Mark Larrimore, Author at Public Seminar

The New School

A Sanctuary from Double Betrayal

What The New School could do for its students from China

June 28, 2021 • by Mark Larrimore and Lei Ping

_____ The New School has one of the most international student bodies of American universities, including students from many Asian countries. Asian international students are celebrated among the graduates and alumnae/i, especially of Parsons School of Design, but while studying here they often find curricula that marginalize their traditions and ignore ...

The New School

Realizing The New School

A downloadable collection of essays documents lessons from the past as a university looks to its future

September 10, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

A century later, the experiment has become an institution, one different in almost every way from the one originally proposed. Psychology and the arts quickly redefined what “social research” could be. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and the rise of fascism inspired The New School’s president to establish a ...

History

The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

June 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

Alvin Johnson is the leading man in the history of The New School. He saved it from financial failure again and again and again; he attracted intellectuals to its faculty, most auspiciously those fleeing fascist Europe in the 1930 and 40s and he persuaded artists such as Thomas Hart Benton ...

The New School

Hanging in Union Square

H. T. Tsiang and the New School

May 28, 2020 • by Mark Larrimore

Among the challenges facing the New School in the coming years will be navigating the increasingly charged relationship between the United States and China. Links with students and partners in China are a significant part of the life of the New School, but not our institutional storytelling. To counter likely ...

The New School

The New School’s Secular Faiths

At a progressive institution, religion hid in plain sight

December 20, 2019 • by Mark Larrimore

From its earliest days, a fraught engagement with religion characterizes The New School -- a school conceived just as Max Weber was delivering his lecture “Science as a Vocation.” If it was pioneeringly secular from its beginnings, as it has been glibly suggested, this is not because The New School has ...

The New School

Listening to The New School

Why podcasts?

October 3, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

At the time we began this project, we also began work on a series of podcasts (available here). Our engagement with New School history already spans multiple genres -- a website, an exhibition, all manner of talks and the current seminar here -- in its effort to invite more and more ...

Multi Media

New Histories

A new three-part podcast on the histories of The New School

September 29, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

Episode 1: A Place to Go for Adult Values The centenary of The New School offers a chance to look at a university that began as an educational experiment and critique of higher education. Nothing has changed more than the school’s shift away from its original mission as a school devoted ...

Education

The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College

100 years in, the New School’s experimental ethos lives on

September 12, 2019 • by 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 ...

The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College

Education

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Anatole Broyard at The New School

April 16, 2019 • by Mark Larrimore

Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. … All the courses I took were about what's wrong: what's wrong with our government, with the family, with interpersonal relations ...

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Feature

How to Mark a Centennial

Telling the Story of the New School at 100

January 28, 2019 • by Mark Larrimore

“In 1896, a minor event occurred in New York’s art world that would, in time, transform American art education.” So began the sample script sent to 60 Minutes by the consultant hired to help make the upcoming centennial an event of national significance. CBS didn’t bite, and the proposed segment never ...

Feature

Are the Arts a Critical Facet of Social Research?

At The New School, artists have shaped the institution’s agenda

November 14, 2018 • by Mark Larrimore

This vertical is called New School Histories not just because there is an embarrassment of riches, but because these legacies don’t all fit into one story. A case in point is the extraordinary and unplanned efflorescence of the arts at The New School in the 1920s and 1930s. The school’s first slate ...

Are the Arts a Critical Facet of Social Research?

Feature

Exiled Knowledge Salvaged for World Use

The histories hidden in the New School’s digital archives

October 10, 2018 • by Mark Larrimore

The histories of an iconoclastic institution aren’t easy to trace. The New School has always been diffuse, porous and underfunded. Until recently, The New School didn’t even have an archive. So the fifty-seven volumes of publicity scrapbooks maintained by a clipping service for the school’s first several decades -- and ...