Tell me a story about The New School

Huzzah - The New School aged almost a quarter century! At the university's 90th commencement at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn today, our president referred to ours as a 130-year-old institution. 

A novel story of the New! An argument could be made for starting our institutional storytelling with the origins, 130 years ago, of the oldest part of the present institution: the pioneering school of applied art much later renamed Parsons School of Design. Parsons was saved from collapse by The New School in 1970, before rapidly becoming our most successful and lucrative component of the ensuing hybrid university, but what was happening there before 1970 fits awkwardly into the standard stories, especially those starting only in 1919. 

It would be good to weave them together better. Each is a bit of a shaggy dog story, though. What William Merritt Chase concocted in 1896 is nothing like what the school now named Parsons was to become. And of course the same could be said for the New School for Social Research, started in 1919, which my co-historian J and I have long argued spent a century trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) not to be a university.

Still, it's strange to think that proto-Parsons was in some sense New School before New School was! It's the sort of things folks say when they marry into families, but nevertheless more than a little odd. 

When The New School (the one kicked off in 1919) celebrated its centennial seven years ago, we saw efforts to combine the two stories. They mainly took the form - familiar, too, from marriages - of suggesting that TNS and PSD were meant for each other. The long years spent on their own - half a century for one, three-quarters of one for the other - were a kind of casting about for the unexpected partner who, hindsight confirms, was destined to complete them. (You'll recall I found that no comparable effort was made to find a place for The New School in storytelling around Parsons' own centennial in 1996.) It was forced but the giddy conventions of centennial celebrations excused it.

At one hundred and thirty, it's funny to think of The New School as, now, a nineteenth-century institution! But it's less fun to think about these differently nested stories at a time when the Graduate Faculty, the distinctive heart of The New School for a long time (though only starting in 1934, and never exclusively), is being restructured nearly out of existence. I'm not quite ready to imagine that The New School existed in some meaningful way before the New Schools of 1933 or even 1919 - and might somehow continue after them, too.