NINE DECADES OF THE NEW

Imagine the audacity of naming a serious institution of higher learning The New School—in 1919. Consider the genius of it now: the relentless and public imperative built in to that name, charging all future leaders, faculty, and students to challenge the status quo every day of every year, for nearly a century thus far. As the decades since its founding have brought a range and speed of transformation to the world unprecedented in human history, The New School has remained a fountainhead of social change, artistic daring, intellectual freedom, and educational innovation.

Appearances Can Be Affirming

In 2005 The New School made visible a fierce internal rededication to its founding principles, ideals, and promises, in the works for the past several years. The university officially trimmed its name from New School University to its deft and definitive original—The New School. It revised the nomenclature of its eight member schools in a way that both preserves the cachet and distinction of each and demonstrates an unprecedented solidarity and reciprocity among them. And it introduced a striking new visual identity that communicates the essence of The New School—bold, progressive, kinetic, urban, engaged.

The schools are now named: The New School for General Studies (formerly The New School); The New School for Social Research (formerly The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science); Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy (formerly Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy); Parsons The New School for Design (formerly Parsons School of Design); Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts (formerly Eugene Lang College); Mannes College The New School for Music (formerly Mannes College of Music); The New School for Drama (formerly Actors Studio Drama School); and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (formerly the Jazz & Contemporary Music Program).
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NEW SCHOOL

A University Born of Dissent and Democracy

"This is the hour for the experiment; and New York is the place, because it is the greatest social science laboratory in the world and of its own force attracts scholars and leaders in educational work." — proposal for The New School, 1918

In the aftermath of the First World War, much of America was playing it safe. Social criticism and modern arts were restricted or banished from many of the nation's cultural institutions, including universities. In response, a small band of unconventional thinkers—including historian Charles Beard, philosopher John Dewey, and economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson—imagined an educational venue where they could freely present and discuss their ideas without censure, and where dialogue could take place between intellectuals and the general public. In 1919, they published a brochure listing their lectures and opened The New School to all "intelligent men and women." In addition to studying the "grave social, political, economic, and educational problems of the day," students could prepare for careers in teaching, journalism, public policy administration, and labor organization. The school, which during the 1920s occupied six rented brownstones in Manhattan's Chelsea district, was an immediate success, attracting in its first years faculty and lecturers including Lewis Mumford, Harold Laski, Franz Boas, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Felix Frankfurter. America's first university for adults was formally named The New School for Social Research in 1922.

In 1930, The New School commissioned Joseph Urban to design its first permanent home—and the nation's first building developed specifically for adult education—to be constructed on West 12th Street. Murals by Thomas Hart Benton and José Clemente Orozco punctuated the interior of the building, which remains today an outstanding example of the "international style" of modern architecture.
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A Home for the Exiled, a Haven for the Arts

"I have no reforms to recommend except the liberation of intelligence." — James Harvey Robinson, founder

Now known as The New School for Social Research, the second division of The New School was founded as The University in Exile in 1933. Conceived by New School president Alvin Johnson, it rescued and employed European intellectuals and artists who had been dismissed from teaching and government positions by the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. More than 180 scholars and their families found refuge here, including Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer and economists Karl Brandt and Gerhard Colm. Nobel prize winner Franco Modigliani was one of its first students. In 1934, the University In Exile—renamed The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science—received authorization from the Board of Regents of the State of New York to offer master's and doctoral degrees, and began publication of its international journal of the social sciences, Social Research, still one of the most influential academic journals in the United States.

Continuing its rescue of European scholars, The New School, with the assistance of the French and Belgian governments-in-exile, established the Ecole Libre des Hautes Studes in 1942, a temporary home for such world-renowned scholars as Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Maritain, Henri Gregoire, and Henri Bonnet.

During the 1930s, The New School became a major center for the modernist impulse in the visual and performing arts. Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey taught modern dance; Aaron Copland, music, Charles Seeger, musicology; José Clemente Orozco and Stuart Davis, painting; José de Creeft, sculpture; and Frank Lloyd Wright, architecture.

In 1940, exiled German stage director Erwin Piscator launched the Dramatic Workshop at The New School. An acting school in which serious American and foreign theatrical productions and instruction were informed by social and political concerns, the Workshop launched students who would become the core of the American theatrical renaissance of the 1950s. Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Harry Belafonte, Elaine Stritch, Ben Gazzara, and Tony Curtis studied here with a faculty including Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.

"I attended The New School for Social Research for only a year, but what a year it was. The school and New York itself had become a sanctuary for hundreds of extraordinary European Jews who had fled Germany and other countries before and during World War II, and they were enriching the city's intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time." — Marlon Brando, student

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A World War II and Post-War Mecca for the Progressive

The New School began granting the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943. The newly established Senior College was the first academic institution organized to meet the special higher educational needs of returning World War II veterans and other working adults. Here, an education interrupted by war or the circumstances of life could be continued and completed.

