Inhabiting ideals

Today the Event Cafe at The New School's University Center, the hub of the One New School occupation which has just recon-vened, was festooned with quotations from the 1918/19 "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women," a document which inspires an anachronistic originalism in many readers. They'd selected passages I often focus on, and others I'd forgotten about. 

My New School history partner J and I were part of the restart, tasked with describing "New School History and Values" in thirty minutes. We focused on earlier crises, the unintended consequences of heady ideals, and what unexpected things their resolutions brought about. 

The first was 1922, when, just three years in, The New School realized it couldn't make do without an administration after all. The second was Parsons' 1970 bankrupty crisis, solved by a merger with The New School which fatefully changed the trajectories of both. And then there was the 2008-9 faculty vote of no confidence in the mercurial president who had set out to unite the disparate parts of the university. (He didn't leave until the end of his term, though.) 

I'm not sure this was quite what the organizers - committed among other things to bringing about an administration-less New School through no confidence votes in senior leadership - had in mind. But people are always happy to learn anything complicated and contingent about New School history, and to know they're not the first to be wrestling with the messy legacies of a mess of glorious ideals.

The rest of the morning was also devoted to "education." Over zoom a professor at a university in Argentina which has, for three years, attempted a kind of participatory decision-making, shared their experience. Two seniors in the Fine Arts Department shared an eloquent proposal for a revisioning of their program to free them from individualizing and careerist structures of thought and relationship - and invited every department and school to do the same. And a draft of a blueprint for carving out a fundamentally new New School, building on discussions during December's occupation, was read.

I didn't stay for the afternoon, dedicated to working through and honing the blueprint. I'll be interested to see if the Event Cafe and the incredibly generative and galvanizing discussions it's played host to through the Occupation, will change the university's center of gravity as we enter the uncharted waters of a new semester. Humpty TNS Dumpty is in pieces, and needs all the help he can get.