At an event for the families of incoming students today, the parents of three of the students in my upcoming first year seminar came to introduce themselves. Unexpected, since there weren't that many people at the event, and even more unexpected because all three told me their son was in the class. Last year's first year seminar had all women! Is it something in the title, "DIY Religion"?
The parents were all curious what "DIY Religion" meant, too. Didn't they read the course description? I hope their kids did! I told them that the course starts with the reality that more and more people are turning way from "organized religion" to do their own thing, something we'll be learning about first-hand from alums. But in fact this entrepreneurial spirit is less new than it might seem. The vitality of religious traditions has always come from the ways in which people make them their own. That so many religious leaders insist on the importance of this or that practice or teaching just tells you at least some folks were doing other things. The story is messy, and not always happy. But the DIY impulse is part of taking a religion seriously, and part of how traditions grow.
What I didn't get into was how New Schooly the class will be. I mentioned that it's the Lang fortieth and that we'll be hearing all about life at and after the college from alums, of course. But the readings are New School-heavy too, as we've been at the forefront of appreciating the reality of DIY religion from the getgo. Most obviously, "lived religion" approaches build on the transformed understanding of human history and psychology offered by pragmatists, and amplified by qualitative sociologists. But New School also contributed to the rise and fall of secularization theory. And, in tandem with that, to exploration of what could take the place of forms of religion becoming obsolete. Indeed one of the New School founders, Herbert Croly, actually offered "schools of social research" as a kind of DIY religion of humanity!
If humanism is to triumph over the headstrong and capable particularism which is the immediately dangerous enemy, it must anticipate in the lives of its own promoters the beginning of that better cooperation between science and social purpose, between the intelligence and the will, which it hopes to spread throughout the world. Probably such cooperation will not go very far until it receives an impulse from the restoration of religion to a worthier place in human life, but the religious revival, if it comes, must come when and where it pleases. In the meantime, something can be done to anticipate by education the birth of the new faith, and in this pedestrian job, schools of social research ... could make an indispensable contribution.
"A School of Social Research," The New Republic June 8, 1918: 167-71, 171
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.
I've always wondered (well, once I knew about it) why the eminent radical historian E. P. Thompson should have been the speaker at the inauguration of Eugene Lang College in 1985.
Well, it seems that his host, Margaret Jacob, also a historian and Lang's first dean, convened a forum on "The Future of Radical History" with Thompson and fellow British Marxist historians Perry Anderson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm on October 20th. (Anderson and Hobsbawm were regular members of the New School's Graduate Faculty.) The dedication of the new college was the following day. The symposium, attended by 1000 people, "was organized to mark this event and was intended as the first gift of Eugene Lang College to the university"!
Jacob describes the content of Thompson's talks as untimely:
Will Thompson have made any linkage between radical history and the aims of education? I hope soon to know! A tape recording of the dedication turned up in a box in the University Archives, and is being digitized as we speak. But in the meantime, how interesting that, like The New School in 1919, Eugene Lang College should have been ushered into existence by historians! (The New School's recently arrived president, Jonathan Fanton, and the Graduate Faculty dean, Ira Katznelson, were both historians, too, a Committee on Historical Studies established just the year before, in 1984.)
On the symposium, Margaret C. Jacob and Ira Katznelson, "Agendas for Radical History," Radical History Review 36 (Fall 1986): 26-45, 26
The description of Thompson's talks is in Margaret C. Jacob, "Among the Autodidacts: The Making of E.P. Thompson," Labour / Le Travail 71 (Spring 2013): 156–61, 160
And somehow the assembled group included people who'd studied in every decade from the 1960s on, in everything from AAS to PhD at every part of the school except the performing arts! (There was even someone who'd participated in an undergraduate "great books program" from 1969 to 1971 of which none of us knew!) After a short presentation we had them ask each other about their (and weirdest) classes (and weirdest), memorable experiences, and then share with the larger group some things from their past they'd like to see at the school today.
Our time proved too short to hear from everyone, but what was shared was amazing. How valuable for design students to take liberal arts courses, for sociologists to break with their value-neutral European professors and become artist activists. How much they learned from older classmates in Adult Division courses and from part-time faculty members involved in worlds beyond school. How galvanizing protests were. And, of course, how indispensable international students are.
Now I'm working with a student researcher to put together what seems to be the first timeline of this now not quite so young member of the New School family. (It was still a teenager when I arrived in 2002!)
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These images are from a 1983-84 recruitment flyer, as all these changes were in the air. The somewhat ramshackle looking courtyard (what happened to the Alvin Johnson Oak?) looks ready for a change.
Had the pleasure of participating in this feast of interdiscip-linary work on climate, justice and the Anthropo-cene today. (I spoke about trees, of course, a preview of a talk I'll give at ISSRNC in June.)
There's a lot of work engaging these topics actoss the university so highlights were many. (The live performance of a climate change-inspired jazz album wasn't a New School person but clearly a friend.) I was particularly charmed by the remarks of our climate-focused president, who put New School history to some of the best use I can recall. The founding of the New School, he reflected, wasn't provoked by a single event but by a quarter century's changes which conventional university knowledge wasn't keeping up with. In our last thirty years, human beings have put more carbon in the atmosphere than in all human history before that, fundamentally changing our present and the futures available to us. Don't we need a retooling too?
