing preceded it? That's the drunk madness of the Doctrine of Discovery/terra nullius Wynter's Taino named. The story of the US unfolded on stolen land, building wealth and clearing swamps and forests with stolen labor. And it was never the only story unfolding here, nor itself a single story.

What story should one then tell? As a partisan of democracy (unlike those on the Mall whose false God enjoins them to subvert it in a great spiritual war), I'd like to say that the Founders stumbled on something remarkable and of broader significance than they could have imagined - the idea of a political community in which everyone matters. If everyone really has a voice, who knows what glories might emerge from their collaboration? (This is the dream the Equator editors see the present regime as having fatally dashed.) And what possibilities of collaboration, across and within every kind of difference, it opens up!

Hold the Norman Rockwell images: The telling of this story can't abstract from the story of a hemisphere ravaged by the very unequal "Columbian exchange," the centuries-long enslavement of people from Africa (and indigenous people too), and the religion of "whiteness" which sanctioned them. The US became the dominant world power we still fitfully are not because of divine blessing but because of the cushion of two oceans around land taken from peoples decimated by our diseases. 

What about the blessings of liberty? Is it self-delusion to think that democracy may have played some part in the success of the US? The "us" of enfranchized citizens always projected an excluded "them," it is true. Is it vainglory nevertheless to think democracy is still the best way of naming, minimizing, maybe even overcoming these exclusions? If not the best or only, a way? This wouldn’t erase the crimes of the founding and the expanding and their long shadows, but might it redeem them?  

"Redeeming" - that’s Christian language. Do I dare say anything to all this as a Christian? (Not because Christians have a privileged say here - those who say so are those I'm calling "Christianist" - but because I am an American and a Christian, or strive to be.) 

As a white Christian I can say one must begin with repentance, that our chances for transformation - as individuals or communities - are unmerited and yet real. Taking these chances may be a way to begin atoning for this history of plunder and presumption. But I wouldn’t have the effrontery to tell a non-white Christian to think this way. 

As a Christian I feel I should say that we are called and sent to the lands of others to recognize them, as we have been recognized, as all of us children of God. Christianity may not be the only or best way to do this; arguably the potential for it within Christian culture was developed only through encounter with other traditions. Christians (as I've learned from Willie James Jennings) should remember we are guests in the story of redemption, naturalized to it, not native. And we were invited into the covenant community along with the whole of humanity. There is no subset of humans for whom there is a special place, most certainly no special nation. Christianity most be universal or it is not Christian. 

What story can a Christian tell about the experiment launched by the imperfect and unrepresentative white men gathered in Philadelphia 250 years ago? It can tell that despite human imperfection religious liberty is a good thing, that diversity of every kind is a gift that keeps giving, that the shape of the human story isn’t fixed or finalized. The American way isn't the only or necessarily the best way of realizing all this but enough of it may serve toward this end to merit continuing the experiment, learning to do it better. (Indigenous sovereignty now, reparations for enslavement, and fearless history for all!) 

The American flag was cut from cloth of a Christian civilization but it flies for all God’s children, of all faiths and none. If it flies only for some, it doesn't deserve to fly at all. 

An "unamerican" thought? If I spoke those words in the Mall, and the Founders had to choose which words spoken on the Mall today were truest to their better natures, I hope they'd endorse mine.

Pins and needles

The academic year's over. Someone's taken down all the flyers for events and opportunities on campus and off; student research projects, senate candidacies, casting calls and recitals; faculty plugs for fall classes that weren't filling. Now we wait to see who gets to be part of the school's next chapter.

Unguarded

Today was a good New School day. 

I had lunch with the TAs from the just-completed iteration of "After Religion" (in the dappled light of the courtyard maples, despite the barriers), happy to learn how the experience has been useful for them. Before and after that, I had zoom interviews with potential TAs for next year's iteration, and, wow, what a cavalcade of talent - and in areas entirely different from this year's two stars. It's exciting to think about how the course will be reshaped in consultation with a new crew. (Choosing just four of the ten I spoke to won't be easy.)

There's something more than usually bittersweet about perching between past and future at this end-of-the-schoolyear moment, since so much is uncertain about next year. Several of the potential TAs face the loss of an advisor or even their school. And who knows what world we'll be teaching in (if we're still there) in January 2027?! Scare quotes-framed though it is, it feels a little like cheating on the pain of the present moment to make even provisional plans for next year.

