A Light in Dark Times

The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile

Judith Friedlander

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231542579
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The New School for Social Research opened in 1919 as an act of protest. Founded in the name of academic freedom, it quickly emerged as a pioneer in adult education—providing what its first president, Alvin Johnson, liked to call "the continuing education of the educated." By the mid-1920s, the New School had become the place to go to hear leading figures lecture on politics and the arts and recent developments in new fields of inquiry, such as anthropology and psychoanalysis. Then in 1933, after Hitler rose to power, Johnson created the University in Exile within the New School. Welcoming nearly two hundred refugees, Johnson, together with these exiled scholars, defiantly maintained the great traditions of Europe's imperiled universities.

Judith Friedlander reconstructs the history of the New School in the context of ongoing debates over academic freedom and the role of education in liberal democracies. Against the backdrop of World War I and the first red scare, the rise of fascism and McCarthyism, the student uprisings during the Vietnam War and the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe, Friedlander tells a dramatic story of intellectual, political, and financial struggle through illuminating sketches of internationally renowned scholars and artists. These include, among others, Charles A. Beard, John Dewey, José Clemente Orozco, Robert Heilbroner, Hannah Arendt, and Ágnes Heller. Featured prominently as well are New School students, trustees, and academic leaders. As the New School prepares to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary, A Light in Dark Times offers a timely reflection on the legacy of this unique institution, which has boldly defended dissident intellectuals and artists in the United States and overseas.

PART I

A School of Social Research

(1919–1933)

1

THE FIRST FOUNDING MOMENT

The New School opened with “éclat” on February 10, 1919, bursting onto Manhattan’s cultural scene with an exciting program of Preliminary Lectures delivered by leading social scientists of the day.¹ A full set of courses would follow in October. As Alvin Johnson described it in his autobiography, “Every liberal in the city was excited by the novel venture of an institution headed by…such dynamic figures as James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard.” Fiercely committed to academic freedom, these widely acclaimed historians had already caused a media sensation by resigning from Columbia University. “Self-disfrocked from…conventional academic life,” they turned their backs on New York’s most prestigious educational institution after the university’s trustees fired two pacifist professors who had continued to campaign against taking up arms after the United States had entered the Great War.²

The fired professors were James McKeen Cattell, a nationally renowned psychologist, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, a young literary scholar and grandson of the poet. Neither man had any illusions about what would happen to him if he persisted in speaking out. Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, had made things perfectly clear in a widely circulated speech delivered on June 6, 1917, during a commencement luncheon for students who were graduating that year:

What had been tolerated before was intolerable now. What had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason…. [T]here is and will be no place in Columbia University, either on the rolls of its faculties or on the rolls of its students for any person who opposes or who counsels opposition to the effective enforcement of the laws of the United States, or who acts, speaks, or writes treason.³

Beard and Robinson were not pacifists; on the contrary, they fully supported America’s decision to enter the war. But they refused to remain at Columbia or affiliate with any other academic institution that fired colleagues who disagreed. Now, in the winter of 1919, admiring New Yorkers were rushing down to Chelsea in lower Manhattan to take courses with the two historians and other members of the New School’s star-studded faculty, all of them known for their bold ideas and firm commitment to academic freedom.

Two weeks after the New School opened, Beard wrote to his good friend Lucy Salmon, a professor of history at Vassar College, describing triumphantly how he and his colleagues were going to “unhorse the autocrats who are blocking the advancement of learning in American institutions!”⁴ In another letter to Salmon, he described himself as “a man with a six-shooter in each boot.”⁵ The economist Wesley Clair Mitchell used similar language as he tried to capture the excitement of the moment.

Like Beard and Robinson, Mitchell too had left Columbia—at least temporarily—to join the new venture. Twenty years later, while reminiscing about his decision to do so, Mitchell spoke of the rapid-fire exchange he had had with Johnson in 1918 that persuaded him to perform his “civic duty” by joining the faculty of the New School. The two men, Mitchell explained, had settled their “moral issues on the spot, with a six-shooter, after the best traditions of the old West, in which both of us had been dipped”⁶—of the old Middle West, to be more precise, which still looked like the wild frontier during the last quarter of the nineteenth century when he and Johnson were growing up.

