Welcome to the Start of the New Academic Year
A Message from Joel Towers, President and University Professor
Welcome to the first day of classes for the 2024-25 academic year!
At a design conference in 1972, the architect Louis Kahn remarked: “I love beginnings. I marvel at beginnings. I think it is beginning that confirms continuation.”
Kahn had an often elliptical style of speaking. Ideas would circle back on themselves without ever quite returning to the same place. “Beginning confirms continuation” just as the fall arrives with a new academic year. It is a start, but not for the first time. It is a new beginning and, at the same time, a continuation of life-long learning. Even if this is your first semester at the university, it is not your first autumn, nor your first beginning. And if you are returning to The New School for another year, if you are continuing, it is also a beginning. Celebrate this new start. Honor the lessons of the past by seeking deep and new knowledge that may carry you further along a path or offer a change in direction.
This fall, we welcome nearly 3000 new students, who join their peers on our campuses in New York and Paris. Altogether, our students represent 100 nations and 51 U.S. states and territories. The New School is a community drawn together by a passion for learning, making, and performing. We are artists, designers, musicians, writers, scholars, actors, innovators, business leaders, policymakers, and practitioners of emergent fields that defy categorization. Look around, engage this beautiful mosaic, and enliven this community. It is your community. It is our community.
I wish you all the best on this first day and in the year to come.