Arien Mack, Director of the New University in Exile Consortium, Reflects on Nearly 60 Years at The New School
Arien Mack, Director of the New University in Exile Consortium and Marrow Professor Emerita, joined The New School in 1966 as a professor, but she soon became a journal editor, the creator of several programs, and a staunch advocate for displaced scholars. Mack has spent nearly 60 years at The New School promoting the free exchange of ideas—from editing Social Research: An International Quarterly to launching the New University in Exile to creating Endangered Scholars Worldwide and the Journal Donation Project.
In 1970, just four years after coming to the university, she was selected “by luck,” she says, to become the editor of Social Research. Fifty-four years later, she is stepping down as the longest-serving editor of The New School for Social Research’s (NSSR) flagship journal, having published more than 200 issues for readers in more than 100 countries. At the 50-year mark into her editorship, she spoke with Public Seminar, describing her time with the journal. Mack credits former NSSR faculty member Hannah Arendt with persuading her to accept the offer to serve as editor. “Hannah Arendt, who was then on the faculty, came to visit me in my office. She encouraged me to take the position, telling me that it would change my life. And she was certainly right about that.”
While it might have been luck that initially got her the editor position, Mack made her own luck by creating several long-lasting programs that expanded the journal’s reach and impact both in the United States and abroad. Mack created the Social Research conference series as a way to attract a broader pool of contributors to the journal and to pay them. “I got the idea to do these large multi-day public conferences, because it enabled me to ask people who were very distinguished and would be wonderful authors for the journal, and whom I could offer a modest honorarium from money I raised through grants from various foundations,” says Mack.
“Preceding the conferences, when I was first editing the journal, the journal routinely had 9 to 12 papers at 20 to 25 pages each in an issue. It occurred to me that if, for every issue—that’s four issues a year—I had to invite 12 different authors, it would be very hard to do. I’d go nuts. It occurred to me that it would be easier to do if I had a theme, let’s say Politics and Comedy, which was actually one of the conferences. Then I could invite people around that theme and it would also become easier to find contributors.”
A research psychologist by training, Mack also found that editing the journal provided a way to connect more deeply with colleagues at The New School. “I work in an area that’s really a ‘sciencey’ part of psychology, and therefore had very little overlap with the rest of the NSSR faculty, then called the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. Editing the journal allowed me to connect with the faculty in a way I couldn’t when I just had my own lab and did my own work. I was very invested in my research, but this provided a whole new arena. I’ve always been very grateful for the opportunity because it was fun. It was a burden too, but it was fun—intellectual fun. Who gets to have that?”
Mack spent more than 50 years with the journal, but it’s far from the only significant impact she made outside of the classroom. Drawing on her connections with academics around the world, she became a keen advocate for displaced scholars and artists and the free exchange of ideas and created the Journal Donation Project, Endangered Scholars Worldwide, and the New University in Exile Consortium.
The idea for the Journal Donation Project came from traveling with a Hungarian dissident who had not been able to teach during the period of Communist rule. “We were traveling together when news of the Berlin Wall coming down was broadcast, and he told me that we don’t need democracy seminars; what we need is books and journals that we haven’t been able to get for 45 years during the Communist regime. It occurred to me I could write to journal editors I knew and ask them if they’d be willing to donate subscriptions to university research libraries in eastern Europe. That’s what started the Journal Donation Project. It became a major source of subscriptions, all supported through grants, not only for universities that had been under government control about what could and couldn’t be read, but also for countries in places like sub-Saharan Africa that didn’t have the money to subscribe to journals. The university president at that time, Jonathan Fanton, was very supportive. It was a wonderful opportunity.”
The founding of Endangered Scholars Worldwide arose from work with a colleague at Milano. “I started this program because of an Iranian American colleague who helped me plan a trip to Iran for the Journal Donation Project; we had the idea of providing journals to Iranian libraries. This was during the Bill Clinton presidential administration, and it took almost a year to get permission to go. That colleague later went back to live in Iran, and within a few years, he was arrested and imprisoned for two very long periods of time. I became very engaged in campaigning for his release. It was his arrest and imprisonment that led me to start Endangered Scholars Worldwide,a website that publicizes attacks on academic freedom, and ultimately led to the launching of the New University in Exile Consortium.”
Mack established the New University in Exile Consortium (NUIEC) in 2018 to follow in the tradition of the university’s original University in Exile, which was created in 1933 to serve as a haven for mainly Jewish endangered scholars from Germany and France. Today the NUIEC is an expanding group of universities and colleges that support the idea that the academic community has both the responsibility and the capacity to assist persecuted and endangered scholars everywhere and to protect the intellectual capital that is jeopardized when universities and scholars come under assault. “The New University in Exile Consortium has 70 universities worldwide, and we support over 200 displaced, threatened scholar members. We’ve also raised money to bring ten Afghan artists to The New School as part of the University in Exile for Afghan Artists, a collaboration between the NUIEC and the Artistic Freedom Initiative. This year, we had a hand in bringing three Palestinian undergraduate and graduate students to The New School.
“I’m grateful that I’ve had all these years to edit the journal. I was able to get to know the most interesting intellectuals and academics in the West. That was an enormous privilege, and it made my life at The New School extremely interesting.”