As a longstanding devotee of “the arts,” I’ve written off organized sports teams since the sixth grade. I tolerated soccer and field hockey because I thought nothing was cooler than a uniform with my name on it, but that allure waned quickly along with my patience for mouthguards. By high school, I was an embittered artist watching my peers obtain Ivy League tickets in the form of sports scholarships. Obviously, the recipients were phenomenal athletes, but I wouldn’t have minded a “You’ve Been In Six Musicals” scholarship to Yale. When I first arrived at The New School, I was determined to devote my time to non-sporty exercise like yoga and to my crafts. Now in my fourth year, still searching for a way to clear my mind while avoiding an $80 monthly gym membership, I joined The New School Cross Country Team.
Among The New School community, there were two distinct reactions to mentions of my unforeseen athleticism. The first was one of genuine surprise (“What?! We have a Cross Country team?!” etc.) from professors and freshmen. The second was “The Snarky, I’m-Too-Cool-To-Like-Anything” disbelief from my fellow upperclassmen. To be fair, I never acknowledged the existence of New School athletics until this year. Athletics is something I had pegged as “normal college stuff” that didn’t belong at my progressive, urban art school. I’m not challenging “The Snarky, I’m-Too-Cool-To-Like-Anything” disbelief, but I do not condone its subsequent complaint: “We have no community at this school.” If I had a dime for every time I heard that, I could pay my tuition in full. In fact, on the spectrum of Favorite Things To Bitch About At The New School, I think it falls somewhere between whining about how much work we have and hating Miley Cyrus. Needless to say, we have exhausted both those topics.
Since joining the Cross Country team, I feel the need to defend our community more than ever. The group of people in Narwhal attire are the solid foundation upon which I now power through my days — their energy and spirit inspires me far beyond the pavement on which we train. We have freshman, seniors, undergrads, PhD candidates, rookies and champions, and no one segregates themselves based on age, division, or talent. As a result, our community is not only very much existent, it is powerful. Perhaps this is the athletic camaraderie that I wrote off so long ago, but I’d venture to say that it has more to do with people dedicating themselves to something other than their own private passions. It exemplifies a necessary element of any community: member’s willingness to engage.
Parsons senior Cody Pumper agrees. “Community is what you make it. I don’t go around looking for friends, but between my job at the Office of Admission and the people in my classes, I have both.”
The college community perhaps begets certain attributes. Nearly twice a day, for example, I get emails from both Lang and Parsons with a list of at least 7 different things happening on and around campus. Arnhold Hall’s lobby bulletin board is an infamous dumping ground for club sign-ups, internship opportunities, lost hard-drive signs, event invitations, and more. There are town hall meetings once a month where we can voice anything we want to the president and provost of our school. We have award-winning publications, incredible theater productions, dance showcases, music performances, and art shows. The only difference between a typical college and ours, it seems, is that a large majority of our students don’t go to anything, though they simultaneously crave and reject the over-enthused participation that other schools propagate.
Such is the ongoing identity crisis of The New School, and New York City is partially culpable. Lang sophomore Sienna Fekete is actively involved, but thinks that some students simply are too busy with glittering Manhattan to participate on the same level as other college communities.
“If we were in a humdrum town in Rhode Island where there’s nothing to do, it’d be a different story,” she said. “But community is something that manifests itself as a part of the things you involve yourself with.”
Recent Lang/Parsons graduate Erik Freer, didn’t mind the disconnect that New York provides.
“I never felt bound by the physical walls of a campus, so I often interacted with people outside of New School, which provided me with creative impetus,” he says.
Despite such logic, the verbal negation of community is contagious. Impressionable freshmen observe disenchanted upperclassmen complaints and adopt similarly cynical views to stay afloat in our endless abyss of “hip.” It’s like community never gets a shot. Do we oppose it out of laziness? A genuine fear that we might actually like our school? Because being an isolated New Yorker is cool? We came here because we wanted something that didn’t feel forced or fake or just like another round of high school, yet we’ve become so concentrated on pushing back against what we believe is counterfeit community that we’re frustrated by our own.
There is (and has always been) a community at The New School for those willing to participate in it. No one is going to hold our hands while we try to discover who we are, including the administration. The students who are so quick to criticize our community should examine how much effort they’ve put into trying to build one of their own. If not, haters gon hate, and the Narwhals don’t really care.
Stephanie Leone studies Fiction writing and Poetry at Lang and Communication Design at Parsons. God willing, she will graduate by Spring 2015. She has an unhealthy obsession with well-designed books, shoes, and Patti Smith. She hopes New York City will love her forever.
