Higher education in society

I do hope we have a chance to teach a full-length version of our "What is college for?" course at some point. There's another fragment coming up in a few weeks, which will focus on self-designed liberal arts majors. But there are so many issues in the topic of the first one, "Higher education in society," that we barely caught a whiff of. 

But for those paying attention, there were whiffs. The thing I have in mind right now starts with the problem of the spiraling cost of higher ed in the the US, and the concomitant crisis of student debt. One of the student groups was tasked with thinking of responses, and they came up with a few.

One of the students had listened to a podcast we assigned the week before on the significance of Biden's debt forgiveness program. But none considered, perhaps because they got together to plan their presentation before or instead of reading it, one of our assigned texts for the final class, a related essay entitled "The return of college as a common good" from The Chronicle of Higher Education. (It's behind a paywall; I can send you a pdf if you're interested.) Why should not society pay for higher education?

This essay narrates how recently college has come to be thought of as a private investment of individuals (and their families), valuable even if it involves debt, and suggests that the tide may be turning again. But it only scratches the surface of what it might involve to think of college as a "common good" - the thinking behind not just the land grant and other state universities steadily defunded in our time, but the whole earlier history of universities we learned about in our first session, which told how political rulers and cities and churches and states and empires established - and funded - universities. But perhaps it didn't come to our students because they understand their own college careers in such privatized ways. "Public" or "common goods" are hard to even conceive in a neoliberal world.

To get students to appreciate what thinking of higher education as a common good might entail, one could use another of the texts we assigned for our last class, a description of the convening of Te Wānanga o Raukawa, an institution of "higher level Maori learning" in Aotearoa New Zealand. The university isn't the first or last part of a broad and longstanding effort to revive and sustain traditional Maori ways. An undated paper entitled "Leaders Are Made Not Just Born" explains how as part of imagining a thriving Maori community, they decided they needed people educated for various specialized roles:

The New School offers degrees in only two of these. For what projects are the things we teach a common good - if indeed they are? And should society invest in all the many majors offered in American universities? Business? Philosophy? Product design? Classics? Sports management? Literature? Dance? Communications? Computer game design? Anthropology? A few additional steps are required to make the argument that society should subsidize whatever students choose to major in, from advertising to zoology, and it would be valuable to tease them out. (There might be several ways to make the case.)

Maybe this will come up when we explore the world of self-designed liberal arts degrees, all of which have high-minded rationales...

Out of body experience

For the final session of our intensive mini-course "What is college for? Higher education in society" we spent most of our time workshopping student presentations on challenges identified last week: "affordability and access," "theory and practice and the relationship of what happens inside and outside the classroom," "inclusion and making space for all voices," "making invisible problems visible," and the "relationship of academic freedom to liberation." Groups were tasked with articulating the problem and considering possible solutions and related issues and, considering how little time we've had together, came up with some interesting ideas. Ideas from our first two sessions provided critical context but much of the content, perhaps inevitably, came from students' own experiences at The New School.

What we didn't have time for was any discussion of to three inspiring alternative institutions of higher education which we'd shared information about. Perhaps students will find themselves remembering them in future discussions? For me, reading them again and together was a slightly out of body experience.

The first, a Maori-led institution dating to 1981 and discussed in one of last week's texts (A Third University is Possible), is so compellingly local in its orientation and grounding in the indigenous values and communities of Aotearoa New Zealand that it challenges one to surface the forgotten and perhaps obsolete values and communities undergirding "the University" in the west: a huge task, and important.

The other two came at us as reincarnations of aspects of The New School. One, the 2012-founded Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, takes its name from the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung with which the New School for Social Research has long been confused, but its project is like the original New School. They aspire to be

an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in person (in partnership with local businesses and cultural organizations), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century. 

Like the original New School, BISR doesn't offer degrees or plan to, but rather proposes that college-level education can and should be part of the lifelong learning of engaged citizens. They offer new courses on classic and emergent topics to fit with changing times.

Our third inspirational case is the newest, and also refers to itself as the "New School," though its full name is New School of the Anthropocene. Their words really sing! 

The New School was ... founded by an ensemble of experienced academics from the higher educational world alongside artists and practitioners, none of whom regard education as a business and their students as customers. 

We recognise the pitiless financialisation of the university world and the dismal situation of the student-consumer, for whom vast debt is a passport for crossing the threshold to adulthood and social participation. We observe the demoralisation of exploited teachers within a casualised workforce whose energies are drained by a technocratic culture of audit and administration. We witness the purposeful and systematic dismantling of adult education, the crude instrumentalisation of learning and a joyless culture of accreditation. 

