University in Exile Archives

Event

Live at Public Seminar: John D’Emilio

Public Seminar celebrates the publication of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood

October 10, 2022 • by Public Seminar

John D’Emilio, a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQIA+ history, will join Public Seminar Co-Executive Editor Claire Potter in a discussion of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood....

Democracy

Democracy and Social Justice

On the significance of C.T. Vivian and Adam Michnik

March 11, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The New York Times, April 26, 1984: “A Polish Nobel laureate in exile stood in a church on lower Fifth Avenue yesterday and read an open letter of moral outrage from a jailed dissident in Poland to his jailer. The letter, as another speaker put it, fell like ''a tornado'' on the ...

Education

Why The New School Will Survive

An imprudent venture in historical context

October 22, 2020 • by Judith Friedlander

Ginia Bellafante is not the first reporter at The New York Times to call attention to the serious financial troubles of The New School. Since its founding in 1919, the university has repeatedly faced major budgetary shortfalls, the details of which the Times has faithfully and dramatically recorded. Each time, The ...

Education

The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

July 30, 2020 • by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...

Education

A Multi-Campus University in Exile

Then and now

February 21, 2019 • by Judith Friedlander

The New School opened on February 10, 1919 in the name of academic freedom -- a cause it heroically defended a second time when Hitler rose to power. In April 1933, Alvin Johnson, the New School’s director, called on American intellectuals to protest the dismissal of hundreds of professors in ...

Education

On the Origins of the University in Exile

An Excerpt from “A Light in Dark Times”

February 20, 2019 • by Judith Friedlander

The New School for Social Research opened in 1919 as an act of protest. Founded in the name of academic freedom, it quickly emerged as a pioneer in adult education -- providing what its first president, Alvin Johnson, liked to call “the continuing education of the educated.” By the mid-1920s, ...

On the Origins of the University in Exile

Education

Between Ideals and Realities

An overview of the General Seminar on the legacies of the University in Exile

March 5, 2014 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Last Wednesday, on February 26th, there was a special meeting of The New School for Social Research’s General Seminar, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the University in Exile. Three faculty members and three graduate students were asked to address a foundational question: “What is the meaning of The University in ...

Education

Old School versus New School?

March 5, 2014 • by James Miller

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. In his original email to the faculty panelists, Will Milberg asked (and I quote) "what is the significance of the University in Exile for the New School of tomorrow?” (and ...

Education

Reimagining Our Institution

March 5, 2014 • by William Somerville

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. Dr. Wagner-Pacifici draws our attention to two states of event: event as particle, and as wave. Event as particle may feel more conceptually intuitive: an event has a “shape” and ...

Education

The Mission and Structure of NSSR

March 5, 2014 • by Anthony Bonen

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. The cleavage between the stated mission of NSSR and its structure is gaping. The focus of social research is necessarily on deep, long-term and perennial concepts and challenges. The parsing ...

Education

Experimentation in Tandem with Exile?

March 5, 2014 • by Janet Roitman

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. I’d like to take up Robin’s invitation to think about what exile signifies and to ask, as she does, what are the consequences of having institutionalized the very singular, exceptional, ...

Education

Exile as Event

March 5, 2014 • by Robin Wagner-Pacifici

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. I want to start with the concept of exile itself; exile understood as an event that was produced, one might even say mandated, by an Event with a capital E. ...