What the New School looked like

Hanging out in the New School archives with my co-conspirator J, the university archivist and a grad student in psychology interested in writing about the history of psychology here, I learned about a recent archival find - this photo, of neo-Freudian Karen Horney. It's the late 30s or early 1940s (a historian of millinery would be able to tell us - what a display!) and Horney's teaching in the very room where J and I taught our first New School history course - although the walls and ceiling will then still have had Joseph Urban's color regime. What's so delightful here are the faces, each of which seems to tell a story. Why are some women smiling, others frowning? Why is one woman in short sleeves? What's going on with the intense young woman in the front row, or the pensive man at right (surrounded by scratches on the negative)? The woman in dark glasses in the back row, her companion hiding behind a copy of the New School Bulletin, seem to come from more recent times. And whence comes the circle right above Horney's head?