The work before us
"Faculty arrived one day to be informed that they were 'paid consultants' as students recalibrated their courses in real time ... "
A new year brings with it change, uncertainty, and opportunity. As Public Seminar prepares for the 2026 spring semester at The New School, we’re bookmarking two essays from our archive that offer insight into the ethos of the university and where we might head next.
The dissident academics who founded The New School did not set out to launch a downtown, more open-minded version of Columbia University; they were dead-set against the very idea of undergraduate education as traditionally constructed. In an eye-opening 2019 essay, “The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College,” religious studies professor Mark Larrimore charts the school’s trajectory from offering seminar-style night classes for working adults to granting bachelor’s degrees to thousands of resident undergraduates.
This legacy of radical restructuring is accompanied by a history of radical resistance. In another essay from 2019, “Nurturing Subversive Seeds,” Judy Pryor-Ramirez, Eugene Lang College’s first Director of Civic Engagement and Social Justice, describes teaching her students about “the Mobilization” of 1996–98, which saw some New School students, faculty and staff agitate for more equitable hiring practices, better working conditions, and more diverse curricula.
As Pryor-Ramirez writes, “Knowing the history of struggle at The New School empowers a sense of solidarity with those who participated in the work before us—and with those yet to come.”
The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College
Mark Larrimore
Most American universities start as 4-year colleges, eventually adding masters and doctoral programs, professional schools and conservatories, and ultimately continuing-ed programs. The New School did things pretty much back to front. It took the better part of its first 100 years to establish a 4-year undergraduate college. This wasn’t an oversight. Offering a 4-year degree program to traditional-age college students was the last thing on the minds of the founders, critics of universities and their dusty degrees. When a 4-year college was at last set up, 60 years in, it was only after experiments with programs of other lengths, testing boundaries with graduate, non-degree—and even high school—education. As questions arise anew about the nature and structure of higher education, The New School’s adventures with undergraduate education record a plethora of possibilities.
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Nurturing Subversive Seeds
Judy Pryor-Ramirez
Most folks at The New School today haven’t heard of “the Mobilization,” the series of protests over questions of diversity and inclusion which convulsed the campus between 1996 and 1998. But I learned about it on my first day as Eugene Lang College’s first Director of Civic Engagement and Social Justice. A colleague handed me a copy of “Anatomy of a Mobilization,” a chapter of M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing. I could tell by the intense tone of her voice that I needed to read this document; that doing so was an act of subversion.