In our Archives today I found a 1952 self-study which remarks on the distinctive experience of faculty at the New School. (They didn't capitalize "The" in those days, and, when speaking, seem to have put the emphasis on "School.") Its second sentence is ungainly, as
"rough and tumble" as the classes it evokes, but worth following to the end:
[T]he teacher finds himself freed from the cumbersome
restrictions he has elsewhere known, facing a group of mature men and women who
are there because they want to be, because they are interested, have problems,
face difficulties, need to understand better themselves and others. He finds
them outspoken, often crude in their
remarks, intruding into his abstractions the concrete tests of their own experience,
disagreeing with him and with one another, sometimes without due restraint, taking the attention of the
class away from him, but in a rough and tumble rarely experienced in an average
college class, giving through shared thought, responding with sudden, eager
enthusiasm to some discerning remark he has made, at length listening not in
resigned boredom but in absorbed understanding to a lecture strangely different
from the one he had prepared – and surprisingly better.
