Our New School history team, joined by the university archivist, will be kicking off a teach-in tomorrow responding to the lay-offs of a significant portion of the full-time staff. What we should say isn't obvious. Many of our colleagues, less versed in the history than we are, think the New School pledged from the beginning to be a community committed to social justice as we understand it today - a tradition betrayed when we comport ourselves like a corporatized university. But in reality social justice wasn't the mission (and in any case didn't mean the same thing then that it means today), and the founders were not planning a university at all! There's much inspirational in the history, but on labor questions, for instance, we've been anything but inspiring, in some ways anticipating the landscape of other universities today with a small island of tenured faculty floating in a sea of contingent labor.
Our story is that we only became a conventional university subject to the problems of conventional universities in the last few decades. Some of the ideals of 1919, suitably updated, might inspire us, but we'll learn more from seeking to understand how we became a university - and how we came to understand our mission in terms of social justice (rather than, say, academic freedom, meeting unmet need or even innovation and "the new"). Perhaps there's something in our unconventional history that can offer alternatives to the structural problems we share with so much of higher education today... perhaps we can think outside a box we've only recently been in.
