The New School has a new provost, sociologist Renée T. White - only our second one to be selected through a national search. It's an exciting moment, and not only because the rethinking of the structure and nature of the university which the past year's crises seemed to demand has been postponed until her arrival. Strategic planning, especially around the special meaning of the "liberal arts" at our design and social research university, awaits, and her experience and commitments will help shape it. (She has served mostly at small colleges committed to women, doing important reseearch at the intersection of race, gender, inequality and public health). After a time of anxious uncertainty it's a moment of great promise!
Coincidentally I've been revisiting the moment when New School last brought in an outside provost eighteen years ago, the anthropologist and globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai. His appointment was big news, but his tenure was unfortunately brief: this was during Bob Kerrey's embattled tenure as president, as he cycled madly through five provosts and a dozen deans before being hit by a faculty "no confidence" vote when he claimed he could be provost and president at the same time! But the need for academic leadership which Appadurai demonstrated was established, and what had been a bare bones Provost's Office has continued to grow since his time here.
Less successful was Appadurai's effort at getting New School to globalize its curriculum, especially in engaging Asia, which seems to have met more resistance than just a mercurial president. Pretty much the only vestige of the revolution that wasn't is the India China Institute, whose account of its history records an ambition no less compelling today, if harder to imagine realizing:
[W]e are bringing together key people to rethink vital questions like: What are the truly important issues? How is the world changing? If we can get thinkers in India, China and the United States not only to agree about the biggest questions, but also to decide the shape and scope of them, then the answers will have a certain range of durability that answers in the past have not had. That’s a big ambition. But The New School has always been about big ambitions.
"Durability" is an interesting criterion, especially for the ever-New School! I wish it for Provost White, and, with her guidance, for a distinctive New School vision of liberal arts, global and just.
