In today's New School history lecture, we told together two stories we usually tell separately - the Matsunaga Affair and the Mobe. (Actually, we've never really tried to tell the latter.) Funny things emerge when you have to link things.
The "Matsunaga Affair," you'll recall, was the convulsion of the university in 1989 when Sekou Sundiata, a Lang faculty member of color, x'd out a racist image in a Parsons exhibition of logos by the Japanese graphic designer Shin Matsunaga. The New School had only just affirmed its commitments both to an environment free from intolerance and to freedom of artistic expression, and was just beginning to bring the various divisions of the university together, so Sekou's act of "resistance" plunged the university into an existential crisis. I had a lot of fun telling the story in our "Offense & Dissent" exhibition, locating an unpublished account of Sekou's as well as an untranslated account by Matsunaga. It was heartening also to document the many efforts undertaken in response, by students and faculty and administration, to address the New School's failure to be a truly diverse and inclusive place.
Artwork commissioned for the exhibition reprises the layout of Matsunaga's display
But today we had to go on to talk about an even greater crisis around some of the same questions, which happened less than a decade later, the "Mobilization for real diversity, democracy, and economic justice" known as the Mobe. The Mobe was a many-headed beast, calling out the university for being a bastion of white male privilege in its hiring and teaching, the more outrageous for an institution that prided itself for being progressive; the very traditions and institutions which defined the New School were challenged as a "New University in Exile" disclosed exclusion and hierarchy at the school's heart. The Mobe pitted faculty and divisions against each other, and culminated in a a student hunger strike in April 1997 which was called off only when a student had to be hospitalized. Students gained a voice in some committees and security guards' exploitative contracts were improved, but the Mobe's broader demands were not met, and the whole episode left the campus community scarred. New School was still reeling from this trauma (the wounds so deep they were not discussed) when I arrived in 2002.
It's a tough story to tell, especially when you notice that it led to the departure of forward-thinking faculty members, the Chief Diversity Officer, the Provost, and (probably for this reason) President Fanton - and the closure of the hard-fought MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory. But it gets harder still if you're coming at it from the hopeful responses to the Matsunaga Affair. What went wrong? The responses were insufficient; in particular, efforts to diversify the faculty by bringing in faculty of color on initial 3-year-contracts became no more than a revolving door, confirming - the Mobe showed - that the deeper structures of the university were resistant to meaningful change.
A long article on the Mobe in Lingua Franca - but it happened on Fifth Ave.
Eyal Press, whose article "Nightmare on Twelfth Street" we assigned, criticizes the Mobe protestors for their "disturbing ... tendency to focus on what's happening on campus to the exclusion of the more egregious injustices committed outside its walls" when "much of what these critics abhor about the university ... is rooted in broader social and educational inequities that will not easily change." (Press studied political science for two years at The New School.) But can and should not the New School, of all schools, do better? Dimitry Tetin's commissioned work for "Offense & Dissent" (above) thematizes the challenges of working in a society permeated by white supremacy. Maybe we take these failures as reminders that the struggle will be hard, and long.
But I'm remembering also something Jonathan Fanton once said, similar to a point anti-racist educator Tim Wise made at a Festival of New discussion. When conditions improve, expectations are lifted even further; if improvements seem inadequate it may be because they have succeeded in creating hope for more significant change. Under his watch, Fanton said, New School was actually doing better than many institutions despite its limited resources, though much remains to be done. One could suggest (I did in lecture) that the Graduate Faculty's dismissal of the proposal "Rethinking Europe in a Global Context: A Proposal for Diversifying the Graduate Faculty Within an Intellectual Program of Study” in Fall 1996 seemed so noxious because of the success of Lang's 1990-95 "Program to Create Diversity throughout the College Community" - one of the responses to the Matsunaga Affair. Indeed, without the Lang program's articulation of an antiracist New School ethos the GF proposal might never have been ventured.
Longer, more connected stories show entrenched injustices - it requires constant struggle to resist what Ann Snitow called default patriarchy and the culture of white supremacy - but such storie also show the complicated reverberations of failures - and successes. The work goes on, and telling it like it was is part of it. Even the painful story of the Mobe, we'll tell students next week, planted seeds for a more just future.