Collectively we can do better. We see that higher educational institutions in their current form are ill-placed to foster the new critical and creative ways of working collaboratively that are necessary for social renewal and ecological recovery.

Among their provocations is an alternative genealogy. While they do offer a diploma, they appeal not to the heritage of "the University" but to a wildly eclectic group of settings for reflection and renewal, including Black Mountain College, caves, Nalanda, Paris 8, Irish hedge schools and a newly founded university in Kurdish Syria.

Taken together, these living alternative visions of "what college is for" might make one wonder whether the sorts of ideals driving The New School founders haven't so much been defeated by the gravitational drag of "the University" as moved on to other edgy, urgent and emergent constellations. 

Food for thought! As they gather their thoughts for a final reflection (due Monday), maybe some of our students will realize how exciting these experiments are. And, once you move beyond assuming the answer to questions of higher education's place in society has to be some or other kind of university, how available!

Different universities are possible

"What is college for? Higher education in society" took a deep dive today into the most trenchant American critiques of higher education. Intrepid teams of students presented

• Paulo Freire's ideas on how education can entrench oppression by rendering its students objects or humanize them and allow them to discern a future beyod oppression from their own experience

• bell hooks' arguments for the importance of both wholeness - of students and teachers both - and theory in a truly trasnsformative feminist classroom

• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's rhapsodies on the prophetic work of the community of the university's marginalized "maroon" educators, the "undercommons," and 

• la paperson's chastening call for a "third university" undoing the work of the colonial "first" and the self-indulgently utopian "second universities" with their "scrap material"

None of these classics of radical educational thinking is easy to read, and each could sustain much deeper engagement, but I think the class got highlights and, as important, a sense of a tradition: hooks (1994) builds on Freire (1968), Moten and Harney (2003) read hooks and Freire, la paperson (2017) works with the ideas of all these predecessors. And if we didn't get into the subtleties, we could sense an ongoing effort to imagine education as "a practice of freedom" (Friere, hooks), even as we came to understand the ways in which it more naturally protects an unjust status quo from true change.

This was not all! A final team of students shared with us an analysis of the US-specific problem of student debt, and of the ways in which it disproportionately handicaps African American families. And a colleague central to the international "Platform Cooperative" movement told us about a cooperative university he spent time at in the Basque country, inspiring in some ways, a reality check in others. 

There are no easy fixes for higher education, but we've made clear why it matters to think beyond what we've got now. In our final session next week (three sessions is so few, but what a lot you can still do in them - especially if the students are game!) we'll look at a handful of experimental alternative universities around the world, and read an article arguing for again understanding higher education as a common good, rather than the privatized individual investment it has become in the US. We'll gather our thoughts on the most pressing challenges, and what hopes we can see for tackling them.

We'll pass this on, our contribution to our school's soul-searching.

Opening salvo

In the first meeting of our intensive mini-course "What is college for? Higher education in society" we started with the familiar 1918 "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women," allowing students to annotate it with questions and observations, and then zoomed out dramatically to suggest a much bigger set of questions. Groups of students were charged with reading and presenting four additional texts, each interesting in its own right but also, we promised shining light from a different angle on the problems The New School sought to address.

The first group gave a quick survey of the history of universities, a longer and more complex history than most realize. Why, where and how institutions of higher instruction and learning were established raised questions about whose the university is and whom it is accountable to. Founders, sponsors, the public, government, knowledge itself?

A second group talked about the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, raising questions of access and exclusion - and drawing attention the heroic efforts of those excluded in designing and defending their own institutions of higher learning.

A third group told about the founding of the American Association of University Professors, just a few years before - and involving many of the same thinkers as - The New School, making clear how rare it is for educators to run the show, or even to have stable positions. (The issues raised by each group resonate not only with New School woes but with growing attacks on higher education nationally and internationally.)

The final group used material from a video on the "founding mothers" of The New School (ten of the nineteen members of the 1918 Organization Committee) to help make us aware of the exclusion of women from nearly the whole history of universities, and of how the New School's legacies include the tenacity and imagination of thinkers anchored in practices and institutions besides the university.

It's a lot to process and we have only two more sessions to process it, but it was exciting to find that the compressed format actually gave us permission to think more broadly. I'm not sure I've ever approached our local and global issues with quite this wide a frame. Perhaps this was possible also because the current New School seems more unmoored from its past than ever, even as the idea of it invites all involved in it to think beyond about crucial questions of higher education's role and function in society. A good start!

