At its birth, The New School for Social Research had purposes that blended the ethical with the academic. This resulted in educational programs that gave equal weight to truth-seeking and truthtelling. This goal continues to drive the GF today, as it continually rejuvenates itself with new faculty and new programs, not to mention fresh classes of graduate students, who each year bring ethical and intellectual energy from every region of the world to our doorstep. The cosmopolitan character of the student body matters educationally more than ever. We learn by presenting our ideas in seminars made up of fellow students quite different in their cultural origins and political experiences.

In an even richer sense, education here is cosmopolitan. We are marked by a deep interest in and knowledge about other parts of the world; we are not local, not parochial. Yet we are also metropolitan, nestled in arguably the most demographically diverse and culturally eclectic city in world history. New York City today is home to every world civilization and culture, to every language and faith, to every nationality and ethnicity. Being here is a serious part of being educated at the GF. What makes this place special is its blending of a cosmopolitanism that is worldly and metropolitan, and this blend we will continue to nurture.

The New School for Social Research is not for everyone. It is densely urban. It is an intense and demanding intellectual experience. It assumes a high level of maturity and ego strength among its students. As always, it expects scholarship that is self-critical as well as critical of injustice, inequality, and inhumanness. The need for such scholarship was made immediately present in the awful criminal act of September 11, 2001. This act of destruction, and all that has followed, forcefully remind us that we have a continued responsibility to examine how the world’s people, despite multiple and conflicting interests, can live together peacefully and justly.

Kenneth Prewitt
Dean, 2001–2002