A Message from President Joel Towers: Beginnings
A Message from Joel Towers, President and University Professor
As I start my first day as the 10th President of The New School, I offer my sincere thanks to Interim President Donna Shalala for her leadership over the past year. I would also like to share some thoughts about our university, the opportunities ahead of us, and how they relate to the challenges of the times in which we live. Let me begin, however, with some personal reflections.
Arriving on campus this morning, I experienced a profound sense of gratitude. I am deeply thankful and truly humbled by the trust that has been placed in me to lead this institution at a time of significant change. I have been given a rare gift: the opportunity to see anew a place I have called home for twenty years. Today I am asked, as I have asked so many students before, to shift perspective, to see from a new vantage point, and to be open to new possibility, growth, and change. I find myself mining the palimpsest that records my journeys over two decades at The New School and drawing on those experiences to chart a new way forward. With a sense of excitement, respect, and a deep bow to the intelligence, ingenuity, integrity, and resilience of The New School community, I see that pathway as one that honors and learns from the many histories that have shaped our university today while affording the creation of new stories that will allow us to thrive in the future.
Our task, as an institution intent on writing the next chapter of our history, begins with a recognition of the most consequential challenges facing society today and the university’s role in confronting them. In many ways, this is the same challenge the founders of The New School saw for themselves. As Professors Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore have chronicled in their 2020 book, Realizing The New School: Lessons From The Past:
“…the creators of what would become The New School for Social Research called for a rethinking of what higher education could be. Universities were hamstrung by backward-looking legacies and structures, both institutional and intellectual. Education needed to be put in service of solving current-day problems. The new world opened up by World War I, urbanization, the labor movement, and women’s suffrage demanded an education attuned to an ever-unfolding human story…”
In 1919 a new institution emerged that was influenced by John Dewey’s radical aims of education—his belief that the content of study must be connected to the context of the time in which it exists. This notion of “the integration of life and subjects” became part of the foundational ethos of The New School. That new approach, including a commitment to the pragmatic role of education in supporting the growth of more progressive and just social and economic systems, an emergent democracy, and “learning by doing,” all remain relevant today. As a framework for our future, it points to a re-embrace of The New School’s mission with a renewed focus on the challenges of our time.
How The New School responds to the shifting nature of education and the crosscurrents of the social, environmental, political, and economic forces shaping the first quarter of the 21st century will define pathways for students and the institution for decades to come. Other universities face similar choices. The imperative for change in higher education is strong; the capacity for it less so. The New School, however, is uniquely positioned to lead the way forward on the most critical issues of our time through our longstanding excellence in innovative teaching, research, scholarship, and creative practice. In a landscape of profound political, social, and intellectual polarization, declining democratic norms, accelerating technological transformation, and an overarching climate crisis, The New School stands ready to offer alternatives and solutions.
Simply put, The New School was made for this moment in history. The question before us is: do we have the courage to make the changes necessary to create our future? I firmly believe we do.
A New School education promises profoundly relevant learning for a world in rapid transition. Our success in continuing to redefine the university will allow us to attract new generations of bold and ambitious students, to provide them with an unparalleled and highly relevant educational experience and help them to succeed—both at The New School and beyond it. Our work will also position the university for significant endowment growth and partnerships that will begin to address the precarity of our economic condition. But we must not underestimate the magnitude of the challenge. We face considerable headwinds, including the ongoing spatial, social, and technological transformations that have accelerated during the COVID years, budgetary challenges, under-resourced strengths and ambitions, unaddressed issues of equity, inclusion, and social justice, and an institutional structure that harkens to our past rather than our future.
As President, I will commit all my energies to confronting these challenges and working with you to solve them. Together, we must summon the institutional courage and build the conditions for collaboration that will remake The New School as our history would suggest and the times we live in demand. That university, our university, dedicated and focused on how to live in this new present, will be a resilient institution long into the future.
So we begin.