The "Matsunaga Affair," you'll recall, was the convulsion of the university in 1989 when Sekou Sundiata, a Lang faculty member of color, x'd out a racist image in a Parsons exhibition of logos by the Japanese graphic designer Shin Matsunaga. The New School had only just affirmed its commitments both to an environment free from intolerance and to freedom of artistic expression, and was just beginning to bring the various divisions of the university together, so Sekou's act of "resistance" plunged the university into an existential crisis. I had a lot of fun telling the story in our "Offense & Dissent" exhibition, locating an unpublished account of Sekou's as well as an untranslated account by Matsunaga. It was heartening also to document the many efforts undertaken in response, by students and faculty and administration, to address the New School's failure to be a truly diverse and inclusive place.
Artwork commissioned for the exhibition reprises the layout of Matsunaga's display But today we had to go on to talk about an even greater crisis around some of the same questions, which happened less than a decade later, the "Mobilization for real diversity, democracy, and economic justice" known as the Mobe. The Mobe was a many-headed beast, calling out the university for being a bastion of white male privilege in its hiring and teaching, the more outrageous for an institution that prided itself for being progressive; the very traditions and institutions which defined the New School were challenged as a "New University in Exile" disclosed exclusion and hierarchy at the school's heart. The Mobe pitted faculty and divisions against each other, and culminated in a a student hunger strike in April 1997 which was called off only when a student had to be hospitalized. Students gained a voice in some committees and security guards' exploitative contracts were improved, but the Mobe's broader demands were not met, and the whole episode left the campus community scarred. New School was still reeling from this trauma (the wounds so deep they were not discussed) when I arrived in 2002.
It's a tough story to tell, especially when you notice that it led to the departure of forward-thinking faculty members, the Chief Diversity Officer, the Provost, and (probably for this reason) President Fanton - and the closure of the hard-fought MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory. But it gets harder still if you're coming at it from the hopeful responses to the Matsunaga Affair. What went wrong? The responses were insufficient; in particular, efforts to diversify the faculty by bringing in faculty of color on initial 3-year-contracts became no more than a revolving door, confirming - the Mobe showed - that the deeper structures of the university were resistant to meaningful change.
A long article on the Mobe in Lingua Franca - but it happened on Fifth Ave.Eyal Press, whose article "Nightmare on Twelfth Street" we assigned, criticizes the Mobe protestors for their "disturbing ... tendency to focus on what's happening on campus to the exclusion of the more egregious injustices committed outside its walls" when "much of what these critics abhor about the university ... is rooted in broader social and educational inequities that will not easily change." (Press studied political science for two years at The New School.) But can and should not the New School, of all schools, do better? Dimitry Tetin's commissioned work for "Offense & Dissent" (above) thematizes the challenges of working in a society permeated by white supremacy. Maybe we take these failures as reminders that the struggle will be hard, and long.
But I'm remembering also something Jonathan Fanton once said, similar to a point anti-racist educator Tim Wise made at a Festival of New discussion. When conditions improve, expectations are lifted even further; if improvements seem inadequate it may be because they have succeeded in creating hope for more significant change. Under his watch, Fanton said, New School was actually doing better than many institutions despite its limited resources, though much remains to be done. One could suggest (I did in lecture) that the Graduate Faculty's dismissal of the proposal "Rethinking Europe in a Global Context: A Proposal for Diversifying the Graduate Faculty Within an Intellectual Program of Study” in Fall 1996 seemed so noxious because of the success of Lang's 1990-95 "Program to Create Diversity throughout the College Community" - one of the responses to the Matsunaga Affair. Indeed, without the Lang program's articulation of an antiracist New School ethos the GF proposal might never have been ventured.
Longer, more connected stories show entrenched injustices - it requires constant struggle to resist what Ann Snitow called default patriarchy and the culture of white supremacy - but such storie also show the complicated reverberations of failures - and successes. The work goes on, and telling it like it was is part of it. Even the painful story of the Mobe, we'll tell students next week, planted seeds for a more just future.