Mitchell’s allusion to their gunslinging past was not entirely in jest. He did not want anyone to forget that he and Johnson hailed from the other side of the Appalachians. People might associate them—and rightly so—with New York’s circle of progressive intellectuals, but the two men grew up in homes on the open prairie that had little in common with those of the scions of East Coast families, whose names had made their group so famous.

Nor were they the only ones. Their circle of progressive intellectuals had attracted other midwesterners as well, several of whom became founding members of the New School: Beard, like Mitchell, was from Illinois; Johnson, from Nebraska; Robinson, from Indiana; Thorstein Veblen, from Wisconsin. And they were proud of it, as they reminded their readers now and again with a folksy aside—the cornier the better. Although most of them came east to study and settled down in New York, they still enjoyed seeing themselves as cowboys ambling into town, loaded with arguments they were ready to fire at anyone who stood in the way of social reform and academic freedom.

Thorstein Veblen was the sharpest shooter of them all, and the most infamous after he published The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899—a wicked satire on the economic and social behavior of wealthy Americans. Among the economist’s other books was The Higher Learning in America, an extended essay aimed mercilessly at university presidents and boards of trustees. Appearing in bookstores a few months before the New School opened, this slender volume made a timely case for abandoning “conventional academic life” and building something radically new.

In The Higher Learning in America, Veblen called on colleagues at universities across the country to rebel in precisely the way the founders of the New School were doing: seize control of an educational institution, do away with the office of the president (“the academic executive”), and minimize the role of the board of trustees (“the board of governors”). Several members of the New School’s organizing committee had been publishing articles along the same lines in The New Republic and other liberal periodicals, but Veblen’s rhetoric was the most explosive:

As seen from the point of view of the higher learning, the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate;…the governing board, in so far as it presumes to exercise any other than vacantly perfunctory duties, has the same value and should with advantage be lost in the same shuffle.⁷

The problem, Veblen explained, was structural, not personal. It had less to do with the way one individual ran a particular institution than with the widespread practice by university trustees of appointing academic leaders to protect the political and economic interests of their own social class. Leaders, in other words, who prevented reform-minded professors from taking initiatives that might threaten the status quo.

Structural, not personal? In theory yes, but the examples Veblen gave to support his arguments drew on the exploits of a specific academic leader and his board of governors, an individual so famous that he did not have to name names and risk being sued for libel. Everyone recognized Nicholas Murray Butler in Veblen’s masterful “dissection of the species’ most pernicious traits.”⁸

Butler responded in kind. Without naming names either, he described Veblen and his New School comrades as “a little bunch of disgruntled liberals setting up a tiny fly-by-night radical counterfeit of education.”⁹ Columbia’s president, we know, had scores to settle with two other members of the founding faculty (Beard and Robinson), both of whom had caused him and the university a great deal of embarrassment by resigning in protest. And that was not all. Butler was still digesting the fact that his distinguished economist, Wesley Clair Mitchell, had taken a leave of absence to help launch the New School and his best-known philosopher, John Dewey, had chastised the trustees in The New York Times right after Beard resigned—doing so not only in the name of a renowned member of Columbia’s faculty, but as the founding president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and author in 1915 of the association’s “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.”¹⁰ Finally, although Dewey never took a leave of absence the way Mitchell did to join the New School, his name appeared on the faculty list in 1919–1920.

Butler expected this “fly-by-night counterfeit” of an institution to fold quickly. And it probably would have had Johnson not taken over in 1922 when Beard and Robinson abandoned their new venture in higher education. Although finances remained rocky after the two men resigned, the New School, under Johnson, mounted a popular new program in continuing education with a singularly New York feel about it. A curious development, some might say, given the faculty. But perhaps that was the point. In a city famous for the geographic and ethnic diversity of its residents, the New School offered students the opportunity to study with scholars and artists who came from different parts of the country and overseas, just like the people they met on the street and read about in Horace Kallen’s essays on cultural pluralism.

