Part-time U

It's been a spell since anyone's asked me to talk about New School history, so it was fun in several ways to hang out with this year's first year fellows and chat about history and why it might matter. Preparing for it I realized I've sort of lost the thread - or maybe we all have? Even without the disruptions of covid, covid-related staff layoffs, and last year's part-time faculty union strike, the years since the New School centennial have been largely history-free. A new president, prevented by covid from ever really connecting with the school, made no references to its legacy and traditions, and now he's gone, too. What do the first year fellows know of how we got here? 

The Columbia story is remarkably persistent but I pushed back: "school" not "university," conceived in the office of a magazine (our "New Republic story"), supported by "founding mothers" committed to many other kinds of institutions than universities. Part of nobody's understanding of the history of the place was its dependence in the past and surely into the future on part-time instructors - even as these unusually civic-minded students thought the percentage of part-time intructors is ninety-six percent (!). Time to deepen the New Republic story: dedicated to finding the right people to teach about new things as they happened, the early New School was more like a magazine than a university dedicated to a set curriculum and invested in a stable faculty. How to recognize, cultivate and support the part-timers indispensable to this process is task 1 of our next leadership.