Had a fun little event relaunching the New School Histories website today. Well, mostly fun - it's a history of losses as well as gains. This is one of the five splash pages, and we're no longer committed to "Adult Education," and so perhaps also not to "lifelong" learning. Hanging over our heads was the imminent dissolution of the the founding division, home of all that lifelong learning (currently called Schools of Public Engagement, fifth in that list under "The New School is"), its various components, faculty and staff to be "rehomed" in other division. How do we tell the story now?
Since SPE was the trunk from which the others branched (it's more complicated than that of course, since our history involves some crucially important grafts), I quipped that we were like a banyan tree which, having sent out aerial roots which became secondary trunks, eventually loses its original trunk. The banyan lives on, but you can only understand why it has the shape it does by knowing about the now empty center.
A lot of our storytelling about The New School's histories has inevitably been about ruptures and interruptions, but this still feels different. So it was a salve to spend some time with folks committed to the continuing interest of that history. In fact, we were soon happily lost in the website's thicket of historical research, documentation and reflection. So much good stuff there!!
