A Message from President Towers: Welcome to the Start of the Spring 2025 Semester
A month ago, as we crossed the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun started to chart a path across the sky that was a little higher with each passing day. In two months we will mark the equinox as winter transitions to spring. As the daily cycle of news, politics, personal sorrows and joys unfurls, I often find it helpful to ground myself in the larger rhythms of life. Doing so offers some perspective even if the frigid cold of this January day makes spring seem far away.
The days between the end of the fall semester and the start of this new spring term have offered me a chance to reflect on the future of the university. Meetings with the Provost, Deans, Faculty, and Staff throughout the fall have further advanced plans that have been emerging through the academic core work, strategic planning, and the many community meetings I have held with students and the Board over the past six months. I look forward to continuing that work apace as the semester unfolds.
In my communications with you over the past months, I have often begun with a rereading of our history. I do this to honor and understand where we have come from and to be inspired by where we may go next. Today I am starting from the very beginning.
The original idea for The New School was drafted sometime around 1918 as World War I was coming to a close. A group of scholars and education reformers gathered in a building on Madison Avenue near 39th Street to draw up a proposal for what they called “An Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women.” In the aftermath of the first global war, the committee’s goal was the establishment of a university for research and teaching that would address the profound challenges confronting the United States. Their focus was national, even as they recognized “the growing complexity and significance of international relations – commercial and diplomatic” that underscored the need for what they described as “a new type of leadership in every field of American life.” The New School they imagined was founded in 1919 and, to this day, remains true to the mission of breaking free from the constraints and norms of higher education to advance the creation of new knowledge and its application to the most pressing issues of our time.
The New School today educates approximately 9,000 students a year at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral level. Parsons School of Design (founded 1896) joined The New School in 1970 and was followed in 1989 by Mannes College of Music (founded 1916). The University in Exile (Graduate Faculty/NSSR), Lang College, Jazz, Drama, Milano, all emerged from the original New School that would later add Media Studies, Creative Writing, and the first adult bachelor’s degrees through the GI-Bill in support of returning veterans from World War II. With these constituent parts, today we are a comprehensive university whose teaching, research, scholarship, and creative practices include fine art, design, music, performance, the social sciences, liberal arts, management, urban and environmental policy, international affairs, creative writing, media studies, and adult and life-long learning.
From humble beginnings a century ago to a leading university with the top-ranked art and design school in the country, The New School has made and remade itself for its time, creating new pathways for higher education. Each generation of The New School has asked: what is the role of the university today? The answer lies in identifying the places and spaces in society that higher education is uniquely positioned to advance, and what is required of the university—any university—to better serve that role.
Today, a series of cross-cutting multidisciplinary themes establish a kind of field-condition for the university, leading to a series of foundational questions. In an age of artificial intelligence and the rapid expansion of digital tools, communication platforms, and industrial technologies, what kind of learning and knowledge is required to direct these transformative capacities toward social and environmental good? Similarly, in a time of global climate change, energy transitions, increasingly catastrophic storms, fires, and heatwaves, biodiversity loss, and the likelihood for displacement creating waves of climate migration of people seeking refuge, what kind of innovative design, policy, technology, and knowledge solutions will be necessary to create a just and resilient transition to a climate resilient future? How will universities deepen their capacity to house the robust ecosystem of ideas and diversity of opinions and experiences that make them the ideal place to educate the next generation of leaders for an increasingly urbanized and culturally diverse world? What is the role of a 21st-century university in preserving and advancing a 21st-century democracy?
As we design The New School for our time, these university-wide themes touch every part of our teaching, pedagogy, scholarship, and creative practice. They describe a shared ground that the colleges and programs occupy, each in their own way. Climate, Cities, Diversity, and Technology are not the domain of any one discipline alone nor are they silos unto themselves. They are the water we are swimming in, and our capacity to see and respond to them through our creative work, learning, and scholarship will be the measure of our success as a university for today and the future. This semester I will be working to advance these intersecting themes across the university. I look forward to your collaboration and engagement in that work!
I wish you the best for a creative and successful spring semester!