That Times article about The New School has generated a lof of comments, some predictable, many misinformed, and a few brilliant. My co-historian J sent me this one, a beaut:
In earning a BA in Liberal Arts from the New School College in the early 70’s I was allowed to take graduate courses to fulfill my requirements. One class I took was with the late Dr. Stanley Diamond, a distinguished anthropologist. His lectures were always packed. One lecture he changed the format and asked us students to start our own discussion asking and answering questions about any topic. He sat and listened. As the hour and a half class came to an end, he got up, silenced us and stated “What I have heard in this class today indicates the complete collapse of Western civilization”. He then abruptly left the lecture hall where we all just sat in stunned silence. That was The New School for Social Research at its peak.
Part of the trouble of an institution that marches to its own countercultural drummer is that, even as they grumble about its inadequacies, everyone thinks they just experienced The New School at its peak before things headed irrevocably south. I was guilty of that for a time, too, until newer cohorts of faculty and students started mourning as lost peaks things the things whose arrival I had rued!
