What we learned at a Faculty Senate meeting this morning was made known to the world later in the day. Nineteen beloved faculty colleagues are being let go. (The article doesn't mention that sixty-eight staff members are as well.) Almost all of the faculty, along with another forty-odd who have accepted various "voluntary separation" offers, are from the liberal arts divisions of The New School.
The New School aged a quarter century in a day! 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 new story of the New!
It would be good to weave our stories 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. For its part the serendipitous 1970 merger - a surprise to both parties - only started to make any kind of sense in the last twenty years.
So it's passing strange to think that proto-Parsons was in some sense New School before New School was! It's the sort of thing 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 first efforts really to combine the two stories. (You'll recall I found that no comparable efforts were made in storytelling around New School's 75th or Parsons' own centennial in 1995 and 1996.) These recent efforts 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 wandering in search of the unexpected partner who was destined to complete them. It was forced but the giddy conventions of centennial celebrations excused it.
If one hundred and thirty, it's funny to think that The New School is in fact 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 key to The New School for a long time (though only starting in 1934, and never exclusively), seems about to be restructured nearly out of existence. I'm not quite ready to imagine that The New School existed in some nascent way before the New Schools of the twentieth century - and might somehow continue after them, too.
The academic year's over. Someone's taken down all the flyers for events and opportunities on campus and off; student research projects, senate candidacies, casting calls and recitals; faculty plugs for fall classes that weren't filling. Now we wait to see who gets to be part of the school's next chapter.
So I was grateful and proud to find in the spring hard copy issue of the school newspaper, The New School Free Press, not only well-researched and written articles about our predicament but illustrations that perfectly capture how it feels to be caught in it.
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Thank you Dove Williams, Jordan Fong and Zora Edelstein for expressing how much our attempts to figure out what's gone wrong and who's behind it are like something from a police procedural. And thank you Cecilia Yang for capturing how existential proposed and feared changes feel!
Spent a long day at two poorly-structured "visioning sessions" for the turbocharged devising of new degree programs we're told we need pronto if we are to right the foundering ship of the liberal arts at The New School.
The first was billed as regarding "humanities and social sciences" across the university but managed not to mention humanities once. Our specific focus was to be the space of history, sociology and anthropology (whose majors are among the "credentials" marked for "indefinite discontinuance for redesign" in our restructuring plan), but our breakout discussions wound up reinventing the wheel of general education.
The other brought together faculty in the "discontinuance for redesign" programs in urban, environmental, and global studies (one of our curricular strengths but one few students choose as majors), who were invited to come up with "concepts" for new degree programs, what one wag called "new bottles for old wine." We think the old wine is excellent, but both of these exercises were haunted by the likelihood that the restructurers are looking for new wine - and will refer to these "visioning" sessions as proof that faculty sommeliers had a say.
The New School's new semester begins in twelve days. But what new school will that be? Cancellations of courses with less than 75% enrollment continue (one of mine was a casualty*), but the biggest question is which faculty members will voluntarily or "involuntarily" leave the school, and what will be produced by the three months of liberal arts "academic re-envisioning" announced the day after fall classes ended (!). I had my first meetings as a University Faculty Senate co-chair today, one of them with good people from the Provost's Office, and I'm not sure folks have any idea how tumultuous, not to say traumatic, this semester will be.
At Public Seminar, the online journal based at the graduate faculty, someone decided it might be useful to look at New School history at this juncture, and stumbled on two essays from the New School Histories vertical my friend J and I edited for the university centennial in 2019. One is one of mine, which I'm always glad to share... though I guess resonates in unforeseen ways in this moment.
The thought has crossed my mind a few times these past months whether it might be time for a new New School history article for Public Seminar, but what would it say? The thought arose in response to the mobilization of variously one-sided versions of that history by the advocates for restructuring and by those threatened with restructuring. But this is no time for "demythologizing the New School," or adjudicating among the myths - even with the rider that what New School actually has been is stranger and more inspiring than most people know.
*This means I "owe" the college an extra course in 2026-27
A little update from The New School, where things are not looking good at all. Yesterday all the full-time faculty in the programs slated for pause, merger, reimagining and various kinds of "discontinuance" received letters offering "voluntary separation" packages, as did all non-unionized staff across the university who have served at least four years. At the same time, all full-time faculty over 62 were offered a "voluntary early retirement" package. That's a lot of people spooked and demoralized by the suggestion they are disposable.