Hidden agenda

For the final meeting of our New School History ULEC, students, in teams, were tasked with generating an "agenda for the new president" rooted in our history. Not many did. We'd thought this was a way of making the history matter, that by raising the stakes (we will offer a

report to the incoming president) we might feel empowered and engage more. But a ULEC is still a ULEC, lowest priority for busy students. And inciting them to think not only historically but institutionally proved too hard an ask for them even to fake it. Some cute slides, slim pickings.

Adult community

Classes that meet just before the Thanksgiving break, when many students have already decamped, are always a little subdued. I remember feeling a bit forlorn at Thanksgiving myself while in graduate school as the campus emptied out. My family (which never really did Thanksgiving anyway) abroad, I celebrated it with international students who had nowhere to go. It was nice in a somewhat countercultural way, perhaps a little like Jewish folk doing Chinese and a movie on Christmas.

So it wasn't that surprising, I suppose, that when we asked students if there were things from the histories we'd been exploring that stuck with them - useful for imagining better futures and more effective ways of achieving them - all they talked about was our vaunted "lack of community." Not to make light of that: it's a persistent complaint, pointing to a structural problem. Part of it is New York, of course, and part is how busy people keep in New York, whether engaging it or working long hours so as not to go under in it. Lacking a campus we're effectively a commuter school for many students, and the sorts of students who come here tend to march to their own drummers anyway. Enterprising students start clubs but they rarely last long, and have a hard time getting people to keep coming to their meetings.

So it's a lonely experience for many. This reality makes an interest contrast, or perhaps complement, to the adult education character of the place for its first many decades. People weren't at the New School full-time (students or faculty); they came as a supplement to lives already lived - even if this was the part that kept them engaged, learning, sane. And they came in large part for each other, others drawn beyond their day jobs and families to make new connections and discoveries. I picture it a very social place, a place for meeting new and interesting people as much as new ideas. Isn't it that still?

Much has changed since we've become a full-time place, a degree-granting university with mostly traditional age undergraduate students, and rightly so. We have responsibilities to them which we didn't to adult education students, a world of instruction and support. But... we're the day job now! What to do if that's not fulfilling, if the relationships don't extend beyond the classroom or studio? Ironically the best I could offer the students yearning for connection was the vestige of the New School of old - the many public programs that still happen here every night, drawing motley audiences largely not of our students and faculty, where you might get in conversation with people with whom you already know you share an extracurricular interest in common.

When I led the First Year Workshops at Lang years ago, we tried and tried to get students in the habit of going to events. Every week there are amazing speakers, films, performances from across the city and around the world - and you have a standing invitation to all of them! I didn't realize we were showing them not only how to get the most out of The New School but also how to access to its community, at once evanescent and enduring, of adults.

Existential crises

In today's New School history lecture, we told together two stories we usually tell separately - the Matsunaga Affair and the Mobe. (Actually, we've never really tried to tell the latter.) Funny things emerge when you have to link things.

The "Matsunaga Affair," you'll recall, was the convulsion of the university in 1989 when Sekou Sundiata, a Lang faculty member of color, x'd out a racist image in a Parsons exhibition of logos by the Japanese graphic designer Shin Matsunaga. The New School had only just affirmed its commitments both to an environment free from intolerance and to freedom of artistic expression, and was just beginning to bring the various divisions of the university together, so Sekou's act of "resistance" plunged the university into an existential crisis. I had a lot of fun telling the story in our "Offense & Dissent" exhibition, locating an unpublished account of Sekou's as well as an untranslated account by Matsunaga. It was heartening also to document the many efforts undertaken in response, by students and faculty and administration, to address the New School's failure to be a truly diverse and inclusive place.

Artwork commissioned for the exhibition reprises the layout of Matsunaga's display 

But today we had to go on to talk about an even greater crisis around some of the same questions, which happened less than a decade later, the "Mobilization for real diversity, democracy, and economic justice" known as the Mobe. The Mobe was a many-headed beast, calling out the university for being a bastion of white male privilege in its hiring and teaching, the more outrageous for an institution that prided itself for being progressive; the very traditions and institutions which defined the New School were challenged as a "New University in Exile" disclosed exclusion and hierarchy at the school's heart. The Mobe pitted faculty and divisions against each other, and culminated in a a student hunger strike in April 1997 which was called off only when a student had to be hospitalized. Students gained a voice in some committees and security guards' exploitative contracts were improved, but the Mobe's broader demands were not met, and the whole episode left the campus community scarred. New School was still reeling from this trauma (the wounds so deep they were not discussed) when I arrived in 2002.