But I sure do hope The New School makes it through, and as much like the fabulous if flawed beast that it has been as possible. I felt that in the worlds of curiosity and commitment of these graduate students, and again when I rounded out my day with a visit to the senior show in the BFA Fine Arts program, which included work by two of the "After Religion" students. The array of gifts on display was overwhelming! 

This picture isn't from that show, but from one I found my way in accidentally: MFA Textiles. These works are (I think) part of a project of found materials called "Fibres of Thought" by one Vidushi Parashar, whose description includes the words:

In a world that's attracting us to the constant chatter and noise, this project focuses on the tender mutation that one goes through to release the feeling of overstimulation. ... The aim is to let each form ask people to loosen their grip. To soften. To laugh. To linger. To remember what it means to be unguarded. I am interested in what happens when we are disarmed by delight. When laughter opens the body. When something playful can hold something devastating. When wonder becomes a method of survival.

How much we give each other in this school...!!

Shallows of MAGA

May I state the obvious? Even if the project weren't being executed poorly and way over budget by unqualified people hired without proper process, the prez' plan to paint DC's Reflecting Pool "American flag blue" emblematizes the cheap grace his vision of America offers. This pool won't reflect anything. His type think nothing like that is needed. The sky, the world, transcendence, even reality? We're "great" without you.

我慢

At the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine this morning, the annual Asian American Pacific Islander Celebration Service was dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the closing of the last Japanese American internment camp, Tule Lake. 

In his sermon, the Reverent Canon John Kitagawa, whose family were imprisoned at Tule Lake, emphasized that the danger to non-white and foreign-born Americans persists, and in a time of resurgent white supremacism offered a Japanese word for the struggle to bend the arc of history toward justice: 我慢 gaman. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, he told us, gaman is patient persistence in enduring the apparently unbearable, persevering without losing one's dignity or commitment to a better way.

This Japanese gift was offered in a service which included music sung in Malayalam, and Prayers of the People offered in English, Shanghainese, Spanish, Tagalog, Japanese, Cantonese, Malayalam and Korean. Written for the occasion by Deacon Elis Lui (the bulletin has just the English), they're worth reading, though you might find yourself weeping if you do, as I did. Now imagine hearing each in someone's ancestral language, a polyglot chorus united in mutual care.

Only in America, I thought to myself, with fierce gratitude. And in the Church? 絶望せずに我慢しましょう。

White supremacy rears its head

It took just a week for the SCOTUS conservative majority's claim that the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed to be proven wrong. 

Tennessee Republicans' gerrymander to procure the final of the state's nine Congressional seats for their party by carving up Memphis winkingly claims merely to be nakedly political, and so SCOTUS-approved. Of course a third of the electorate voted for Kamala Harris and a Democratic candidate for Senate in 2024... but that's no reason why a gerrymandered state legislature can't engineer a 100% Republican delegation to Washington, surely? That's just politics! 

Except it's not. Such transparently anti-democratic theft of votes is pure White Supremacy. The Republicans elected in gerrymandered districts don't bat an eyelid at silencing the Democrats in their state, because they've been raised to believe that not all citizens' votes should matter, even as they claim representation based on census counts including those they disenfranchise. The template for this theft of others' voice is slavery and its Jim Crow successors, where not only the voice but the labor and freedom of African Americans were systematically stolen.

Did the SCOTUS majority consider that their green-lighting of "merely political" vote-rigging might entrench White minority rule? Or do they, too, think that it wouldn't really be minority rule, since those robbed of their votes should know their place as second-class citizens in a White "Christian" America? Democracy for some is not democracy.

Final project showcase

"What comes after religion?" Community!

AI, where is thy sting?

Still reeling at my student's rejection of AI I decided to attend the final presentations of a collaboration between the design school and Adobe. 

A group of "transdisciplinary design" MFA students spent the semester working with Adobe engineers, crafting their own artistic projects and helping articulate codes of "content authenticity and provenance."

The students had found, learning through doing, that AI can expedite creativity or short-circuit it. At some stages friction is useful.

One student shared her learning about how AI can turbocharge options, overwhelming the creative (and destroying the planet) until the value of limits is appreciated, along with the environmental costs of AI, in an animated film about a cute polar bear. (This 2-D summary doesn't mention that at the moment the polar bear starts producing cascading streams of AI content the ice floes beneath him begin to melt.)

