I was worried that the students would flake, it being end of semester, group assignments not being their thing, and our class being, after all, for many of them just a requirement. But all went swimmingly! Or at least there were enough students who took the assignment seriously to provide engaging presentations, some of them were very good indeed.
Where do they see us in ten years? More integrated, both between the university's various divisions and cultures (design, liberal arts, etc.) and their students, and between students, faculty and administration. We'll be limber, collaboratively engaged and linked by data-sharing, resource-pooling, expert advising and a culture of networking which includes alumni and a faculty engaged with the world beyond the university. We'll identify with The New School and its glorious legacy of creative forebears, rather than just with our divisions. We'll also be more diverse, socio-economically and also in worldviews, in part because we'll have found a way to be less expensive, maybe by expanding to Brooklyn! (I've made the suggestions sound both more unified and bolder than they were. Surely to the relief of the president, etc., nobody took up our invitation to "think big" and recommend a virtual university, a transnational one, a free one, etc., but that's probably for the best; they need it to work as more or less what it now is, as the group whose chosen title was "YOLO: You only live once," reminded us! We may be here in ten years but they won't.)
Once I realized it was going to be fine, I was quite moved by the pairs and triads of students from Parsons, Lang, NSPE and Jazz - a more ethnically diverse mix than you get in a representative Lang event - clearly enjoying each other's company, casually dropping names and ideas they'd learned in our class, and asking for more! We didn't reach everyone, but we reached enough. And people are already asking when we'll be teaching New School Century again. Spring of 2014, maybe...
