Opening salvo

In the first meeting of our intensive mini-course "What is college for? Higher education in society" we started with the familiar 1918 "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women," allowing students to annotate it with questions and observations, and then zoomed out dramatically to suggest a much bigger set of questions. Groups of students were charged with reading and presenting four additional texts, each interesting in its own right but also, we promised shining light from a different angle on the problems The New School sought to address.

The first group gave a quick survey of the history of universities, a longer and more complex history than most realize. Why, where and how institutions of higher instruction and learning were established raised questions about whose the university is and whom it is accountable to. Founders, sponsors, the public, government, knowledge itself?

A second group talked about the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, raising questions of access and exclusion - and drawing attention the heroic efforts of those excluded in designing and defending their own institutions of higher learning.

A third group told about the founding of the American Association of University Professors, just a few years before - and involving many of the same thinkers as - The New School, making clear how rare it is for educators to run the show, or even to have stable positions. (The issues raised by each group resonate not only with New School woes but with growing attacks on higher education nationally and internationally.)

The final group used material from a video on the "founding mothers" of The New School (ten of the nineteen members of the 1918 Organization Committee) to help make us aware of the exclusion of women from nearly the whole history of universities, and of how the New School's legacies include the tenacity and imagination of thinkers anchored in practices and institutions besides the university.

It's a lot to process and we have only two more sessions to process it, but it was exciting to find that the compressed format actually gave us permission to think more broadly. I'm not sure I've ever approached our local and global issues with quite this wide a frame. Perhaps this was possible also because the current New School seems more unmoored from its past than ever, even as the idea of it invites all involved in it to think beyond about crucial questions of higher education's role and function in society. A good start!