Student enrollment skyrocketed as The New School became the primary intellectual magnet for New Yorkers in the post-war era. Faculty included W. H. Auden, Meyer Schapiro, Berenice Abbott, Alfred Kazin, Chaim Gross, and John Cage. Students of the Writing Workshops program, established in 1934, included authors James Baldwin, William Styron, Mario Puzo, Madeline L'Engle, Lorraine Hansberry, and Thomas Berger.

During the 1950s, New School instructors included Hannah Arendt on politics, Margaret Mead on anthropology, Reinhold Niebuhr on theology, Karen Horney on psychology, Sidney Hook on philosophy, and Robert Frost on writing and literature.

In 1951, the Human Relations Center was created within The New School. Known since 1987 as the Vera List Center, it was the nation's first daytime program of studies designed exclusively for mature women.

The Institute for Retired Professionals opened at The New School in 1962 and became the prototype for more than one hundred similar educational programs for older citizens in the U.S. and abroad.

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Eight Become One

"In an intellectual setting where disciplinary boundaries are easily crossed, students learn to practice creative democracy—the concepts, techniques and commitments that will be required if the world's people, with their multiple and conflicting interests, are to live together peacefully and justly. " — Richard Bernstein, Philosophy faculty, The New School for Social Research

The founding idea that the free and finest thoughts of mankind could be put into practice in the social sciences and urban policy—and that the purpose of education was to provide the individual with the tools to make a difference in the world—proved transferable to every realm of inquiry and expression. Beginning in the 1970s, The New School grew from two divisions into a university of eight likeminded schools where 9,300 undergraduate and graduate students and 15,000 continuing education students now enjoy a disciplined education supported by small class sizes, superior resources, and a full-time faculty of renowned scholars as well as teaching professionals from every realm of expertise.

In 1964, the J. M. Kaplan Center for New York City Affairs was founded here as the first teaching and research center in the United States devoted to the study of a single metropolitan area. The Kaplan Center evolved into the Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy (now Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy), named in honor of former New School trustee, Robert J. Milano, in 1975, with a curriculum structured to encourage creative thinking in aid of progressive social, economic, and political change in the public, private, and nonprofit arenas.

Parsons School of Design (now Parsons The New School for Design) became the fourth major academic division of The New School in 1970. Founded in 1896 by painter and art educator William Merritt Chase, Parsons has long maintained its reputation as the premier degree-granting college of art and design in the nation. Since joining The New School, Parsons has established branches in Paris and the Dominican Republic (1980), Japan (1991), and Korea (1994)

In 1978, the Seminar College synthesized the New School philosophy and methods into a full-time, four-year undergraduate liberal arts program leading to the Bachelor of Arts degree. The undergraduate division was renamed in 1985 to acknowledge the support of Trustee Eugene M. Lang, and is now known as Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.

The venerable Mannes College The New School for Music joined the university in 1989. Located in Manhattan's Upper West Side, Mannes offers undergraduate and graduate programs in all of the orchestral instruments, voice, conducting, composition, music theory, and historical performance, and has a long tradition as an international leader in the training of professional musicians.

In 1994, The New School instituted an interactive Distance Learning Program, allowing students anywhere in the world to take New School courses. The following year, The Actors Studio Drama School became a division of The New School, an association that continued for the next ten years.

In May 2005, the legacy of the Dramatic Workshop was resurrected with the launch of The New School for Drama. Director Robert LuPone oversees a MFA program offering graduate training in Acting, Directing, and Playwriting taught by a faculty of theatre professionals including Ron Leibman, Lloyd Richards, and Michael Weller.

Begun in 1986, The New School's undergraduate program in Jazz and Contemporary Music is the university's eighth division. Drawing on New York's incomparable pool of musical talent for its faculty, The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music offers a BFA in jazz performance with concentrations in all instruments, composition, and arranging, or a five-year BFA/BA degree in collaboration with Eugene Lang College.

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Everything New is New Again

"We must sustain the belief that the men and women who earn their degrees here, or who make the effort necessary to acquire knowledge of something previously unknown, will in big ways and small change our world for the better." — Bob Kerrey, President, The New School

The return to our original name—as fresh today as it was in 1919—signals a major transformation and expansion of The New School's academic programs and global outreach, under the leadership of President Bob Kerrey and the guidance of our founders' uncompromising dedication to unfettered and intelligent progress toward world peace and global justice.

Excellence, integration, and expansion are the themes of the initiatives now under way within and throughout The New School. We are fortifying our undergraduate program to make its unique strength in educating young people to make an actual difference in the world competitive with the top traditional programs in the nation, and significantly increasing the number of full-time faculty throughout the university.

We are developing a new approach to general education built around interrelationships in the arts, design, social sciences, and the humanities; building new programs linking our strengths in media, culture, and technology across all divisions; creating dynamic new collaborations between the schools; and adding the natural sciences to the education of our undergraduates.

In keeping with the necessity to push constantly at boundaries in order to keep change alive and moving forward, we are extending our international interests to encompass Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe and Latin America; establishing a new university-wide initiative in history as it informs the building of a global society; and expanding and enhancing our on-line educational resources.

To realize and complement these academic initiatives, there will be changes as well to our infrastructure that will enhance our facilities with the latest technologies and provide our students and faculty with optimal physical resources for living and learning at The New School.
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