NSSR Europe
The New School for Social Research – Europe
It was in late July of 2014, during the final two days of the 23rd annual Democracy & Diversity Institute, that a sizable group of the Institute’s alumni — representatives of a much larger NSSR/TCDS community now living and working in Europe — joined us in Wroclaw. They were an impressive and accomplished assemblage: people who teach at excellent universities run major research and educational projects, direct publishing houses and non-governmental organizations, and in some cases serve in the parliaments and governments of their respective countries.
The idea of returning to the Institute, which for them represents the New School for Social Research, came from their shared sense of an ethical and intellectual crisis facing academics in Europe and beyond. Drawing on the ethos of the University in Exile, and their own New School experience, and the conviction that especially in dark times universities carry a special responsibility vis-à-vis society, they considered in two intensive working sessions both the mounting problems and possible ways to address them. (TCDS is also about this kind of responsibility: without it, we are not worthy of the name.)
The outcome of the debate was distilled in their final statement, known as the Wroclaw Declaration, which calls into being the “NSSR-Europe” initiative, an intellectually engaged microcosm of the New School for Social Research within the new post-cold-war Europe. You can read the full text of the NSSR Europe declaration on our website here, and you can sign it online here.