It's a tough story to tell, especially when you notice that it led to the departure of forward-thinking faculty members, the Chief Diversity Officer, the Provost, and (probably for this reason) President Fanton - and the closure of the hard-fought MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory. But it gets harder still if you're coming at it from the hopeful responses to the Matsunaga Affair. What went wrong? The responses were insufficient; in particular, efforts to diversify the faculty by bringing in faculty of color on initial 3-year-contracts became no more than a revolving door, confirming - the Mobe showed - that the deeper structures of the university were resistant to meaningful change.

A long article on the Mobe in Lingua Franca - but it happened on Fifth Ave.

Eyal Press, whose article "Nightmare on Twelfth Street" we assigned, criticizes the Mobe protestors for their "disturbing ... tendency to focus on what's happening on campus to the exclusion of the more egregious injustices committed outside its walls" when "much of what these critics abhor about the university ... is rooted in broader social and educational inequities that will not easily change." (Press studied political science for two years at The New School.) But can and should not the New School, of all schools, do better? Dimitry Tetin's commissioned work for "Offense & Dissent" (above) thematizes the challenges of working in a society permeated by white supremacy. Maybe we take these failures as reminders that the struggle will be hard, and long.

But I'm remembering also something Jonathan Fanton once said, similar to a point anti-racist educator Tim Wise made at a Festival of New discussion. When conditions improve, expectations are lifted even further; if improvements seem inadequate it may be because they have succeeded in creating hope for more significant change. Under his watch, Fanton said, New School was actually doing better than many institutions despite its limited resources, though much remains to be done. One could suggest (I did in lecture) that the Graduate Faculty's dismissal of the proposal "Rethinking Europe in a Global Context: A Proposal for Diversifying the Graduate Faculty Within an Intellectual Program of Study” in Fall 1996 seemed so noxious because of the success of Lang's 1990-95 "Program to Create Diversity throughout the College Community" - one of the responses to the Matsunaga Affair. Indeed, without the Lang program's articulation of an antiracist New School ethos the GF proposal might never have been ventured.

Longer, more connected stories show entrenched injustices - it requires constant struggle to resist what Ann Snitow called default patriarchy and the culture of white supremacy - but such storie also show the complicated reverberations of failures - and successes. The work goes on, and telling it like it was is part of it. Even the painful story of the Mobe, we'll tell students next week, planted seeds for a more just future.

Make love not war

In our New School history course today, we talked about the moment when Parsons joined the New School, 1970. What may have been the first real Parsons presence at the New School was the exhibition "My God, we're losing a great country!" which Parsons students had chosen to put up in lieu of their senior shows, in solidarity with the National Student Strike after the bombing of Cambodia and the National Guard shootings at Kent State. The New School Art Center invited them to bring it down to 65 Fifth Avenue, new home of the Graduate Faculty.

That building, in its first year as a New School property (it had been a department store), had been site for it own dramatic National Student Strike related events - not just a strike, supported by faculty and president, but what became an occupation by New School students and hundreds of high school antiwar organizers, who made a home in the lobby of the building and outstayed their welcome. In the end, the administration called the police, and nineteen students were arrested! 
The highlight of our lecture was a presentation by one of the university archivists, who's been tracking down student activists for oral histories. She played us excerpts from two with student demonstrators, whose names she knew because they appeared in a court document from the time. Two of them met during the occupation and are still together! Another was a bit freer in making love not war. From the transcript:

Drugs and rock 'n roll were present too, by other accounts. I'm not sure we convinced today's students that their forebears' activities were as revolutionary as participants may have thought at the the time - making love in the "profs'" offices may have been understood as its own kind of sanitary act! The building where all this happened was torn down to make way for one in whose basement our class is held, but it was fun to suggest that all we were hearing about was part of the site's "karma."

Trained but not overtrained

Had a fun session of our New School history ULEC today. The topic was adult education, a dull topic until you start to think about what it could mean, and we sparked discussion by giving students an outline of a curriculum for adults drafted by the inescapable Alvin Johnson in 1953. Mark it up, cross things out, update and supplement! we urged, but many found it promising as it stood. (It didn't come to pass.) While it goes on to include "Problems of the Citizen," "Our Economic Life" and "The Enrichment of Life: The arts and amateurism," what students were excited by was the first category, "On Personal Development."
The students who spoke up seemed to think that beginning with self-knowledge would be a boon to learning, and to your fellow students, too. "Take your own mask off before you put the mask on others." a student quipped approvingly, an idiom unfamiliar to me, which seems to combine self-awareness with a spin on the instructions for airline safety in the event of an emergency. The discussion was and was not about the "life experience" which some advocates of adult education (like Horace Kallen) thought sheltered college students of conventional age lack.

