This vision statement was developed by the deans, provost, and president over many months of conversation. The statement sets forth an academic direction informed by our values, academic strengths, students' needs, and the changing context for higher education, which the Board of Trustees considered and approved. We now ask the entire community to review it, offer their feedback, and share ideas about The New School's future.

As we envision The New School's future, our singular goal is to ensure that a New School education will profoundly enhance the knowledge, capability, and opportunities of our students. Guided by this paramount commitment, we will build on our greatest historic qualities to enhance our relevance and ability to thrive in the 21st century. Key to The New School's future will be collective work to continue to be the nontraditional university that our founders envisioned: one that boldly innovates and changes, guided by an ethical imperative to meet the challenges that face higher education and its role in society.

Our future will be shaped by an overarching commitment to the qualities that have shaped The New School's character.

• Creativity, innovation, and challenging the status quo, both in terms of what and how we teach, and in the intellectual project of the School itself -- how we respond to changing circumstances in order to best serve students and communities.

• Social engagement, orienting our students' educational experiences to help them become critically engaged citizens devoted to solving problems and contributing to the public good.

We are and will be a university where design and social research drive approaches to studying the issues of our time – such as democracy, urbanization, technological change, economic empowerment, environment and sustainability, and migration.  We will be the intellectual and creative center for effective engagement in a world that increasingly demands better-designed objects, environments, systems, and organizations to meet social and human needs. This direction corresponds with shifts in the global economy, society, and the environment, which require individuals to grapple with complex problems, lead more fluid and flexible careers, and collaboratively create change in the face of uncertainty.

We are guided by a vision for an educational experience characterized by:

• Active engagement with critical issues of our time, including urbanization, sustainability, globalization and social justice, and the interplay of the arts.

• An approach that prioritizes human values, interactions, and systems. This approach, drawn in different ways from design thinking and the liberal, creative and performing arts, orients students to think about how to act effectively in the world, how to move from research and critical reflection to effective interventions for positive change.

• Progressive curricula and pedagogy where project-based learning is central and where there are rich opportunities for distributed learning through global networks, learning partnerships, online learning, and other non-traditional, highly flexible educational opportunities.

• Preparation for success in a world that demands creativity and innovation. Through liberal education, design thinking, and experiential creative learning, students will develop capacities to collaborate, lead, communicate, think both creatively and empirically, embrace complexity and risk, and recognize the social and civic implications of their actions.

• Access, appeal, and affordability for students of diverse backgrounds, pathways into and through higher education, individual realities, needs, and ambitions. Becoming a more accessible university will require that we develop alternatives to the traditional higher education financial model that is, at present, perilous for both students and institutions.

Our university is distinguished by this particular and distinctive academic ecosystem. Our vision is to leverage historically discrete strengths to achieve an academic direction as significant and as prominent as that of our individual academic units. Realizing this vision will require a more active integration of our greatest strengths, all informed by our New York City locus, global perspective, and core commitments to new ideas and civic engagement.

In the coming years we will organize our work – much of it already underway -- to advance this vision. We ask every part of the university to rise to the challenge to be part of this vision. In doing so, we will not only better serve students; we will also become a more sustainable university and continue to honor our extraordinary legacy.