The course supervisors, from Parsons and Adobe, synthesized the students' views on when AI is welcome to their creative process or a threat in a handy visualization of the stages of the creative process.

I found this phase chart so helpful that I shared it with one of my faculty senate co-chairs, a designer who works in more business-focused "impact entrepreneurship." I was surprised only, I told her, that they were so closed to using AI in the final stages of their work, the point where, the director of Adobe's generatative AI Firefly had observed a little glibly, they "add the human touch."

"That's because they're artists," she said. In the design processes she teaches, AI adds loops and layers of refinement and application as products and concepts find markets and audiences and partnerships - things that used to take weeks, now accomplished in minutes.  

The "phase" map I'd appreciated fits with the "double diamond model" that everyone used to use, she told me, but in her world AI has replaced that with what's called the "stingray model." I looked for it online and found this. It promises to help teams "overcome human bias," move beyond solutions they "fall in love with" to "meet the needs of a broader expanse of society." This is different from artists honing their distinctive voice. Do only artists (like my fave of the show) see value in friction?

My own mind is reeling, but in a good way. One of the speakers from Adobe (a Parsons alum from pre-AI days) had reported that students were worried that frictionless AI would lead to "never skilling" (bypassing skills it would be valuable for them to acquire) and "deskilling" (losing fluency in things they already knew how to do.) I can use that, too!

Her gloss for what they were all trying to foster and facilitate, "creative intelligence," is an interesting brief for the aims of liberal education in an age where AI is integrating into every phase of things.

Economic strike

For May Day - "no work, no school, no shopping!" - academic labor unions from across the City converged on The New School, before joining the big labor march from Washington Square Park to Foley Square.

Folks from St. John's told of their administration's ceasing to recognize their faculty union ("Hear us now, we'll say it slowly, union-busting is unholy!") while a leader of the NYU full-time contract faculty who just won a contract urged all to mobilize ("they say it's a bad time, but it's always a good time to organize!"). Our own predicament, as still opaque faculty and staff layoffs beckon, framed the proceedings. Despite the aspirational banner in the picture above, we don't have a full-time faculty union, although a majority of us have expressed interest.

Afterthoughts

It's a wrap - almost. Today was the last lecture for "After Religion." (Students will share their final projects in a showcase next week.) The TAs and I used the class to reflect on what we've covered, but I spent much of my time reprising what students had contributed. 

On the projected screen above you can see the title slides for my class powerpoints filling the first two lines, and the google.docs we did in ten of the class sessions below. I went through the latter one by one, reminding the class of our collective insights, and, I trust, making them grateful to each other for the experience too. 

On the whiteboard, I wrote the prompt for the first class google.doc, on what "after religion" might mean, correcting it half way through my review to suggest it might really be secularism (and its understanding of "religion") that's over, for better or worse. 

I included a picture of the whiteboard in the version of the slide deck I shared with the class after we finished, narrating visually my own very brief reflection on the class. In the half year since the TAs and I finalized this year's syllabus, I told them, the commonplace that "religion is a thing of the past" has come to seem scarily passé. Certain kinds of "religion" seemed resurgent, along with other things we might have thought things of the past - patriarchy, racism, imperialism.

So do I still call the class "After Religion" next time it runs? Might it not be better to rename it "Religion After All"?

Happily there are other options. Last week we'd read Tyson Yunkaporta's "indigenous thinking" critique of western thinking's narrowly linear understanding of entropy, which he upended by carving a club with an Ouroboros (a snake eating its tail) on it. Roll the club on some clay: An image appears of an endless succession of snakes (Sand Talk, 53).

What say we call the class "After Religion After Religion After Religion" - though that might look like a glitch on a transcript!

Before inviting the TAs to share their own closing reflections, I picked out lines from the assigned materials for the class as parting gifts. (At the end of the semester one shouldn't expect anyone to have "done the reading" - even if, as in this case, it was listening and watching.)

Yuria Celidwen, another indigenous thinker (and a friend of the course), gives us permission to be confused but on the way to "recreating, collectively," better stories. And Thich Nhat Hanh invites us to break through the "habit energy of several generations of ancestors" who didn't believe we can be at home in the pain and promise of the present. 

The beginning, I almost said, comes after the end. Maybe I will say that next week, as we give the class time over to students to share their final projects exploring "what comes after religion?"