The New School for General Studies
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The New School for General Studies is the adult education division of The New School, a university located in downtown New York City.
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[edit] Origins
When The New School was founded in 1919, it was hoped to have a permanent faculty to spearhead its innovative agenda. This did not prove financially feasible, though, so the New School, under the leadership of President Alvin Johnson, had to employ temporary lecturers who often held other jobs, who were not lavishly paid, and whose time at the institution was often fleeting. This model, which has persisted to this day, has, for all its institutional drawbacks, yielded some notable intellectual results. To quote from the summer 2006 catalogue of the New School for General Studies: "Some of the finest minds of the 20th century developed unique courses at the New School. W. E. B. Du Bois taught the first course on race and African-American culture offered at a university; Karen Horney and Sandor Ferenczi introduced the insights and conflicts of psychoanalysis.....in the early sixties, Gerda Lerner offered the first university course on women's studies". To this list could be added W. H. Auden, who lectured on Shakespeare at the New School in the late 1940s; Hiram Haydn, whose writing courses produced scores of novelists and publishers; and Gorham Munson, who pioneered the concept of the writing workshop at the New School.
[edit] Growth and Change
Dean Allen Austill led the division from the 1960s to the 1980s. Austill's dedication to the liberal arts (he had previously spent many years at the University of Chicago) and his humanistic vision sustained the New School through the turbulent waters of this fractious era, as the curriculum expanded from "Old Left" areas such as politics and economics to include more aspects of relevance to the "New Left" such as mystical experience and homosexuality. Austill also added such comparatively non-intellectual areas as guitar study and culinary science to the curriculum, indicating that, even though these areas were not central to the New School's mission, including them was an important means of serving the adult learner community of New York City. In 1962, Austill initiated the Institute for Retired Professionals, a community of peer learners from 50 to 90 who develop and participate in challenging discussion groups; the institute, now headed by Michael Markowitz, still exists today. Austill's subordinate as Dean of Humanities for many of these years was Reuben Abel, a philosopher (he wrote a book on the pragmatic thinking of F C S Schiller) who also operated as a small businessman in his spare time. Abel was succeeded by Lewis Falb, a specialist in interwar Paris who broadened the humanities curriculum further. Prominent teachers in this era included the philosopher Paul Edwards; the literary scholars Hasye Cooperman, Justus Rosenberg, and Margaret Boe Birns; the political scientist Ralph Buultjens; and the visual arts instructors Anthony Toney, Minoru Kawabata, and Henry C. Pearson.
[edit] The 1990s and after
The New School, for most of its history, operated as a noncredit institution, serving largely white, middle-class, often politically progressive, often Jewish adults living in Manhattan who were interested in intellectual stimulation and self-improvement. In the early 1990s, the institution, sensing demographic changes and needing to supplement its revenue, began to encourage credit students to matriculate at the institution, a trend which culminated in the establishment of the adult BA program in the mid-1990s. The credit students generally represented a younger and more diverse population.
The New School possesses a prestigious MFA program in creative writing that has featured such authors as Rick Moody, Colm Toibin, and Marie Ponsot as instructors. The division also hosts the World Policy Institute, a well-regarded foundation devoted to the study of foreign affairs and led by Stephen Schlesinger.
Several important developments occurred at the institution in the early 2000s. A strong advising program guided the curriculum's transformation from an intellectual free-for-all of courses often taught by teachers with sharply varying credentials to a smaller, more rigorous set of offerings taught by professionals, often bearing the highest degree in their fields. In 2005, as part of the rebranding of the entire university envisioned by President Bob Kerrey, the division was renamed The New School for General Studies, to clarify its mission and perhaps to invite comparisons with Columbia University's prestigious, similarly named School of General Studies. Also in 2005, the New School agreed to a contract with ACT-UAW, a local of the United Auto Workers, guaranteeing job security to part-time faculty who had taught at the New School for more than ten semesters.
Following the part-time faculty's success in gaining recognition and security, New School students set about creating a university-wide representative body. Many efforts have been made to establish a student legislative body, to address student grievances and concerns, but they were stymied by disconnected university divisions and an unenthusiastic administration. However, the long-standing efforts finally paid off in the Fall 2006 term when a University-wide Student Senate was formed involving representatives from all of the school's divisions. The USS gained administration support and funding from the board of trustees and is set to ratify a new constitution. In the Spring 2007 semester, representatives will be elected from each division.[1]