As you can imagine, our response to the question we were given, "How progressive is The New School," was, well, nuanced. 'Progressive' meant different things at different times, and it's not clear what it means today, though it's the term we revert to over and over in describing our values, our pedagogy, as well as in our regular episodes of protest and critique: "Isn't The New School supposed to be a progressive place?" &c.
We've been asked a similar question before: "What does it mean to be a progressive university?" That was (egad) nine years ago, part of Staff Development Day, and it was fun to revisit what we said there and update it for 2025 and a different audience. Surveying The New School's first century we enumerated values articulated along our winding way, from commitment to the new to professionalization to pluralism to adult education to various kinds of liberalism and critique, and then opened the floor for a discussion of what our future might hold.
The future's too far away, though: the threats to our very existence as a university, not to mention a "progressive" one, are too present right now. Besides, the president was there, and people rightly wanted to hear from him how the university would protect its community against government attacks (and how to define that community), who its allies were in this work, what role it might have in being again, to borrow the name of the most recent book about The New School, a light in dark times.
It seemed like an inopportune time to bring in historical nuance and contingency. Wouldn't it be better if we could agree on what we're about, have been about, ought to be about? Was this really the time to complicate our sense of a clear identity, to puncture the myth that we've always been the same "progressive" thing? In less fraught times, people welcome the serendipity, the fragility, the sense that what we're about is something people have been challenging and refining all along. It also fits the president's sense that the unique space universities offer is precisely a space for research, debate, contestation and innovation. But right now?
As ever, I learned things from this new context and conversation. I was reminded by this audience that the university is the most international in the country (something easy to forget at my college, the least international part). As we try to articulate our values and protect our communities we should know that we have companions in universities not only all over the city and country but all around the world, many of whom know how to deal with interfering governments.
But revisiting our history I was also reminded that The New School was once a place committed broadly to the education of adults, within but also beyond its walls. As we push back against a regime based on cynical lies (including lies about universities), we might have a role to play promoting lifelong learning as a common good, a way to rebuild a divided nation, a way back to the joy of living in truth with others in a grand democratic experiment...
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"!
This was a little disappointing, especially as I was having an epiphany of my own - and also one triggered by not finding what I was looking for. The archivists had brought out most of the tree-related items they'd offered me when I was assembling my "New School Trees" zine last year, including the large plan for a garden behind The New School's main building from September, 1950 (above). The archivist who was our host pointed out that the plan was by one "J. J. Levison M. F." which she presumed meant Master Forester. (It does.)
I'd wondered last year whether this garden had ever been built; if so it would have been a casualty of the 1956 extension which created the courtyard we now know. This time we had a likely way to find out: a folder of correspondence with J. J. Levison from 1948-1960. Progress on the garden would surely be documented here!
None was, so this was likely a proposal never enacted. (For what it's worth, though, the three "existing trees" marked in the plan were real.) But when the archives close a door they invariably open a window. From the correspondence folder it became clear that Jacob Joshua Levison was not only a Master Forester (trained at Yale) but the instructor of a beloved course which had been running at The New School since 1941.
There's correspondence about a 1951 iteration - maybe one longer field trip instead of three? - but the course seems not to have run again. The garden sketch was in effect a parting gift after a decade's teaching at The New School. The course was evidently fondly remembered, and in November, 1959, our long-time president Alvin Johnson said a few words when Levison received an award for City College alumni; the next day he penned a letter of thanks and appreciation, apologizing for not having said all he wished to:
You are a tree, Jack Levison. A tree is always beautiful, in its spring leafage and in its full summer foliage, in its autumn color and its bareness after frost, revealing the consummate design of its branching and the noble strength of its trunk.
The tree is the only living thing that keeps its beauty in old age; indeed reaches its highest beauty then. The tree, and some few mortals like Jack Levison.
Perhaps it was too much to expect these students, barely halfway through their second month of college, to delight in the way evidence can disconfirm our expectations and invite us to discover things we hadn't imagined! Into such gaps questions and research can grow!
But perhaps one of the New School Forest cards I lingered over with them - 7 West 11th Street, next to the churchyard of First Presbyterian - may have left a trace, opened a space...
Amazing example of a L[ondon] P[lane] holding the memory of its dead neighbor, an oak in the churchyard that was cut down; no branches on north side because of the oak which is now a stump.
We'll go check on that tree when I see them next, and on its unforgotten neighbor.
The New School's new president is a member of the faculty - only the second internal president we've had - and an architect. He kicked off his presidency with a talk today framed by the architecture of the first building purpose-built for us, which included the large lecture-performance hall in which he spoke as well as a dance studio, a library, classrooms, and studios for "design and modeling" - whatever that meant in 1930! I took this picture shortly before student protesters started interrupting him with questions about his predecessor's decisions regarding the university's alleged investments in companies profiting from the Israeli siege of Gaza and police and disciplinary responses to protestors last semester. He was trying to describe the university as a precious and precarious space which balances comfort (everyone feels safe and respected) and discomfort (all open themselves to the challenges which facilitate learning and new ideas), but they wouldn't hear it. Compared to Gaza, whose very universities are among the casualties of the war, anything we do can feel like hand-waving. It made for a grim start to the year.
surprise. A string of people dressed like folks from the glory days of The New School in the 1940 started to flow across the courtyard. Turns out someone was shooting a movie scene in the big auditorium, and the extras had to cross the courtyard to pick up their lunches. Past and present blurred for a moment.
Editing challenges and the grainy distortions from multiple copying, redeemed by skills I dredged up from being editor of my junior high school newspaper "The Tide," made a mere flyer into a zine!
