The New School History And More Details

The New School History And More Details

The New School:- Located in New York City, The New School is a private research institution. Originally intended to serve as a haven for progressive thinkers and a school for academic independence and intellectual inquiry, The New School for Social Research was created in 1919. Since then, the university’s school has expanded to contain five departments. The Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the Parsons School of Design, the College of Performing Arts—which houses the Mannes School of Music, The New School for Social Research, and the Schools of Public Engagement—are a few of them.

The university also runs the Parsons Paris campus and founded or has hosted a number of other organisations, including the Vera List Centre for Art and Politics, the India China Institute, the Observatory on Latin America, the Centre for New York City Affairs, and the international research institute World Policy Institute. “R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity” is the category in which it falls. Undergraduate and graduate programmes in fields such as design, music, fine arts, liberal arts, humanities, social sciences, architecture, theatre, psychology, and public policy engage about 10,000 students. Over 70% of all university students are majoring in creative fields including fine arts, performing arts, and design.

The New School History And More Details

History

Known as The New School for Social Research for the majority of its existence, the university was founded in 1919 by progressive educators from New York, most of whom were former Columbia University faculty members who opposed to a necessary loyalty pledge. It was known as New School University from 1997 to 2005. In 2005, the name of the university and each of its colleges was changed.

As a graduate division, the New School founded the University in Exile and the École libre des hautes études in 1933 to provide academic refuge for intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany and other European oppressive governments. The University in Exile was renamed the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science after receiving a charter from New York State in 1934. It took on the name that it had used from the beginning, the New School for Social Research, in 2005, while the broader university was renamed The New School.

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Founding

The New School for Social Research was established in 1919 as a contemporary, progressive, free school for adult learners who wished to “seek an unbiased understanding of the existing order, its genesis, growth and present working” by a group of intellectuals and university professors. Thorstein Veblen, a literary scholar and economist, historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, philosophers John Dewey and Horace M. Kallen, and economist Thorstein Veblen were among the founders. A few of the founders had previously taught at Columbia University.

Several academics were sacked by Columbia University in October 1917 when the university forced all of its staff and students to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States in relation to World War I. Despite his support for the war, Charles A. Beard, a professor of political science at Columbia, resigned from his position in protest. In 1919, James Harvey Robinson, his colleague, departed to become a faculty member at The New School.

With no requirements for degree matriculation, the New School concept offered the rigours of a college education without requiring a degree. In theory, anybody might enrol in it, as the adult section known as Schools of Public Engagement still exists today. At the New School, lectures were followed by discussions for larger groups or by smaller conferences for “those equipped for specific research” in the form of lectures. An ad hoc faculty comprising Thomas Sewall Adams, Charles A. Beard, Horace M. Kallen, Harold Laski, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson, Graham Wallas, Charles B. Davenport, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Roscoe Pound offered 100 courses in the first semester, most of them in economics and politics.

A few years later, The New School starts awarding degrees in accordance with the conventional university framework. After studying with experimental composer Henry Cowell at The New School in 1933, John Cage went on to teach experimental composition there and encouraged his pupils, including Yoko Ono, to start the Fluxus Movement.

The New School History And More Details

Motto

“To the Living Spirit” is The New School’s slogan. A plaque that said “be the Living Spirit” had been taken down by the Nazis from a University of Heidelberg building, as noted by Thomas Mann in 1937. The ‘vital spirit,’ severely threatened in Europe, would have a home in this nation, he proposed, by making that statement the motto of the University in Exile. That concept was taken up by Alvin Johnson, and the division still uses it as a slogan for its current operations.

University in Exile

Founded in 1933 as the University in Exile, the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science was home to a significant number of Jewish professors who had either been forced to leave Hitler’s Nazi Germany or had been fired from their teaching posts by Mussolini’s fascists in Italy. Alvin Johnson, the director of the New School, first established the University in Exile with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and Hiram Halle. The New School’s intellectual core has been the University in Exile and its reincarnations. Psychologists Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer, and Aron Gurwitsch, political theorists Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, philosopher Hans Jonas, and musician Hanns Eisler are among the eminent academics connected to the University in Exile.

The University in Exile was renamed the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science after receiving a charter from New York State in 1934. The Graduate Faculty underwent yet another name change in 2005, adopting the university’s original moniker, The New School for Social Research.

New University in Exile Consortium

The New University in Exile Consortium was established in 2018. The consortium is a collection of several schools and institutions from all over the world that accepts at least one scholar who has been exiled each year and supports them both academically and personally throughout their exile. Since its founding, the Consortium has assisted in housing academics from Afghanistan and Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the overthrow of the democratically elected Afghan government in 2021.

École libre des hautes études

When the École Libre des Hautes Études was established during the Nazi invasion of France, the New School had a similar influence. After being granted a charter by de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile, the École drew in refugee academics who taught in French, such as linguist Roman Jakobson, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and philosopher Jacques Maritain. Over time, the École Libre developed into the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales, one of Paris’s premier research institutions, with which the New School continues to have strong relations.

Dramatic Workshop/School of Drama

Erwin Piscator, a German emigrant theatre director, developed the innovative “Dramatic Workshop,” which served as a precursor to the School of Drama, and it was a part of The New School from 1940 to 1949. Piscator hired Herbert Berghoff (playwriting), Lee Strasburg (directing), and Stella Adler (acting) as department chairmen. Beatrice Arthur, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Michael V. Gazzo, Rod Steiger, Elaine Stritch, Shelley Winters, and Tennessee Williams were among the well-known alumni of the Dramatic Workshop. Dramatic skills were taught by The Group Theatre, led by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, before the Dramatic Workshop. Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg both had studios at The New School after the Dramatic Workshop.

The New School History And More Details

I spent just a year at The New School for Social Research, but it was an incredible year. Hundreds of extraordinary European Jews, who had fled Germany and other countries before and during World War II, had found sanctuary at the school and in New York itself, and they were contributing to the intellectual life of the city with an intensity that has probably never been matched anywhere during a comparable period of time.

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