I speak to the first year fellows each year to help them plan a workshop around New School history, and this year I had the fun of speaking together with someone involved in the Women's Legacy at The New School project which has transformed our understanding of this history. What a different story their work on the "Founding Mothers" lets us tell - not university men planning an even better university, but an experimental school, one of many projects developed and supported by progressive suffragette women, projects which range from the Urban League to the New Republic.
My contribution, more hands-on, was a timeline for the fellows to use in explaining how The New School of today came together. I've offered something like this for a few years, but this year I included two more dates than before (1919 founding, 1933 University in Exile, 1970 merger with Parsons, 1985 founding of Lang, 2015, consolidation of the College of Performing Arts). One was the year the program our speaker from Women's History came from began, the 1943 establishment of our first undergraduate degree program. But the other was pitched to the fellows and their first year charges.
1919
1933
1943
1970
1985
2015
2035
2035 - the year Lang turns (inshallah) fifty! I included it also to acknowledge that we find ourself at another moment of transition and redefinition. Slowed by the challenges and the threats of the pandemic, we're in this year finally embarking on deferred strategic planning and the bold exploration of mission and vision the board selected our new president to spearhead. Our history suggests the future may not be straightforwardly conformable to the past.
The name of this segment of the First Year Workshop is "What is (this) college for?" The intention seems to be to engage New School's quixotic history as a resource for clarifying the goals of their own experience of higher education. Where do they hope to be in 2035, how can the school help them get there and - extrapolating from that - where might that suggest the school itself is heading?
The fellows' response was a surprise. One said she thought that by 2035 our college would have become independent of The New School, since they're so different in ethos and mission. This elicited in others expressions of longing for greater integration with the rest of the school... but it became clear that they have few experiences of and no sense of identification with The New School as a whole. Pandemic isolation has surely contributed to this sense of balkanization, but I was still surprised by it. Even those who yearned for greater integration voiced no particular reason for why integration of this ragtag group of schools was desirable. ... The history continues!
