A seminar hosted last week asked whether The New School could call itself ‘progressive’.  

“Progressive is a term we use all the time…what does it mean to us?” event host and Associate Professor of Religion and Chair and Departmental Faculty Advisor of Liberal Arts, Mark Larrimore said during the event.

“To our founders, a progressive university was an oxymoron,” said Julia Foulkes, Professor of History at the New School for Public Engagement.

The seminar was a part of the General Seminar event series and was open to and attended by New School staff, faculty, and students, as well as University President Joel Towers. Julia Foulkes and Larrimore were invited by the dean of NSSR, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, to host the discussion.

“Everyone who appeals to what’s been in our DNA since the founding tells a different story than what our research suggests. The fact is, the school has been opportunistic, changing our content, our form, our purpose, in the face of new realities,” Foulkes said.

In recent years, The New School has been criticized for failing to live up to its commitment to “ensuring an equitable, inclusive, and socially just environment for all students, staff, and faculty.” 

Multiple labor strikes and the Board of Trustees’ decision not to divest from its Israeli ties have garnered intense criticism from the community. 

“I would never want to tag that word [progressive] with one meaning…[Divestment’s] certainly an action that I think is an important one for the university community to discuss, but I wouldn’t hang the word progressive on that,” Foulkes told the Free Press. 

TNS has long struggled to hold up to its liberal values, as the hosts recounted. 

Up until the early 2000s, New School faculty and staff of color were largely working on either short-term or nonrenewable plans. “Most staff were people of color, including security guards, who at that point were being stiffed by a subcontracting firm that paid them a pittance and offered them no benefits,” Larrimore said.

The speakers also recounted the New School’s history of self-censorship. During the Second Red Scare, the university covered portraits of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin.

“The covering of the Lenin and Stalin parts of the mural is perhaps a kind of metaphor for how the university responded overall during that moment. It did say, ‘we don’t really want to talk about it,” Foulkes said. 

With a new Trump-era reality, attendees questioned how the school would respond to the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion — and orders to cut federal funding grantees who provide or advance DEI programs, services, or activities.  

Towers was prompted to answer. “I actually think it’s exactly the time to be leaning into our values, and there will be lots of pressure on us… in this moment, and we have to be really, really strategic about when we stand out and why we stand out,” Towers said.

Foulkes told the Free Press she agreed the university needed to stand up for its beliefs. “What we have to convince people about in this moment is of the worth of education and the worth of critical thinking and the worth of controversial conversations; That we have to commit ourselves to that, even more so now, because of what we face,” she said. 

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