Time for my annual shpiel about New School history for the peer mentors of the first year class. It's different each time, even though I've used the same framework for several years - a poll of their first acquaintance with the school and what they know if its history, and then a peeling away of the parts of the school we now know, working through milestones in reverse chronological order so they can rebuild it in the sessions they lead with their students.
2015 - creation of the College of Performing Arts out of what had been autonomous schools of drama, music and jazz, each with its own unique past, a forced fusion which made real potentials for collaboration that had been only theoretical before
1985 - belated establishment of a four-year college for traditional age students, confirmation of how backwards-inside out our history has been
1970 - merger with Parsons School of Design, huge surprise to all concerned
1933 - University in Exile's rescue of many European scholars threatened by the rise of fascism and, as a condition for their visas, introduction of degrees (graduate!) to what had been a school firmly against them
1919 - new "school" (decisively not "university") cooked up by various reformers, mostly women, in the office of The New Republic
I suggested that for much of the history, leaders had to make seem coherent and planned what was really serendipity - our present moment no exception. There's no blueprint for how to do what we alone can do, given the characters we've assembled - certainly not the visions of our "founders," who could never have imagined what we've become. (So, I mentioned in an aside, resist arguing "The New School has from its founding been/was supposed to be...")
I suppose it might seem a bit disconcerting, all this contingency, but I think I managed to make it all seem quite exciting. A place on the make! I used to say "each student has to make their own university" but found myself not using the university language today. Instead the picture was of finding yourself with unexpected fellow travelers, whose proximity allows unprecedented collaborations and discoveries. It would have undermined my point to quote from the 1918 proposal but I will here: "a spiritual adventure of the utmost significance"!
