The New School
The New School is a private research university in New York City, New York, United States. It was founded in 1919 as The New School for Social Research with a mission dedicated to academic freedom and intellectual inquiry and a home for progressive thinkers. Since then, the school has grown to house four divisions. These include the Parsons School of Design, the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts and The New School for Social Research.
In addition, the university maintains the Parsons Paris campus and has also launched or housed a range of institutions, such as the Healthy Materials Lab, the Institute for Race, Power, and Political Economy, World Policy Institute, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the India China Institute, the Observatory on Latin America, and the Center for New York City Affairs. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". Approximately 10,000 students are enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Over 70 percent of students are in the creative areas of design, performing, and fine arts.
History
Name
From its founding in 1919 to 1997, the university was known as The New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University. The university and each of its colleges were renamed in 2005.The New School established the University in Exile and the École libre des hautes études in 1933. It was designed as a graduate division for largely Jewish scholars escaping from Nazi Germany and other adversarial regimes in Europe. In 1934, the University in Exile was chartered by New York State and its name was changed to the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. In 2005, it adopted what had initially been the name of the whole institution, the New School for Social Research, while the larger institution was renamed The New School.
Founding
The New School for Social Research was founded by a group of university professors and researchers in 1919 as a school where adult students could "seek an unbiased understanding of the existing order, its genesis, growth and present working". Founders included economist and literary scholar Alvin Johnson, historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, economist Thorstein Veblen, and philosophers Horace M. Kallen and John Dewey. Beard, Dewey, and Robinson were all faculty at Columbia University and all supporters of the Great War.In October 1917, after Columbia University suppressed criticism of the United States by the faculty, related to World War I, it fired two professors who were critical of both Woodrow Wilson and Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University president. Charles A. Beard, Professor of Political Science, resigned his professorship at Columbia in protest, though he supported the war. His colleague James Harvey Robinson, who also supported the war, resigned in 1919 and both Beard and Robinson became founders of The New School. John Dewey chose to remain on the faculty of Columbia.
The New School plan was to offer the rigorousness of college education without degree matriculation or degree prerequisites. It was theoretically open to anyone, as the adult division today called Schools of Public Engagement remains in part. The first classes at the New School took the form of lectures followed by discussions, for larger groups, or as smaller conferences, for "those equipped for specific research". In the first semester, 100 courses, mostly in economics and politics, were offered by an ad hoc faculty that included Thomas Sewall Adams, Charles A. Beard, Horace M. Kallen, Harold Laski, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson, Graham Wallas, Charles B. Davenport, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Roscoe Pound. Within a few years, the faculty expanded, particularly in the performing arts, to include Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, and the Group Theater. Decades later, The New School begin to offer degrees in line with the traditional university model. John Cage, who came to study at The New School in 1933 with the experimental composer Henry Cowell, taught at The New School from 1950–1960, including courses such as Experimental Composition and Mycology. Cage's teaching at the school inspired the founding of Fluxus, through his students, including Yoko Ono. Cage was forced out by the Graduate Faculty who did not feel that he was appropriate to their ideal of an academic professor.
Motto
The New School uses "To the Living Spirit" as its motto. In 1937, Thomas Mann remarked that a plaque bearing the inscription "be the Living Spirit" had been torn down by the Nazis from a building at the University of Heidelberg. He suggested that the University in Exile adopt that inscription as its motto, to indicate that the 'living spirit,' mortally threatened in Europe, would have a home in this country. Alvin Johnson adopted that idea, and the motto continues to guide the division in its present-day endeavors.University in Exile
The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science was founded in 1933 as the University in Exile. It was largely for Jewish scholars purged from teaching positions due to antisemitic laws passed in 1933 Nazi Germany. By 1938, the matter became an issue of life or death for these scholars. The University in Exile, one of a number of similar programs being established nationally, was initially founded by the director of the New School, Alvin Johnson, through the financial contributions of Hiram Halle and the Rockefeller Foundation. Notable scholars associated with the University in Exile include psychologists Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer and Aron Gurwitsch, political theorists Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, philosopher Hans Jonas, and composer Hanns Eisler.In 1934, the University in Exile was chartered by New York State and its name was changed to the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. In 2005, the Graduate Faculty was again renamed, this time taking the original name of the university, The New School for Social Research. Today, the New School for Social Research is considered by many to be a hotbed of Marxist, anarchist, and otherwise extreme left leaning faculty and graduate students.
New University in Exile Consortium
In 2018, the New University in Exile Consortium was formed. The consortium is a group of multiple colleges and universities around the world which host at least one exiled scholar per year, aiding them in academic pursuits as well as providing personal support with respect to their exile. Following its establishment, the consortium has helped host scholars from Afghanistan and Ukraine following the fall of the democratic Afghan government in 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.École libre des hautes études
The New School played a similar role with the founding of the École Libre des Hautes Études after the Nazi invasion of France. Receiving a charter from de Gaulle's Free French government in exile, the École attracted refugee scholars who taught in French, including philosopher Jacques Maritain, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and linguist Roman Jakobson. The École Libre gradually evolved into one of the leading institutions of research in Paris, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, with which the New School maintains close ties.Dramatic Workshop/School of Drama
Between 1940 and 1949, The New School included the "Dramatic Workshop," a theater education program and predecessor of School of Drama founded by German emigrant theatre director Erwin Piscator. The department chairs hired by Piscator were Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Herbert Berghoff. Among the students of the Dramatic Workshop were Beatrice Arthur, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Michael V. Gazzo, Rod Steiger, Elaine Stritch, Shelley Winters and Tennessee Williams. Prior to the Dramatic Workshop, The Group Theater under the leadership of Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg taught dramatic arts. Subsequent to the Dramatic Workshop, both Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg ran studios at The New School.Presidents
These twelve individuals have served as president of The New School:- Alvin Saunders Johnson
- Bryn J. Hovde
- Hans Simons Clara Mayer served as acting president
- Abbott Kaplan
- Henry David followed by Robert Morrison MacIver
- John R. Everett
- Jonathan Fanton
- Bob Kerrey
- David E. Van Zandt
- Dwight A. McBride
- Donna Shalala interim
- Joel Towers
Organization
Major colleges
Former divisions
Academics
| Clinical Psychology | 138 |
| Fine Arts | 15 |
| Political Science | 81 |
| Psychology | 167 |
| Public Affairs | 83 |
| Urban Policy | 22 |
| Sociology | 54 |
Similar to many liberal arts colleges, The New School's Lang College has a "student-directed curriculum," which does not require its undergraduates to take general education courses. Instead, students are encouraged to explore before focusing on a major, selecting topics that are of interest to them. An exception to this is in the performing arts, where students must declare majors at enrollment. Although all "New Schoolers" are required to complete core training—usually of a literary, conservatory, or artistic nature—students are expected to be the primary designers of their own curriculum.
The university offers 81 degree/diploma programs and majors. The New School faculty teach most of their classes seminar style and the student/faculty ratio is 10:1.