University in Exile

One hundred years ago, James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard left Columbia University in an act of political protest and founded what would become the New School. Columbia was firing faculty who spoke out against US involvement in the First World War for “sedition”. Robinson and Beard quit not because they were against the war, but because they refused to support an institution that was not committed to academic freedom. They were quickly joined by other frustrated intellectuals such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen. Ever since, the New School has been home to some of the world’s leading minds: John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski, Margaret Mead, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Frank Lloyd Wright, W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt, to name but a few….

If Columbia University and boards of trustees appear as villains in Friedlander’s history, then Alvin Johnson emerges as a superhero. As a co-founder and president from 1922 to 1946, he not only stewarded the New School through a tumultuous era, but saved innumerable scholars who were forced to flee the horrors of fascism, bringing more than 200 people to the New School alone. In 1933, when the Nazi Party took power, Johnson raised money to found the University in Exile there as a home for thinkers escaping persecution and, when France fell to the Nazi invasion, he worked to establish the École libre des hautes études as a graduate division of the University in Exile, receiving a charter from de Gaulle’s Free French government. In 1934, the University in Exile was renamed the Graduate Faculty, and in 2005 the name was restored to The New School for Social Research. Today, the school continues to change, recently launching its New University in Exile Consortium, partly in response to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s attack on Budapest’s Central European University….

The voices of Hannah Arendt and Ira Katznelson echo throughout as guiding interlocutors, reflecting on the intimate relationship between our political moment and the moral responsibility of academic institutions. Katznelson left the University of Chicago in 1983 for the New School. Together with Fanton, he stepped forward to defend the rights of persecuted intellectuals in east and central Europe. When he left in 1994, accepting a position at Columbia University, Fanton asked him to deliver the commencement address. Friedlander ends her history by summarising Katznelson’s prescient words: “The New School’s European colleagues, he said – both those of the generation of 1933 and those of 1989 – saw the weakness in liberal democracies more clearly than their American counterparts. Given their experiences with totalitarian regimes, the Europeans understood ‘that all liberal regimes are built on foundations of state violence and coercion, and that these instruments in the basements of the state can be used to topple the upper floors of open societies. At best, they remain in place as hidden instruments of rule’.”