The New School

The New School, previously known as New School University, is an institution of higher learning in New York City. Some 9,300 students are enrolled in graduate and undergraduate degree programs in the social sciences, humanities, public policy, design, and music.

The university was founded in 1919 as the New School for Social Research through the financial backing of heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney. Its founders included the historian Charles Beard, economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson, and philosopher John Dewey.

The New School is comprised of a number of academic units, including both traditional faculties and a well-known international think tank, the World Policy Institute. The school is located around Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan. The current president of the New School is former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE). Kerrey drew some praise for his decisive reorganization of the university, as well as censure for his support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, generally opposed by the university's traditionally left-wing faculty. In 2004, Kerrey appointed Arjun Appadurai as Provost.

A new identity

In June of 2005, the university was officially renamed "The New School" and, in order to better promote the New School affiliation of each of the divisions, the academic units were renamed to prominently feature the New School name: The New School for General Studies, The New School for Social Research, Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy, Parsons The New School for Design, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Mannes College The New School for Music, The New School for Drama, and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Some faculty, students, and alumni have expressed concern over the re-branding of the university, and especially the dramatic redesign of the logo from a six-sided shield against a green background to a spray-painted graffiti mark reading simply, in capital letters, "THE NEW SCHOOL" with, in smaller letters beneath, "A UNIVERSITY." They claim that the university's new identity campaign, while maintaining a slick urban edge, does little to suggest academic rigor or collegiate legacy.

The Graduate Faculty and The New School for Social Research

The Graduate Faculty was the intellectual heart of the New School. During the period from 1933 until the end of World War II, the University in Exile was founded as a base for scholars who had been dismissed from teaching and government positions by totalitarian regimes in Europe. The University in Exile later became the New School's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. Notable scholars associated with the Graduate Faculty include psychologists Max Wertheimer and Aron Gurwitsch and political philosophers Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. The New School played a similar role with its support of the École Libre des Hautes Études. 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 New School for Social Research continues the Graduate Faculty's tradition of synthesizing progressive American intellectual thought and critical European philosophy.

True to its origin and its firm roots within the "University in Exile," The New School for Social Research, particularly its Department of Philosophy, is one of very few in the United States to offer students thorough training in the modern continental European philosophical tradition known as "Continental philosophy." Thus, it stresses the teachings of Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida, et al. ^* The thought of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, et al. is an especially strong influence on all divisions of the school.

Academic divisions

The New School for Drama (previously known as The Actors Studio Drama School in affiliation with The Actors Studio )
Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts
The New School for Social Research (formerly known as the University in Exile and the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science)
Mannes College The New School for Music
Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy
Parsons The New School for Design
The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music
The New School for General Studies
World Policy Institute

Labor movement

In 2003, adjunct faculty in several divisions of the New School began to form a labor union chapter under the auspices of the United Auto Workers. Though the university at first tried to contest the unionization, after several rulings against it by regional and national panels of the National Labor Relations Board the university recognized the local chapter, ACT-UAW, as the bargaining agent for the faculty. As a result of a near strike in November 2005 on the part of the adjunct faculty, the ACT-UAW union negotiated its first contract which included the acknowledgement of previously unrecognized part-time faculty at Mannes College The New School for Music.

The New School in the media

The Bravo television program "Inside the Actors Studio", hosted by James Lipton, was filmed at The New School until a contract with The Actors Studio concluded in 2005; it is now filmed at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. Project Runway, another Bravo program, prominently features Parsons The New School for Design's elite fashion design department.

John McCain's speech at the graduation ceremony of 2006 also generated a large amount of media attention, due to vocal student opposition and Jean Rohe's speech ^*.

Notes

The Actors Studio Drama School was part of New School University from 1995 until 2005, at which time their affiliation with the university came to an end.

External links

New School University | Universities and colleges in New York City

Gourt Home::Gourt :: The New School