A little to my surprise, I didn't receive one of those letters. Being not in a department turned out to be a plus, at least for now. But almost all my friends did get a letter. The hope of course is that enough people are willing and able to take up the "voluntary" offers that there will be no need to turn to "involuntary separations," but we don't know how many people the administration wants to get off the payroll. Meanwhile rumors are swirling about significant and targeted cuts, especially in the erstwhile Graduate Faculty. Nobody seems to know who's calling the shots - deans claim to have been blindsided - so everyone feels at risk.
Acknowledging that the administration's hand has been forced by a budget crisis, this is surely the worst backdrop for ushering in what leadership was touting as the "next generation of undergraduate and graduate credentials." It's terrible for morale, and for the reputation of the school. And, as we all speculate about what programs The New School will support in the future (and the existential question whether there will be place for each of us), it undermines already strained solidarity across and within divisions. Not good times at all.
I want to mark a tense, surreal moment.
This is the time in the academic year when past and future are all bunched up with the present. We plan courses for the academic year beginning next fall, our allocated numbers based in part on experience of last year. Meanwhile registration for the courses beginning in January has taken place, and some courses with low enrollments have to be cut. If a cancelled course was to be taught by a full-time or annualized part-time faculty member, they might be assigned to a course originally planned for someone more junior, though this rarely happens.
This year everything is different. The budget crunch caused by enrollment shortfalls means the threshold for course cancellation is higher (and a final cull of courses not at 75% has yet to take place), and course allocations for academic year 26-27 have been trimmed, too. But that’s only the tip of the restructuring iceberg. Planning for 26-27 is reeling from the pausing and merging of "duplicative" or low-enrollment programs. Last week we learned that the small undergraduate majors in history, anthropology and sociology have been shut down, their faculty enjoined to work out something more streamlined and attractive to students. Their work, we are told, will serve as a "model" for the rest of the "humanities and social sciences unit." Whatever 26-27 portends, 27-28 will be different again.
And that's not the last of it either. In the coming days, notification of liquidity cliff-forced "reduction in forces" for full-time faculty will begin, with letters offering "voluntary early retirement" and "voluntary separation." We don't know to how many people these will be sent; nor do we know how many of those offers would have to be taken up to forestall the "involuntary separations" which would otherwise ensue - or what determines who will be affected by each of these measures. Against the backdrop of the unmooring of many departments in the "humanities and social sciences unit," this left many of us heading into the Thanksgiving break not knowing if we were soon to be let go.
I'm not dwelling here on my own case, though I would be surprised not to be getting one or other of the kinds of letters promised for this week. I was already senior enough to be "eligible" for "special voluntary separation" when the university was in the throes of COVID five years ago, and my appointment has never been in a department. I expect wrenching choices in the coming week: leave or stay on a possibly sinking ship which might cast me overboard for ballast anyway? I'm far from the only person contemplating these grim questions, though those of us also responsible for curricular planning are experiencing this uncertainty at two levels. Who will teach in 26-27, and who will be designing the curriculum, if there even is one?
The particularly surreal thing is that I'm drafting the syllabus for what is to be Lang version of the core course for the soon-to-be approved major in Individualized Studies (formed from the coming together of the university's two self-design Liberal Arts majors). A pilot was supposed to run next semester but - ha! - is likely to be cut for low enrollment.
But it's the content of the syllabus that's making me rub my eyes, as I imagine acquainting students with the history and philosophy of education, broadly understood, and more narrowly construed "liberal arts" in its various forms - all in the context of the charmingly quixotic school in which they're designing their individualized course of study. I'm more sympathetic than many of my colleagues to the direction the university is heading (explicitly and intensively bridging liberal arts, design and performance), and can narrate it inspiringly as a new chapter in The New School's storied history... but will I be the one telling the story?
More anon!
The liberal arts world is in a tizzy over a proposed reorganization of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State, which would rehome (or perhaps dissolve) nineteen departments in four new schools. Besides the two provisionally-named schools in the rather dark graphic from the Chronicle of Higher Education above (final names to be decided by the faculty involved), there would be
{Human Narratives and Creative Expressions}
English; Classics & General Humanities; Philosophy; World Languages & Cultures; Spanish & Latino Studies
{Interdisciplinary Programs and Writing Studies}
BA in Interdisciplinary Studies; Medical Humanities; Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies; Writing Studies; Language; Business & Culture
The reorganization has been rejected by the Montclair State faculty, their Senate demanding that disciplinary chairs at least be retained. But the plan (led by a professor of Religious Studies, for what it's worth!) has been offered as a way of trying to save these areas of the curriculum which, at Montclair as nationwide, have seen steep declines in majors. Not only students but younger faculty, too, are already more interdisciplinary in orientation, the proposers argue, and might flourish in these new constellations, freed from the drag of departmental structures. But would this be new curricular freedom or just a new kind of constraint, now by administrators freed from faculty oversight?