Although foreign visitors and immigrants had been teaching at the New School from the very beginning, their numbers increased significantly under Johnson. The proud son of Danish immigrants, he was well on his way toward creating an international faculty by the early 1930s, with scholars and artists not only from Europe, but from Latin America. Among them were the muralists José Clemente Orozco from Mexico and Camilo Egas from Ecuador, who together with the American Thomas Hart Benton paid tribute to the institution’s commitment to cultural pluralism on the walls of the New School’s new building, itself the achievement of the Austrian architect Joseph Urban. Then when Hitler rose to power in 1933, Johnson turned his intellectual predilection into a political imperative.

In 2009, as the New School celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the University in Exile, the political scientist Ira Katznelson marked the occasion in his keynote address by comparing what he called the two “founding moments” in the history of the New School: 1919 and 1933. A much-admired scholar of American politics and history, Katznelson served as dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science in the 1980s, during what some New School colleagues now call the third founding moment.¹¹ Katznelson’s use of this evocative term brings to mind the kinds of landmark events scholars usually refer to when they speak of founding moments—political acts “that break ties with the ancien régime and lay the foundation for the establishment of modern states”¹²—for example, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when the fathers of the American Revolution came together in Philadelphia and drafted the U.S. Constitution.

When the New School opened in 1919, the faculty broke with an ancien régime “to unhorse the autocrats who [were] blocking the advancement of learning in American institutions.” That goes without saying. But Katznelson’s allusion went deeper than that. The founders of the New School in 1919 were recognized scholars of political institutions and constitutional theory.¹³ So were the founders of the University in Exile in 1933, some of whom helped draft the constitution of the Weimar Republic, while others held influential government positions in interwar Germany until Adolf Hitler rose to power, dismantled the constitution, and fired them for being enemies of the Reich.

As evocative as the term may be, founding moments, Katznelson reminds us, only become founding moments after eyewitness reports of the events themselves go through an editing process. In the case of the New School, the revised version of these events describes “a seamless consistency” from one founding moment to the next—perhaps “too seamless”:

Separated by a tumultuous decade and a half, the fears, the insecurities, and the orientations to liberty in 1919 and 1933 were not identical. Though joined by many shared commitments, each founding was dedicated to goals and nourished by explicit and tacit understandings that diverged, sometimes sharply, with respect to the standing of democracy and the status of intellectual authority, and with regard to how free scholarship should responsibly conquer fear and advance liberty. Those differences were not superficial.¹⁴

After cutting open the stitches and revealing the seams, Katznelson wove more textured accounts of the two founding moments back into their historical periods. Or rather he began the process, arguing persuasively that future historians needed to pay attention to the “incidents and stories,” to quote Hannah Arendt again, that pulled at the seams of the 1919 narrative before moving on to 1933—and again, to 1983, Katznelson’s own period, when the university renewed its commitments to academic freedom and human rights, under the leadership of Jonathan Fanton.

As Katznelson described the historic circumstances surrounding the first founding moment, he spoke of the courage it took to open the New School in 1919. It was “audacious,” he explained, because “the repression of dissent at Columbia was not exceptional”:

The wartime q...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Prologue: In the Archives
• Part I: A School of Social Research
• Part II: The Universities in Exile
• Part III: The Middle Years
• Part IV: “Between Past and Future”
• Part V: Renewing the Legacy
• Epilogue: Extending the Legacy
• Appendix A: Extended Notes and Commentary for Chapter 6
• Appendix B: Extended Notes and Commentary for Chapter 7
• Appendix C: Extended Notes and Commentary for Chapter 9
• Appendix D: Extended Notes and Commentary for Chapter 18
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Photo section