2009 is the 90th anniversary of the founding of The New School. I'm one of several people trying to size up ninety years of novelty and pass it on to new generations - great fun. I'll be leading a team of peer advisers through an online collection of writings, video clips and images culled from this tradition, and they in turn will lead all the incoming first year students through weekly workshops one of whose topics is the History of the New School.
Assembling this collection, which we're calling Reading The New School, was one of the pleasures of this past Spring. (For instance, I taught myself to use google sketchup to get the Benton murals in there, and in 3-D!) Its purpose is anything but generating an official history, forcing things into a single celebratory narrative.
There's much to celebrate, but even more to ponder and wonder at, since this has never been a conventional place, and there's never been a party line on what it was about. Serious fun: complicating things is close to my sense of the vocation of the academic (Max Weber's "inconvenient facts" in "Wissenschaft also Beruf.")
And I keep discovering new entries (and new wrinkles in the history) myself. Like the gentleman at left, more commonly associated with the University of Chicago and political conservatism: Leo Strauss. He taught here during what may have been The New School's most glorious decade (1938-48). And the original essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing" was published in Social Research in 1941 - and goes into next year's Reading The New School! Maybe some bright young thing will conclude from its jarring inclusion that the reader itself has an esoteric inner meaning...!
I want this archive to be something maintained by current students, so each peer adviser will also have to find something new to add to the archive for next year. Can't wait to see what they come up with!
Assembling this collection, which we're calling Reading The New School, was one of the pleasures of this past Spring. (For instance, I taught myself to use google sketchup to get the Benton murals in there, and in 3-D!) Its purpose is anything but generating an official history, forcing things into a single celebratory narrative.
There's much to celebrate, but even more to ponder and wonder at, since this has never been a conventional place, and there's never been a party line on what it was about. Serious fun: complicating things is close to my sense of the vocation of the academic (Max Weber's "inconvenient facts" in "Wissenschaft also Beruf.")And I keep discovering new entries (and new wrinkles in the history) myself. Like the gentleman at left, more commonly associated with the University of Chicago and political conservatism: Leo Strauss. He taught here during what may have been The New School's most glorious decade (1938-48). And the original essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing" was published in Social Research in 1941 - and goes into next year's Reading The New School! Maybe some bright young thing will conclude from its jarring inclusion that the reader itself has an esoteric inner meaning...!
I want this archive to be something maintained by current students, so each peer adviser will also have to find something new to add to the archive for next year. Can't wait to see what they come up with!
