Public Seminar has in the last week published not one but two installments of our newer truer history of The New School, reminders of the pleasures and challenges of understanding where you come from. A Relevant Education: The New School in the 1960s, an excerpt from a recently published memoir, offers a delightful account of being an undergraduate here during the counterculture. The joy and serendipity of learning in a community committed to offering a "relevant education" resonates with what people taking classes at The New School must have experienced here in every decade.
Reckoning with the New School's Legacies: A comprehensive view reveals entrenched inequities, by my historian co-conspirator J, shares what we've long known but too many don't: that the structures and mechanisms that provided this delightfully relevant educational world were far from delightful, supporting an expensive commitment to an elite corps of researchers with the poorly paid labor of armies of contingent instructors and an overworked staff. Most of today's debates on how we should move into the future don't realize the idealistic vision of the 1919 founders soon gave way to a series of quite different (also exciting) realities, only in the last few decades becoming university-like with significant populations of full-time degree-seeking students, faculty and staff. The institutional history of The New School has much to teach us, hard truths but relevant.
