Telling the Lang story isn't going to be quite as straightforward as some imagine. It's a little like the New School centennial, where the mood of celebration made research on forgotten promises and unplanned changes seem out of place. Who really wants to know just how different what we've become is from what past generations of stakeholders had in mind? Who really cares about what might have been: we're here now!
But 40 years is different from 100. Plenty of stakeholders from the beginnings are still around - if no longer involved with the school. Their judgment on what's unfolded isn't just a historical hypothetical. Yet the main audience for our storytelling isn't the faculty and administrators but the community of alumnae/i, and the hope is not only to honor their experiences but to draw them back into a shared story.
So what is the story? The ready template is that, over four decades, we have become ever more fully ourselves: the interdisciplinary seminar-focused social justice-oriented urban liberal arts college we were always striving to be. There is truth in that, and it's inspiring to register how the numbers of students and faculty have grown to fill out this dream.
Some things inevitably got lost in that growth, of course: it's a tradeoff. A community of 300 students know each other in ways one five or six time that size can't hope to, likewise a core faculty of a few dozen. Our life is now organized around departments and programs, most still interdisciplinary but generally operating in siloed parallel with each other. Like any other school which has grown, we now have to promote interdisciplinary relationships and curriculum intentionally (like through minors!). But we're still small, and students still thrive in an open curriculum where they put together amazing interdisciplinary courses of study, drawing on a spectacular smorgasborg of teaching talent, some in new fields like contemporary music, media studies, journalism+design, and code as a liberal art. We've grown and we've grown!
A different kind of story-telling would pay more attention to ruptures. The move to departments and majors a decade and a half ago was not just a shift, but came together with significant turnover of faculty and with the phasing out of the program in Education Studies which was the beating heart of the college's non-disciplinary ethos. Today students and most faculty can't imagine Lang was ever opposed to the idea of majors! Having arrived just as this sea change was underway, I remember two largely non-overlapping faculties.
There was an earlier rupture, too, four decades ago, as Eugene Lang College was grafted onto a largely unwilling Seminar College. The Seminar College dean, an educational visionary who'd been at the school for twenty years of undergraduate experimentation, resigned in protest. (The archives has a thick folder of letters in her support from the entire faculty and many students.) There was a real conflict of visions for what the New School's liberal arts college should look like! I find the different visions from the time of the Lang founding fascinating - especially the one proposing a 1+2+1 structure - but to most people at the college now this is all water under the bridge. We don't really fit anyone's vision from 40 years ago, and that's fine: times have changed, so it's natural we outgrew some of the original plans.
Speaking of changes, the task of telling the story in 2025 is complicated by shifts in the larger university, too - transitions to which Eugene Lang College has often been oblivious. The little decal above is indicative of this myopia, though the larger version used on teeshirts and promotional materials did include The New School and New York City, too! Over the years our deans have shielded us from university changes, but financial challenges are now forcing an urgent university-wide rethink of "mission and vision" for which our faculty seems unprepared. At a recent meeting someone asked the university's president if Lang would continue to be a "free-standing liberal arts college" in any upcoming restructuring - as if any part of The New School had ever been free-standing!
In this context, it might be valuable to see Lang's story as part of a longer, and broader, story of liberal arts within the university, which has at least three parts.
1) That story would begin before we granted degrees, when The New School was the country's premier institution of adult education. A small BA degree program was introduced as part of the GI bill in 1943 but it shared the ethos of a school committed to lifelong learning about an ever-changing world, suspicious of the disciplinary commitments and departmental structures of academia.
2) The 1960s and 1970s saw experiments in instruction for traditionally "college age" students - the seeds of what became Lang - but these were initially just a small part of efforts New School made to reach new communities of still mostly adult students. These proto-Langs were interdisciplinary out of necessity, but also out of principle at a time of radical educational reforms like open curricula.
3) And when in 1970 the New School merged with the Parsons School of Design, whose degree-seeking students were required to take a certain number of "liberal arts" courses by the New York State Board of Education, yet another understanding of the aims of "liberal arts" education entered the mix - though it was many decades before the parts of the university really came together in a meaningful way.
The current restructuring may bring these disparate "liberal arts" projects together in challenging but perhaps also serendipitous new ways. We really have an unusual abundance of visions here!
As with my friend J's and my storytelling around New School history, I suspect we'll tell different (if not incompatible) stories of Lang's first forty years to different audiences in different contexts. Some will emphasize continuities and strengths, like the commitment to experimentation, to small classes, and to student and faculty freedom. Others will acknowledge the costs of change and what was lost and gained with departmentalization. Nostalgia is part of any commemoration but the sense that "the school isn't what it used to be!" has also been a constant over The New School's history, and the liberal arts parts are (as I've just demonstrated) no exception. Yet others will see Lang's 40 years as part of a longer and more multivocal university discussion about the aims of education, a discussion that we hope will continue to surprise and inspire (and disappoint) for years to come.
