Welcome to the Start of the Academic Year
A Message from Joel Towers, President and University Professor
Welcome to the first day of classes for the 2025-26 academic year!
This year marks 22 trips around the sun for me at The New School and the beginning of my second year serving as President. I am deeply honored and humbled to be leading the university at this critical time. Each new year brings excitement and possibility, along with novel challenges from which we somehow craft opportunity. But one thing remains consistent: the start of a new semester is a time of renewal and joy.
Over the past week, I’ve had the privilege of welcoming new students to campus, meeting parents, talking with new faculty, and reconnecting with others who have been working on research, creative practice, and the preparation of their courses. In addition, more than a hundred faculty and staff dedicated significant portions of their time between graduation in the spring and today digging deep into the future of the university. I am deeply grateful to them for their dedication and innovative spirit as we remake The New School and education for the 21st Century. This will be an exciting and transformative year!
I hope many of you will join us tomorrow for the first university-wide Convocation since 2010. We have restarted this tradition as one way to mark the beginning of the year and, through the “Aims of Education” address, introduce critical issues that will spark research, reflection, and engagement across the year. Convocation will take place in the Auditorium at 66 W 12th Street from 3:30-4:30pm followed by the annual Block Party on 12th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues from 4:30-7:30pm.
This fall, we welcome more than 3100 new students, who join their peers on our campuses in New York and Paris. Altogether, our students represent 115 nations and 50 U.S. states and territories. The New School is a community drawn together by a passion for learning, creating, 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 hope you will take full advantage of the coming year and get to know our extraordinary faculty, dedicated staff, and amazing students. The months ahead will be filled with adventure, excitement, and the vibrant life of our university—including our many public programs, campus organizations and their activities, and other opportunities to collaborate, build relationships, and experience the very best of The New School. Please also watch for a welcome message from Provost Kessler, his first in his new role at the university.
I wish you all the best on this first day and in the year to come.