The question isn't just academic. Similar things are happening elsewhere, including just 20 miles to the west, chez nous at The New School.
The university restructuring plan, details of which were officially announced in various larger and smaller meetings this week, will see the shuttering, at least as distinct undergraduate majors, of several small social science departments, with the implications of the consolidations of several humanities programs still up in the air. We're told a budget crisis makes already planned changes more urgent than ever, but nobody quite knows what's going on.
Our provost argues that the last nine years have seen an "unnatural stasis" in our "academic portfolio." "Change," he reminds us somewhat oxymoronically, is "in the DNA" of the school! Meanwhile the president argues that a bright new future lies in defining the "distinctive proposition" of a liberal arts college in a university primarily committed to art and design. I'm not averse to such a reorientation (which isn't to say there'd necessarily be a place for me in it) but the faculty as a whole is restive, and anxious for our future. Is the plan really to save the social science and humanities programs or to do them in?
My series of alumnae/i-led classes in the "DIY Religion" first year seminar came full circle today!
Our speaker was an anthro-pologist who's just defended a fascinating dissertation on non-Turkish Muslim ummah in Istanbul. But fifteen years ago he was in a first year seminar here himself. It was called "Religion in Dialogue" - with yours truly!
Tomorrow's the celebration of the 40th anniversary of my school, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts!
The process of putting together a commem-orative exhibit at the same time the university as a whole contem-plates a restructuring has been, it must be said, a little surreal, though perhaps not that different from the New School's day-to-day! In any case, we're telling the big story of the liberal arts at The New School, which goes back twice as far and involves other programs and populations. We focus on the special freedom and responsibility of self-designed liberal arts education, the relationships formed both in seminars and in reaching across to other university communities... all of which allow us to imagine next chapters of many kinds!
I love this poster our director of communication designed after listening in on one of our conversations. She came up with the exhibition title "Unbound" too!
Another chance to talk about New School history - what turned out to be the only faculty-led session at "family weekend." Scheduled in the very pleasant but very non-classroomy Faculty Lounge, I had to do without visuals but this turned out fine. The organizers promised an experience of a New School class, so I put the good people who showed up to work in groups interpreting and then updating the 1918 "Proposal for a New School of Social Science for Men and Women." Thinking of the who, what, where, when, why and how of the "Proposal" gave us a template for thinking of the future New School: Who, what, where, why, how is demanded today? (Between those assignments we had a crash-course in how The New School came to look so completely different from what its planners envisioned, and why that frees us to think boldly about how its future might need to be different again.) 
The Lang 40th anniversary exhibition is coming together! These "stackable seats" made of thick corrugated cardboard, which will be covered with archival images, texts and photographs and piled into all sorts of interesting shapes for the exhibition in the University Center lobby, are fully recyclable... but they also work as seats, and might also be taken home as souvenirs. It's such fun to work with professional designers!
DIY Religion's tour of New School-connected thinkers on religion continued today with two heavy-weights from sociological debates about secularization, Peter Berger and Jose Casanova (with cameos by John Dewey and Alfred Schutz). Berger's the best known secularization theorist to have recanted in the face of evidence that religion seemed to be on the wane only in Europe. Casanova wrote one of the most famous books refuting and moving on from secularization theory, Public Religions in the Modern World. (They didn't overlap, though, Berger's two decades ending shortly before Casonova's three and change began.)
I gave the class the essay where Casanova first laid out the argument of his book, "Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective" (2003), and a piece Berger wrote for The Christian Century, "Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty" (1998) which uses the phrase "do it yourself"! Casanova's essay was a good text for explaining the rise and fall of secularization theses, but I'm not sure anyone in this generation can imagine a world without religion. But Berger's arguments - at least until he changed from his sociologist's hat to speaking as a Mainline Protestant - proved electric, and felt intensely relevant.
