First, there was a strike by academic student workers at the start of this month. It wound up lasting only a few days but this came after weeks of increasingly tense negotiations and full-time faculty angsting about how not to "cross the virtual picket line" in support if a strike were called; word was some of the organizers, recalling the camraderie and sense of shared purpose during last year's much longer strike for the part-time faculty contract, were looking forward to a return to the barricades.
Now we receive word that our interrim president (stepping in for the last president, whose moral authority was extinguished by his comportment during the part-time faculty strike) has done what her predecessors were rumored to have been considering for years: announced that the founding division of the school, currently known as the Schools of Public Engagement (SPE, before that New School for General Studies, The Adult Division, The New School and of course New School for Social Research) is to be dissolved, its parts absorbed by the colleges of design, liberal arts, performing arts and graduate social research. (This afternoon's public notice only speaks of embarking on a route to reducing the number of colleges, but the Board of Trustees has apparently already signed off on giving SPE the ax.)
This will have significant impact for the little self-design liberal arts program I direct at Lang, since SPE has a much larger self-design program and several faculty committed entirely to it. My friends there and I have suggested aligning the two programs for a while; now we have six weeks to make a proposal, and a year tro enact it. The logistics will be complicated but the results might well be best for all involved, including students. Finding new homes for all the rest of SPE's broad range of programs won't be as easy.
But my main reaction to this news has been as a historian of The New School. How will we tell the story without our matriarch?