Our discussion touched also on the importance of "defeats" and "losses," things Johnson thought were part of adult self-knowledge... but I was reminded also of the time I was part of a delegation of New Schoolers at a conference on general education where we decided, not quite jokingly, that one of the hallmarks of a New School education should be "failure." I think that idea lives on, a little defanged, in the "Shared Capacity" goal of "resilience," but the defeats and losses Johnson is thinking of seem deeper. I guess I think the classroom should be a safe space in an unsafe world (like many other "human relations"), a space to name and process and engage that unsafety... adult?

One act festival?

In our New School Histories class today we tried to tell the heart-stopping story of the University in Exile in a new way. This turned out not to be necessary, as it turned out; it was the first most of the class had heard of it! But it was fun to tell it in a new way, and in the headspace of the centennial of the New School.

To the usual story we added granular detail of how the University in Exile was conceived, funded and staffed - choosing which endangered scholars to try to rescue must have been unbelievable painful, and then getting them over hard in many other ways. We pointed out that Alvin Johnson was well positioned to direct this project through the work he'd done as associate editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences - the University in Exile happened at The New School because the school was already the hub of an international community of scholars.

But not just scholars - the nearly two hundred refugees scholars granted safe passage by the New School included many artists, a part of the story which warrants remembering, especially given the kind of school we've become. So we talked about the Dramatic Workshop, established by Johnson with refugee director Erwin Piscator, building out an already thriving theater program to meld American and European theater practice, Epic Theater and Broadway. Berlin, New York and Moscow!

It's an exciting story of its own, and paints a quite different picture of what the New School was and represented in the 1940s. We'd become a center for the arts in the 20s and 30s, learning to appreciate the modern arts as themselves forms of social research, and this took it to a new level. The grafting of the work of Piscator and his partner Maria Ley onto that of Theresa Heilburn and John Gassner, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg was just the kind of "Renaissance" which Johnson had seen the University in Exile ushering in, bringing European thinking to American materials. The New School at that time was humming with these Renaissance energies, new sciences and arts in a new kind of synergy.

The Dramatic Workshop has fallen out of our story, although it is the source of most of the celebrity alums we used to claim. The New School parted ways with it in 1949, and the school's commitment to theater subsided. It never disappeared, of course. Indeed, Mary Ley Piscator tried to bring the spirit of the Dramatic Workshop back twice, in the 1960s and at the end of the 1980s, when Dramatic Workshop alumna Judith Malina offered a "Dramatic Workshop II." Theater came back in a more substantial way a few years later, with a partnership with the Actors Studio, which lasted for a while (its new home Pace University now claims the whole legacy), but just looking at the constantly changing names suggests that theater's place has never been stable.

It's fitting in its way that Maria Ley Piscator's students in 1965 offered "An Evening with Kafka"! It may be fruitless to consider what the place of theater (or anything else, for that matter) will be at The New school in a hundred years. But it's worth considering the power that awareness of such legacies - both the days of glory and how short lived they were (barely a decade for Dramatic Workshop or Actors Studio) - might have in shaping it. Meanwhile, the shining example of the University in Exile suggests ways The New School might again become a path-breaking haven for scholars aborad. (Bob Kerrey, the New School president who ended the relationship with the Actors Studio, also  unsuccessfully proposed a new university in exile for scholars from the Middle East.)

Today, the New School offers BFAs and BAs in theater (at the College of Performing Arts and the College of Liberal Arts, respectively), while the MFA seems to be on hiatus. The legacy of the University in Exile has recently been reactivated in the New University in Exile Consortium, spanning fifteen universities but homed at The New School. And we have a new president coming in Spring. What next?

Portrait galleries

The semester's classes are unfolding nicely. Theorizing Religion has entered the world religions MOOCs, filling students' heads with knowledge of Islam and Buddhism before we get into the otherwise too self-referential discussions of the definition of religion. And in New School Histories, one of our teaching assistants, who's been working with the "Women's Legacy at The New School" project, gave a lovely mini-lecture which included portraits of all the ten women who were on the organizing committee of the New School, and raised new questions (at least to me) of how the New School's vision might be shaped by different movements in progressive era women's education. Exciting starts!