Berger's argument, in a nutshell, is that modernity leads not to a decline in religion but to a change in how people are religious. What effects this change is pluralism, which relativizes beliefs and practices earlier generations might have unquestioningly taken for granted. In this "age of uncertainty," we are free - or forced - to choose what we will believe. (His book The Heretical Imperative made this argument in 1979.) But uncertainty is unnerving, and if everyone has their own belief, it may seem that the only certainty is the unsatisfying virtue of tolerance. Relativism can slip into nihilism: there is no truth! And this can push people to seek the unquestioning certainty offered by various dangerous types, what Berger calls "fanaticism," until they realize its fundamental mendacity. He described a dispiriting dialectic of nihilism and fanaticism and back again which struck some of my students as perfectly describing what they encounter online every day.
Berger offers an antidote to this downward spiral: communities that sustain us in faith (knowingly not knowledge) in the context of uncertainty. Contrasting them with demanding fundamentalistic religious organizations, he calls them "weak" institutions - voluntary associations where "uncertainty-wallahs" can share their uncertain faith rather than pretending certainty.
Even apart from Berger's suddenly switching to theological mode to root all this in Paul Tillich's "Protestant principle," First Corinthians' God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong and the "kenotic," this was a harder sell. I made a passionate case that weak - participatory, democratic - institutions are what we need, now more than ever. I'll be curious what stays with students from all this, and if it offers them some resources to resist the present fanaticisms, whose appeal several of them clearly feel.
We didn't, alas, have time to see Berger hit the limits of his own tolerance for uncertainty, in a telling anecdote from a conference he'd attended on "epistemological modesty":
One of the participants from Israel recounted a story from Talmudic literature. It went something like this: A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, an adept of the Kabbalah. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?"
God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says so-and-so . . ."
I'm not altogether comfortable with this story. I'm inclined to think that, both from a Jewish and a Christian point of view, we should assume that God could indeed have given the right answer.
Sublimest weakness!!! But even without this, ours was a profound and wide-ranging discussion, I think.
New School course catalogs never disappoint (until they moved online, that is). I've been enjoying dipping into some of the old catalogs which surfaced in that forgotten office closet last week - the real things, not digital copies!!
And oh, the places you'll go! Consider this insanely ambitious Friday night course offered in the early days of the University in Exile, Fall 1934, by a German Jewish pacifist mystic to whom The New School had offered refuge. (He continued to teach there until 1940.) This delirious romp through "great philosophies of life" begins with the Vedas, Taoism and the Hebrew Bible and goes on to touch on just about everything ancient, medieval and modern on its ways to "the possibilities in philosophy for discovering greater realities." Each lecture is like a whole floor of the department store of philosophy. Among contemporaries, Lenin and Gandhi get airtime, as well as "modern non-rational philosophy as the basis of Fascism." Only "The Caballa" gets a whole lecture to itself.
We were more interesting than one can even quite imagine today!
In "DIY Religion" today we started thinking about pluralism, with the help of two figures important to New School history.
One was the long-serving Horace Kallen, who endorsed what's still referred to as "cultural pluralism" over the assimilationist "melting pot" already in 1915. Our discussion showed that for it to work you need to be able to think about cultures plurally, indeed not as opposed outsiders to each other but as potential neighbors: we called this "pluralist culture." If you think this way, Kallen suggests, you will not only engage other cultures better but understand your own better (not confusing it with nation, for instance). When thinking about religion, Kallen recommends a similar pluralist self-understanding, praising the secularism of democracy as the "religion of religions" - the best way to regard and engage not only other religions but your own, too. I think the idea that cultures or religious traditions might appreciate each other in relation rather than compete for dominance seemed quaint to the class... but hopeful too, in an unfamiliar way. Pluralism as the gift (and work) of participatory democracy is a taste of the "Kallenism" that has defined The New School from its beginning!
It was fun to introduce the adventure of pluralism, which Kurs' friend Diana Eck has argued is a practice of dialogue (something you can't do alone), in a free-wheeling seminar at The New School, a temple to the promise of personal and societal pluralism, to the religion of democracy.
Katherine Kurs, "Between the Mystic and the Mainstream," CrossCurrents 50/1-2 [Fiftieth Anniversary Issue] (Spring/Summer 2000): 121-30, 128
Every few years, someone cleaning out an office or closet happens on a trove of New School history. The latest find includes course catalogs from the dean's office of the Adult Division in that division's heyday, when the appearance of the New School Bulletin was an event in the city's cultural calendar. Some of these ring-bound bulletins record which courses ran and which were cancelled - about 25% each time - so they're a precious complement to the digitized catalogs.
