Out of the box

I'm given to understand that - unlike many Parsons classes - our history department doesn't require its majors to get to know the New School Archives. Shame, since it's a good place to make the discovery that the past isn't the way you want it to be.

I spent a few hours there today, hoping to learn more about the role of a famous religious studies personality in the origins of my school. I once met Jonathan Z. Smith, whose work kicks off many a theory of religion classes, including mine. When he learned I was at Eugene Lang College, he told me he'd been flown to the New School many times to help get it set up. I've confirmed that he was a member of the Commission on Undergraduate Education which the newly installed president Jonathan Fanton set up in 1982. The abridged version of the Commission's report (delivered in June 1983) lists the members - and also that one of the areas it recommended the school develop was Religion! Apparently there was an outline of a possible course of study, too. This could be a coup for the history of the history of religions, as well as for the history of the New School! So I asked the archivists to see a copy of the unabridged report. They found me four copies, from four different sets of boxes - three of them as yet uncatalogued. Exciting!

There is indeed a Religion curriculum mapped out in an Appendix to the Report, designed to fit the Commission's most radical proposal - that New School undergraduates specialize in their sophomore and junior year, returning to a full diet of interdisciplinary seminars as seniors. That daring 1+2+1 way of carving up a four-year college career, a visionary anticipation of later ideas, is a lost opportunity I deeply rue.

The proposed Religion curriculum is a little staid, a little Eurocentric - it was 1982. (One of the topics proposed for the senior seminars was "Genesis.") I suppose I should be grateful that someone argued for religious studies at all. Classics was recommended, too, as was a kind of pre-law degree, and nothing came of them. But religious studies at what became Eugene Lang College isn't J Z Smith's greatest legacy.

It turns out what J Z Smith was referring to when he told me he'd been flown in regularly was what happened after the Commission's report was published, and even after the dean of the Seminar College, the long-time director of undergraduate experiments Elizabeth Coleman, resigned. (He may have been invited to do so in the aftermath of this unexpected resignation.) J Z Smith was asked by president Fanton to serve as a consultant to the university, leading discussions of the Commission's report and drafting an action plan based on these discussions. With a sinking heart I learned that it was J Z Smith's March 1984 report which pulled the plug on the Commission's most exciting idea - the 1+2+1 year curriculum.

Presumably J Z Smith's task was to reconcile the Commission's idealism with realities on the ground; in his report, he indicated he was being "conservative," thinking about what could most feasibly be achieved given the existing lay of the land. It may be that part of that lay of the land was a directive from the president to recommend a more conventional curricular structure - or through the president from the Board of Trustees. (J Z Smith's report also cut the legs out from self-government by the seminar college, recommending "the college" be taken to be a university-wide commitment governed by all parts of the university.) Maybe it was the best thing to do under the circumstances.

But it was still a shock to go in thinking I would uncover forgotten heroism only to find something more like villainy! J Z Smith helped the New School be more conventional in building its undergraduate college. Working with what the university's strengths already were, he recommended a curriculum composed of seminars (the existing seminar college), disciplinary foci (building on university strengths, they needn't be everyone else's disciplines), general liberal studies courses (feasting on the offerings of the adult division) and a "practicum" (internship, participation in a research project, etc.), the particular mix of which would be up to each individual student. Interesting in its own way but quite different from the seminar-centered vision of the Undergraduate Commission!

Perhaps I shouldn't grumble... what J Z Smith proposed is sort of what we're doing now (though the college has more autonomy than his proposal envisioned), and to general acclaim: it's what many other liberal arts colleges have come round to doing, too. Two cheers for JZS.