So it wasn't that surprising, I suppose, that when we asked students if there were things from the histories we'd been exploring that stuck with them - useful for imagining better futures and more effective ways of achieving them - all they talked about was our vaunted "lack of community." Not to make light of that: it's a persistent complaint, pointing to a structural problem. Part of it is New York, of course, and part is how busy people keep in New York, whether engaging it or working long hours so as not to go under in it. Lacking a campus we're effectively a commuter school for many students, and the sorts of students who come here tend to march to their own drummers anyway. Enterprising students start clubs but they rarely last long, and have a hard time getting people to keep coming to their meetings.
So it's a lonely experience for many. This reality makes an interest contrast, or perhaps complement, to the adult education character of the place for its first many decades. People weren't at the New School full-time (students or faculty); they came as a supplement to lives already lived - even if this was the part that kept them engaged, learning, sane. And they came in large part for each other, others drawn beyond their day jobs and families to make new connections and discoveries. I picture it a very social place, a place for meeting new and interesting people as much as new ideas. Isn't it that still?
Much has changed since we've become a full-time place, a degree-granting university with mostly traditional age undergraduate students, and rightly so. We have responsibilities to them which we didn't to adult education students, a world of instruction and support. But... we're the day job now! What to do if that's not fulfilling, if the relationships don't extend beyond the classroom or studio? Ironically the best I could offer the students yearning for connection was the vestige of the New School of old - the many public programs that still happen here every night, drawing motley audiences largely not of our students and faculty, where you might get in conversation with people with whom you already know you share an extracurricular interest in common.
When I led the First Year Workshops at Lang years ago, we tried and tried to get students in the habit of going to events. Every week there are amazing speakers, films, performances from across the city and around the world - and you have a standing invitation to all of them! I didn't realize we were showing them not only how to get the most out of The New School but also how to access to its community, at once evanescent and enduring, of adults.