School's out forever!

In our New School Histories class today we considered the role students should take in determining curriculum, teaching, administration at a school like ours. We read an essay about an episode of student take-over of a class at the New School College in 1968, by an instructor who found himself relegated to the role of "paid consultant" to his class. With several levels of irony he described how the students reconstituted their course with great energy and rigor - only largely to recreate what would anyway have been taught. A win for all sides" Next week we'll be looking at more radical forms of student protest, including "Disorientation," a guide put together by students in the middle of the "war" between the New School and its president in 2009. It includes this splendid account of how taking ownership of your education can be a form of subversion of the capitalism educational machine. Take that!

Evangelist of beauty

It was time to acknowledge the biggest gap in our New School story today - Parsons School of Design, and the man it was posthumously named after. Frank Alvah Parsons (1866-1930) took over the New York School of Art (originally named after its founder William Merritt Chase), renaming it New York School of Fine and Applied Art as he added path-breaking departments in interior design, costume and advertising. By the 1920s the school was informally known as the Parsons school - a fact acknowledged in catalogs starting in 1928. A dozen years after Parsons passed away, the school was renamed in his honor by his successor (and, it seems, partner) William Odom. What do we know about this man, endowed by nature with a buoyant disposition and an engaging personality, as an obituarist wrote, and so singularly fitted to preach the gospel of beauty to a people hitherto indifferent to the arts?

Our reading was an address Parsons delivered in 1911 at the Annual Convention of the American Federation of the Arts, entitled "Art in Advertising." It's a more interesting, and stranger, argument than you might expect. Advertising, too, can be art - we must stop supposing art is only pictorial, only pictures, only decorative - and it is art when it achieves both fitness and beauty. So far so good. But advertising that is good art is also good advertising, helping accomplish the aims of every advertisement: seizing and holding a viewer's attention, convincing them of the product's merit and inducing in them a desire to acquire it. Fair enough. But how does it do that, and is it really more likely to do that when it is also art? Here the argument gets a little gauzy. Art moves us because the harmonious consistency of an object resonates with an inner harmonious consistency in the viewer, defining a sort of virtuous circle of aesthetic appreciation and consumption. Ideally, aesthetically sensitive citizens would be moved (only) by artistically meritorious advertisements (only) for products themselves aesthetically fine, the acquisition of which would in turn reinforce the citizens' characters and those of all exposed to their tasteful possessions.

for the finest art known to men is the art of right living. To live right one must think right. Let us begin, then, to think in terms of fitness and beauty from the foundation up, then will these qualities appear in our work and the public will grow with us.

How much the civic part is just what you'd say at a national convention I need to find out, and whether the concerns about harmony and fitness are reactionary or potentially progressive. Parsons gave a lot of talks and published a lot of books, as well as running what became a very successful school or art and design. Lots to read!

(Top image, c. 1925, from New School Archives; this credo is from the start of Parsons' Principles of Advertising Arrangement, 1912)

More Than Meets Eye

We went to the university archives today with our New School histories class. Students will be studying the publicity scrapbooks which, in part with a grant we secured from the Provost's Office, have been digitized. I haven't been in the presence of the originals aura since then. Even disbound for scanning they're still thrilling. Lost myself in reviews of the 1947 Dramatic Workshop production of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Les Mouches."

(Dramatic Workshop scrapbook #4, part 2, page 7)

For real

J's and my New School history course this time round is a little smaller than we'd expected but actually a good size for our two-hour time frame. The students hail from across the university, which is quite exciting. The only funny thing is that what we'd conceived as a graduate class has now become an undergraduate seminar!

Today's class, the first one with assigned readings, revisited the founding ideals of the New School in the context of progressive ideas both a century ago and today. To keep the present on the table, we assigned an essay we've found helpful before, "What is college for?" by Gary Gutting in the New York Times' The Stone" column. It's from 2011 and today it proved dated in helpful ways.

The essay addresses discussion of the "value of a college education" that we've been hearing for several years now. The astronomical rise in tuition costs, and in student debt, have made this an ever more pressing issue, but Gutting is aiming higher. In a Pew survey, college graduates reported that college was "very useful in helping them grow intellectually," in "helping them grow and mature as a person," and in "helping prepare them for a job or career." But these arguments, skeptical as well as positive, all result from a basic misunderstanding of what colleges are for.

What are colleges for? Gutting argues that they nurture a world of ideas, and demonstrate that we regard intellectual culture as essential to our society. But professors as well as students have lost sight of this. Professors need to need to realize that dedication to their disciplines expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. Students need to appreciate that a college education broadens you. Good teaching does not make a course's subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests - and so makes them more interesting.

