Reflections on the New School’s Founding Moments, 1919 and 1933

Abstract

This essay relates the New School’s situation of receiving European refugees and creating the University in Exile in 1933 to its founding period after 1919. From its very beginning, the New School wrestled with the consequences of unfreedom, fear, and insecurity. Two years after its founding, the University in Exile was chartered as the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, having become an established American doctoral institution, with the “fundamental belief in the great tradition that thought and scholarship must be free” (Alvin Johnston). In drawing parallels and contrasts between 1919 and 1933, the chapter underlines some basic tensions, but also chronicles the great impact that the arrival of a substantial number of European social scientists as emigrés had in reshaping the project of the New School.

This article was first published as: Katznelson, Ira. “Reflections on the New School’s Founding Moments, 1919 and 1933.” Social Research 76:2 (2009), 395–410. © The New School. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.