New School for Old Students

Most universities start out as small liberal arts colleges, adding more advanced programs, courses and departments as they expand. Not Manhattan's New School for Social Research.

Founded in 1919, the no-longer-new New School began as a nondegree institution aimed at adults, added a graduate school, and only later turned to undergraduate teaching. Today, in fact, there are just 64 undergrads--all juniors and seniors--among the New School's more than 10,000 students.

Although chartered as a university, the New School has no science labs, no college clubs, no athletic teams. What keeps New Yorkers coming to its three-building, modern "campus" in Greenwich Village is an ever-changing curriculum that is almost as contemporary as a daily newspaper. Its smorgasbord of noncredit classes ranges from "The Art of Singing Folk Songs" to the crassly commercial "What the Editor Wants: Media Placement in Public Relations." In the spring of 1965, the New School ran a course on the Warren Commission findings; this term it has a continuing series of lectures on the Viet Nam war--and it quickly signed up Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times for a 70-minute report almost as soon as he returned from Hanoi.

Issues & Problems. The New School's professors are almost as unusual as what they teach. The most recent faculty addition is former Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, who last week taught his opening graduate seminar on "Current Economics and Political Problems."

Collegiate Hero Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd) conducts a graduate course in higher education at the New School, while waiting in the wings to join the staff is National Review Editor William Buckley. Next fall he will teach a noncredit course on "Issues and Problems of the City: a Conservative View."

That kind of provocative coursemaking results in a mature (average age is 36) student body that includes not only bearded beats but rising young lawyers and mod yet earnest matrons. Among the most popular offerings are the New School's highly regarded art courses. Among its best-known alumnae is Eleanor Roosevelt, who studied there in the late '20s. While starring as the attorney-hero of television's The Defenders, Actor E. G. Marshall studied law at the New School. Even so astute a politician as Tammany Leader J. Raymond Jones enrolled last year in its popular Center for New York City Affairs, where courses are led by such experts as Deputy Mayor Timothy Costello and Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton.

The New School was created by a group of former Columbia University professors--including Historian Charles Beard, Philosopher James Harvey Robinson and Economists Wesley Mitchell and Alvin Johnson--who felt that Columbia limited their freedom to teach unconventional courses and express unpopular views. By the early '30s, the New School had gained a certain vogue as a center of night-school uplift for left-wing intellectuals. It acquired new academic respectability in the mid-'30s by creating a "University in Exile" on the talents of about 50 European scholars who had fled fascism in Germany and Italy and formed a Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School.

What Students Want. The goal of the New School, says President John Everett, is to "educate adults." The university did not set up undergraduate credit courses until 1944, still has no plans to admit freshmen and sophomores. Currently, its only bachelor-degree candidates are enrolled in the experimental New School College, which offers a two-year program in the humanities and social sciences. The students get no grades, pursue no major, but receive plenty of individual attention, and pass or fail on the basis of interdisciplinary final exams. New School Dean Allen Austill selected the college's seven-man faculty on the basis of what subjects students want, since "faculty interests are not only different from but detrimental to students' interests."

"The machined and polished liberal arts curriculum first developed for the production of ministers, doctors, financial and government people," says President Everett, "is just not applicable in a world that changes so damned fast." Under Everett, former chancellor of the City University of New York, the New School hews to no philosophy except, as he puts it, that "human problems are only going to be solved by the application of highly literate, active intellects."

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