Read in 2018 this seems a little quaint. A majority of Republicans has in the last two years been persuaded that colleges and universities are "bad for the country." Bastions of elite liberalism, they're regarded as making students not "more interesting" but more self-absorbed, at once relativist and intolerant. The "world of ideas" sounds either idly or subversively disengaged from the world. "Critical thinking," which we liberal educators purport to be teaching in all we do, is seen as nihilistic, morally and socially corrosive. (Actually it's not clear where the antipathy comes from; I'm stringing together views I've seen written about in various places.)

So what is college for? Happily we were reading this together with several documents from the time the New School was founded: an excerpt from John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916), the "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women" (1917 or, more likely, 1918) and Herbert Croly's celebration of the proposal in The New Republic, "A School of Social Research" (June 1918). None of them is interested in college. Dewey writes about education as lifelong, though his focus is on the education of children. The "Proposal" and Croly's essay argue the need for a school for adults. They're also all suspicious of otherworldly "world of ideas" talk, which displaces and degrades the active work of will and intelligence in life and endeavor.

What distinguishes these century-old proposals from most of our discussions today is their deep conviction that education is a social experience. (Croly giddily conflates social ideal, social process, social purpose, social life, social effort, social sympathies, social aspiration, social behavior, social knowledge, social relations, social activity, social impulse, social science, social practice, social experiment .... all of which flow together and through social research.) It should help students become the social beings they are meant to be, and in the process helps society as a whole become what it is meant to be. (The proposed new school would train and send out experts in bringing the social to the fore in all departments of life.)

Dewey argues that all thinking is research (D&E 174) - thinking understood as the work all of us do all the time in trying to solve problems, make things meaningful and build lives. (Correlatively not all research is thinking!) We think in and by doing. Schools aren't the only places thinking happens, but the places where thinking becomes reflective about itself, becomes habitually reflective. In the process we clarify our commitments, recognize and deepen relationships old and new, feel and hone our creative powers as interdependent social and moral beings in a world that is not settled and finished but rather is one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective (D&E 178).

Is that not what college is for, too?

In the new

 

Our seminar on New School Histories began today. Not quite at capacity but enough to run. Perhaps the students found it engaging enough to tell their friends about it... Today's class began with the students' prior knowledge of The New School - what they knew about it before they came here, whether it proved to be true or not - and wound up with a tour of sites on campus which try to convey our rich tangle of legacies.

Fall course

Looks like the set for a German expressionist film, doesn't it!

8:02pm, 14th St at Union Square

Official last day of the academic year (makeup for the two Tuesday snow days). Since my "Sacred Mountains" class had plenty of extracurricular activities, we didn't need it. Farewell, AY 2016-17, a year in which I taught quite the range of courses in quite the range of formats: an upper level and an introductory religious studies seminar (Theorizing Religion and Not To Scale: On Sacred Mountains), a university lecture course (Who New? A History of The New School, with my friend J), a seminar-turned-independent study (Exploring Religious Ethics: Confucianism in Dialogue), an advising tutorial (Buddhism as a Liberal Art), a conference tutorial (Mountains and Sacred Landscapes) and the Dean's Honor Symposium. Whew!

Failing by design

The penultimate session of our New School history course was really the finale. We're giving students next week's class to share and present the projects they've been working, so today was our last chance in the spotlight. What did we talk about? It was a little touchy-feely.

The theoretical framework was supplied, as in past iterations, by our colleague Ann Snitow's reflections on historical memory - and why the life of movements like the women's movement seems to those who were there to be "forgotten and actively misremembered" by historians.

Snitow's concern is feminism, though she suggests that what is true of feminism may be true of liberation struggles more generally. J and I suggest that ventures like The New School share some of these traits of forgettability too, and also by design. You can tell an inspiring story about visionary leaders doing decisive things, and we often do (lots of firsts!). But the New School project is only incidentally that. Presidents and (retrospectively defined) pioneers have done much to make the New School work, but the actual life of the place is more like the messiness of progressive movements seeking inclusive stories, plural voices, open futures. We gesture to the future not with a pointed finger or a fist of triumph but an open hand.

