An earlier version of this article was posted with the headline, “The New School Returns To Roots After Decision To Commit As A Sanctuary Campus.” The New School has not declared itself a “sanctuary campus.” In March 2017, school leadership released a statement to the Sanctuary Working Group explaining why they are avoiding this language. The Board of Trustees also released a statement, in a school-wide email, expressing its commitment to international and undocumented students. The article has been updated with the correct information.
About 40 students shouted and carried signs as they filled elevators enroute to New School President David Van Zandt’s office in the 12th Street university building. They were reacting to Donald Trump’s statements to ban or deport ethnic groups he didn’t like, calling for something as old as the The New School itself: a university in exile.
“Say it loud, say it clear: Immigrants are welcome here,” the students chanted on Nov. 16.
The protest resulted in a statement given by both the president and board of trustees two weeks later confirming that The New School will serve as a safe place for those who need it most.
In the statement, Van Zandt said the school welcomes all students without regard to their citizenship status.
“This resolution includes a commitment to protect undocumented students by withholding records that may disclose citizenship status to any law enforcement authority without a court order or a legally enforceable subpoena,” Van Zandt wrote in a school-wide email.
“[A sanctuary campus] is a campus, classroom, and community experience free of hostilities, aggression, and bullying regarding immigration status, race, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation,” explained Alexandra Delano, the co-director of the university’s Zolberg Institute of Migration and Mobility in an email.
Delano, along with her colleague Miriam Ticktin and chair Jonathan Barch, as well as students of the DREAM Team at the New School, drafted a petition to Van Zandt and Provost Tim Marshall advocating for the school to commit to being a sanctuary campus.
“Nine hundred people had signed the petition as of Nov. 18th,” Delano said.
While it’s impossible to say how exactly the mercurial Trump will govern, on the campaign trail he repeatedly advocated for policies that would infringe on the rights of Muslims, immigrants from Latin America, and other minorities.
With this statement, The New School may in fact be returning to its roots, a place of refuge for intellectuals and anti-fascists.
According to Mark Larrimore, professor of religious studies at Lang who teaches a university lecture course about the history of The New School, the two founders were professors who left Columbia University and decided to start The New School.
“The two founders were historians James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard. [They] left Columbia because the patriotic demand during World War I seemed incompatible with intellectual freedom,” Larrimore said.
According to The New School for Social Research website, The New School was founded in 1919 in hopes of making a new type of higher education for adults.
“It’s called the New School and there’s a sense that we needed a kind of institution that’s structured differently from a university,” Larrimore said about the founding of the university.
According to Larrimore, the founders wanted to create an institution that was open and could feel like a place that students could come back to whenever they needed to.
“The political and social problems forced upon the country by the economic development of the past 25 years call for a new type of leadership in every field of American life,” said a 1919 document drafted by the university’s founders titled “A Proposal for An Independent School of Social Science.”
Then in the 1930s, the school started the University in Exile program. This provided a safe space for European scholars fleeing the Nazi regime. The initiative was lead by Alvin Johnson, a co-founder of The New School and managing editor of The New Republic.
“It was a risk for [Johnson] and the institution that he was leading to so obviously welcome Jewish scholars,”said Larrimore. “At that time, almost all American universities had a Jewish quota for their faculty and their students…we forget now how pervasive anti-semitism was at that point.”
Trump’s policies are not the only threats to The New School community. A few days after the election, four all-female dorm rooms filled with women of color, LGBTQ, and Jewish students woke up to swastikas drawn on their doors.
Considering the history of the school, this hate crime incident seems out of place.
“Swastikas on campus are especially jarring in a university known for welcoming Jewish refugee intellectuals in the Nazi era,” said Natalia Petrzela, a history professor at The New School.
In 1934, Charles Beard, one of the founders of The New School countered a widespread American reluctance towards anything having to do with Hitler. Beard knew that even though Hitler was only affecting Europe now, he, or someone like him would threaten the United States eventually.
“It may be said that these things are done in Europe and do not concern us in the United States. This is the most dangerous delusion of our time,” wrote Beard.
Petrzela believes that this hate crime should be a wake-up call to many on campus to remember where the school comes from and to live up to that legacy. She sees The New School’s history as a basis for establishing a sanctuary campus.
“The New School from the start was a home for people who didn’t fit into other institutions…and when that space is violated by some sort of hatred, then everybody is affected,” said Larrimore.
Despite anxieties The New School community may have about the years ahead, the university now has a chance to act as a home to many who need comfort.
Petrzela would like to see the school live up to its past, and said that though as an institution it’s imperfect, The New School should be a present-day leader for other universities.
As for what Alvin Johnson and the other founders would think of the current demand for a sanctuary campus at The New School, Larrimore said, “I’d like to think they’d be taking the lead!”