Michael Schober, Dean

Welcome to the extraordinary experiment in American higher education and intellectual life that is The New School for Social Research.

Within a university with an unusually progressive mission—dedicated to the NEW—this school assembles a community of scholars who aspire to the broadest, deepest, best informed, most critical, most global, most forward-thinking work. Being part of that community, I have found, stimulates and challenges me at every level.

Visionary thinking has been at the heart of our school since the founding of the New School for Social Research in 1919. The founders and early teachers  included leading progressive scholars of the day, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard, Franz Boas, Harold Laski, and others. Their New School aspired to be everything the Old School was not, geared to learning as an end in itself instead of narrow professionalism, open to dissenting opinions and the avant garde in art and scholarship. From the start, conversation at The New School included an astonishing range of academic and artistic figures. The list of early participants—Martha Graham and Aaron Copland among them—reads like a catalog of the period’s cutting edge.

In this exciting mix, a particularly visionary effort established the foundations of today’s New School for Social Research. In 1933, the president of the New School, Alvin Johnson, was one of the few Americans to try and help German and Austrian scholars who were being fired and deported, and whose very lives were in danger, under National Socialism. The New School embarked upon a long-term rescue mission, raising money to create a University in Exile in New York as an academic home for social scientists fleeing Germany. Among the first scholars were economists Karl Brandt, Emil Lederer, and Frieda Wunderlich; sociologists Hans Speier and Albert Salomon; and psychologist Max Wertheimer.

In 1934, the University in Exile was incorporated into The New School as the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. It generated immediate interest, with 92 students enrolling the first term. As rescue efforts continued, the Graduate Faculty internationalized American social science, bringing to the United States an unprecedented cohort of scholars from Europe, whose impact was enormous, and this at a time when Jewish scholars were regularly (sometimes openly) discriminated against in American academia.

The New School for Social Research stood and has stood since as a beacon of cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and serious critical engagement with the issues of the day. The distinguished teachers who have found a home here over the years—and any list that includes names like Hannah Arendt, Alfred Schütz, and Solomon Asch is indeed distinguished—have represented a diversity of theoretical and methodological commitments. Today’s NSSR continues the tradition of questioning, critique, political and ethical engagement, and innovation. Each department or program has its own strengths and focuses, but what may be less clear is the degree to which the members of our faculty promote and engage in dialogue that goes beyond the parochial concerns of their individual fields. This happens in individual courses, in co-taught and cross-listed courses, in multidisciplinary conferences and forums for discussion, and in division-wide faculty meetings, which are the norm here but are far from commonplace in American universities.

Another thing I find particularly exciting about today’s NSSR is our increasing collaboration with the other divisions of The New School, setting the stage for an unprecedented kind of graduate education that goes beyond “interdisciplinary” as most universities think of it.  Already, graduate students at NSSR are taking courses with graduate students at Parsons The New School for Design, for example, on the intersection of psychology and technology design, seeing not only how social science research can inform design, but how designers can inform social science. Cross-divisional collaborations, both in research and in the classroom, are in the works with The New School for General Studies; our management school, Milano; our undergraduate liberal arts school, Eugene Lang College; our music conservatory, Mannes College; The New School for Drama; and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. As I see it, these explorations have the potential to transform the nature of graduate education.

Two more points about The New School for Social Research. First, the fact that it is located in downtown New York City is an important part of its vibrancy. New York is simply one of the most exciting places one could be, with more people from more cultures speaking more languages assembled in one urban area than the world has ever seen. The breadth of cultural, artistic, intellectual, and political activities available in New York is unparalleled. Our home in a hub of the globalizing world is part of what makes us special.

Second, a word about our students, who represent an extremely diverse range of nationalities, ages, and life experiences. When colleagues from other universities meet my students, they regularly comment on their maturity and engagement, and they wonder what it is we are doing to attract students of such excellence. Part of the story is that one of The New School’s longstanding values is to give students from nontraditional backgrounds a chance to excel through rigorous training, and so we benefit from having some students that other programs might overlook. Another part is that NSSR’s unique profile attracts a certain kind of student, with an energy, intellect, and openness to exploration that is the heart of what a graduate education should be.

I look forward to your contributing to the conversation at The New School for Social Research.