Still, we said, there are a few things we hope will stick - we offered four for starters. J talked about the different kind of story you tell if you start with discussions in the editorial office of The New Republic, discussions which included professors (notably New Historians) but were not about or confined to university education. She the suggested that the "through line" of our history is not social science but the arts, which can serve as forms of social research but also of reflection on larger questions, more sensitive and open to ambiguity than scholarly research or design. I talked up pragmatist understandings of education and of what it is to live in a world still on the make, where experiences of knowledge and beauty and other things are stages in broader processes unfolding - and inviting participation - all around us: that's the what and the why of our commitment to the "new." The fourth candidate for stickying was what design might do if really mixed up with liberal arts, a story only now, fitfully and belatedly, beginning to be told. Stay tuned!

If ours are likely to be unsticky stories, though, what were we doing devoting a course to them? Was it just telling (and contesting) stories with little chance of changing colllective memory? Snitow's essay is chastening. It was written ten years after the publication of The Feminist Memoir Project, conceived as an effort to gather and share voices which had been forgotten. But, ten years on, the misremembering seemed to be continuing unabated. Snitow proposes the "unstickiness" of feminism as a way of making sense of this difficult reality, and offers a sort of dilemma. Does one find a way to tell a "sticky" story - though the movement in question was "by design" not that sort of thing, and will be misrepresented - or continue to gather and share memories true to what happened in their multiplicity and messiness, knowing they will remain marginal?

We mention Snitow's fearlessly honest arguments in a half-magical thinking way to give students permission to forget - but also to remember - things we've discussed and engaged over the course of the semester. Perhaps they'll remember our synthesizing points. But it came to me that what I'd really like them to hold on to is a more general sense of what it feels like to have been part of this messy stickiness-resisting experiment in progressive engagement. And I recalled a reading we assigned the last times but not this time... perhaps we should bring it back next time.

The 1940 essay "A Story of Three Days," by Gestalt psychologist and University in Exile scholar Max Wertheimer, explores the valuable but incomplete contributions different disciplines make to an understanding of what freedom is, but ends with the argument that the best account of freedom is the way a free person faces counterarguments and new facts. When in the presence of a truly free person, you can feel it. 

Wertheimer's discussion of truth (in an essay we did include this time) is similar: hard to define in the abstract, truth is something you can recognize in the living of truthful people.

In our stories may we have given students an experience of what a school striving for true openness to the new feels like.

All education is local

Some people think our interest in the history of The New School is mere navel gazing, can you believe it? How can you be here now if you don't know where here is, and how it came to be the way it is? And if you're from an interesting place like The New School, which professes to think outside the box, wouldn't it be foolish not to learn from its extensive and varied experience in and out of boxes? Still, one might yet wonder if any of this has valence beyond The New School itself. Could our history, however inspiring or chastening it is for those of us whose destinies are linked to it, be of use to anyone else?

Our class (and we) had a chance to explore this question today. We invited two young student activists from our neighbor the Cooper Union to talk about their work calling their institution to task for abandoning its commitment to free tuition in 2013. Free Cooper is an inspiring story of successful student protest, if also of the way an institution with a distinctive and unconventional mission can lose its moorings. Cooper is 50 years older than The New School and from the start was meant to be more than a school. The Great Hall at the core of its dedicated building, a famous site of public events, helped define its civic role.

The Free Cooper leaders anchored the story of their organizing in a history of Cooper and its buildings. A slide of the inside of the signature building, hollowed out beyond its landmarked façade for renovation, illustrated better than mere words could what can happen when an institution moves beyond its original mission. Left standing inside was only the multi-story cylindrical shaft Cooper's inventor-founder had set aside for future use as yet unimagined (perhaps an elevator?), a lovely symbol, too. It was exciting to see a history put to such effective work.

We learned about the 65-day sit-in in the office of the president who had taken Cooper into such debt to build a stylish new building that they could pay for it only by introducing tuition, a sit-in which helped topple the president and his board. Part of how it worked was through the organizers' savvy use of social media, performances, parties and other public events, and it was exciting to be shown them by the very people who masterminded them. It was fascinating to learn how they collaborated with and learned from Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and tuition hike protests in Québec. It was moving also to hear them reflect on how hard it is to convey what it was really like, three years on, both as history and as continuing impetus for student activism.

I'm not sure what our students made of it but I'd be happy if they took from the talk some stories and strategies, a sense of the power of student organizing, and a renewed sense that the history of a place is a resource for present engagement and future hopes. All politics is local! New School isn't Cooper, nor should it be. But even in our lapses queer old birds like us can encourage each other in the struggle to resist the homogenizing of higher education. Our quixotic origins might make the lapses easier to see and to learn from. And who knows to what uses our future-focused founders' hidden shafts might yet be put!