When Lang history professor Oz Frankel woke up the news of Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton on Wednesday Nov. 9 he realized his upcoming New School course ‘Donald Trump as History’ might need a new name and may be more important than ever.
Lang history department’s ‘Donald Trump as History’ class, taught by Oz Frankel, will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1:50 to 3:30 p.m. The class will track the Trump presidential campaign’ journey from him sliding to the top of the Republican ticket to the winning of the 2016 election on Nov. 8.
“This was designed before the election so there is a bit of wishful thinking in the title. My hope is that by tomorrow he will become part of history,” Frankel told The New School Free Press Monday- the day before the election.
When asked his opinion the morning after the election, Frankel said, “As many of us I am still grappling with last night’s news. It hasn’t been easy…. As for my seminar, I may have to reconsider the title, unfortunately.”
He came up with the idea for the class when the Trump phenomenon got to a point where it was overwhelming confusing and intriguing at the same time. He originally planned to teach a different history class in the spring but the university allowed him to switch.
“On the one hand we say that Trump is unprecedented, there’s no history, we never had someone like that, he’s the disruptor, he’s the Joker from Batman. On the other hand there’s sometimes frantic attempts to situate him historically, to find the president, whether it’s the Mussolini or Richard III … to think and try to find some continuity,” Frankel said.
Frankel is under the impression that the vast majority of New School students share a dislike of Trump. However, because of the progressive edge of both the school and faculty, Frankel is afraid people who take the course and feel differently won’t speak up.
“I think that amongst students, they don’t understand what’s going on because it is baffling and just embarrassing,” said Frankel who has been working in Lang’s history department since 2001. He is from Israel but now resides in Brooklyn.
The class is not about condemning Trump for his racist and misogynistic rhetoric, Frankel said. It’s about thinking more generally and thematically about him through the lens of American history.
“Trump will follow the course. He’s really not the focus. We aren’t going to read lots of biographies and try to understand the man from within, ” Frankel said.
The first thing on the agenda is to frame everything in a historical context. Frankel plans to take into account the events of the last year such as the primaries and what has happened with the two parties, but then looking at a wider frame, thinking about things that happened in the last 20 to 30 years. He hopes to focus on showing the students the familiar themes that Trump is reassembled throughout the election season. These themes include paranoia, nostalgia, spectacle and the marriage of politics and entertainment.
“I won’t give my students the ultimate definition of what’s going on in part because it’s still going on, we actually don’t know what’s the end of the story,” Frankel said.
When asked about what he thought Trump would think of the class he replied “Most likely he won’t appreciate it and that would make me very happy.”
Illustration by: Jimmy Ramirez
Julia is the current Senior Photo Editor for the Free Press. She is in her senior year at Parsons, majoring in Photography and minoring in Art History. Julia is originally from Boston and is patiently awaiting her return there after college. She is a wiener dog and pizza enthusiast and finds herself most at home when she is near the ocean.
