All Hail New School Faculty
Just in case you forgot (or genuinely missed out on the brilliance written by or about faculty) we’ve pulled some of the best of 2017. Read up.
“The End of Progressive Neoliberalism” by Eugene Lang College’s Nancy Fraser was Dissent Magazine’s top-read article of 2017.
“In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives.”
“How Tax Policy Created the 1%” by Julia Ott, Associate Professor in the History of Capitalism and the co-director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, also made Dissent Magazine’s top-read articles of 2017.
“The equalization of tax rates on different forms of income might seem like a top-down, technocratic liberal fix. But in fact, it would radically reorient the U.S. tax code according to a simple democratic principle: everyone’s income counts the same.”
Eugene Lang College Professor Federico Finchelstein, who recently wrote a new book on fascism and populism, made several contributions to The Washington Post’s Made By History column.
“Understanding the history of fascism and populism can help us better recognize why a populist leader can sound insane while not actually being so, something we’ve seen in the past in Latin America, Europe and elsewhere.”
Eugene Lang College + New School for Social Research Professor Natalia Petrzela provided historical context both for education and the politics of wellness in the contemporary United States.
“If today’s teenage jingoists scream “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” to heckle Latinos at high school sporting events, public schools 50 years ago suggested a more promising future: one in which conservatives worked alongside liberals to secure educational access for native-born and immigrant Latino children whose dignity was assumed.”
“Today, if your work schedule, child care and next meal are unpredictable, wellness is at best aspirational and at worst a cruel reminder of yet another dividing line between haves and have-nots.”
“For all the genuinely positive energy that exists on Lulu’s retail floors, an equally disturbing culture festers at the top and perpetuates a discourse with far more damaging implications than pilling capris.”
The Washington Post profiled Mannes College Faculty member Missy Mazzoli, calling her “the ‘it’ girl of the contemporary scene.”
“Hearing it the for the first time at an early workshop during Mazzoli’s Opera Philadelphia residency, David Devan, general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, says that “eight bars in, we were punching each other in the arm. It sucked us in, and was just rich and stark at the same time. David [Levy, senior vice president for artistic operations,] whispered, ‘This is opera!’”
See more about her opera, “Proving Up”:
Horror opera: Is it a genre? It may be now. On Friday night, the Washington National Opera presented a harrowing world premiere, “Proving Up,” by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, that literally gave me chills. As powerful as it is bleak, it cannot leave audiences cold: You may hate it, or you may love it, but you will definitely have some reaction.
Mannes piano faculty member Simone Dinnerstein collaborated on a Philip Glass world premiere.
“Dinnerstein opened with a gentle clutch of full, familiar triadic chords, shifting by seconds and thirds, the tonality both enveloping and undermining itself. Throughout the first two movements, minor-tinged melodies and portions of quiet, chromatic bravura from the piano were like 19th-century ghosts drifting in and out of the shadows.”
Teresa Ghilarducci teaches economics at The New School for Social Research, directs of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) AND The New School’s Retirement Equity Lab (ReLab). In her spare time, she schools the internet on the problem of retirement in America.
“The low status of women in the labor market after the age of 50 may be quite related to the fact that we don’t have many women economists. And, in fact, other women reinforce that by not asking the age. I’m 60. Let me just shout out to all the people who might be watching this that the only way we’re going to eliminate age discrimination is if we shout out our age. I’m 60, I’m vital, and I’m so glad I have tenure, because I know the realities, Paul, that I wouldn’t shout out my age if I didn’t have a secure job.”
“There is no part of the country where the majority of middle-class older workers have adequate retirement savings to maintain their standard of living in their retirement.”
“The only way we’re going to eliminate age discrimination is if we shout out our age. I’m 60, I’m vital and I’m so glad I have tenure, because I know the realities, Paul, that I wouldn’t shout out my age if I did not have a secure job.”
The New Yorker delves extensively into Professor Rachel Sherman’s new book, “Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence,” wherein she describes feeling poor as having consequences that go well beyond feeling.
[Sherman’s] subjects, she believes, are reluctant to categorize themselves as affluent because of what the label implies. “These New Yorkers are trying to see themselves as ‘good people,’ ” she writes. “Good people work hard. They live prudently, within their means. . . . They don’t brag or show off.” At another point, she observes that she was “surprised” at how often her subjects expressed conflicted emotions about spending. “Over time, I came to see that these were often moral conflicts about having privilege in general.”
Sherman also wrote her own piece for The New York Times on the same topic, which was one of the top-trending articles of the 2017 internet.
“It is not surprising, then, that the people I talked with wanted to distance themselves from the increasingly vilified category of the 1 percent. But their unease with acknowledging their privilege also grows out of a decades-long shift in the composition of the wealthy. During most of the 20th century, the upper class was a homogeneous community. Nearly all white and Protestant, the top families belonged to the same exclusive clubs, were listed in the Social Register, educated their children at the same elite institutions.”
Maya Wiley, Henry Cohen Professor of Urban Policy and Management at The Milano School of International Affairs + Senior Vice President for Social Justice, discusses #NetNeutrality…EVERYWHERE.
It’s not just organizing that demands affordable and fast mobile internet access. Small business owners depend on equal and fair online access for their livelihoods. Black women are the fastest growing small business entrepreneurs in the country. By permitting content discrimination, start-up companies may struggle to compete with wealthier companies.
“… as we know, one out of three women-owned businesses is owned by black women. And immigrant businesses are amongst the fastest-growing, along with black women businesses. If you have to pay to get your content, your services, your products to customers faster, and therefore compete, and you’re a small business, that means you’re in trouble. And that’s going to kill some of the innovation we’re seeing in communities of color.”
Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy Professor Darrick Hamilton forms real, radical economic policy in the United States. He was also honored by POLITICO Magazine.
Disparities are worse when looking at wealth. The 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that Black households have median wealth of about $17,600 (inclusive of home equity), in contrast to $171,000 in median wealth for White households. And these disparities persist and even worsen factoring in education. Black families where the head of household has a college degree have less wealth than White families where the head of household dropped out of high school.
“The key ingredient of how successful you will be in America is how wealthy your family is,” Hamilton says. Baby Bonds are one way to change that, he argues. He presented the idea at the American Economic Association conference in Philadelphia this weekend.
“If you are black and a college graduate, your net worth is still typically two-thirds that of whites who dropped out of high school.”
Claire Potter, Professor of History + Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative, killed it on Public Seminar, covering a variety of topics.
“What cases like this should remind us is that expansions of civil rights in the United States have always represented clashes of moral values that end up in the courts because they are deeply attached to, and the leading edge of, powerful political interests.”
My point is this: conservative students have a right to be respected too, and making them listen to baseless assertions that they are complicit with an act of terrorism is an abusive use of a teaching position. Worse–and I know you are going to think this is corny–when you express a passion in a way that stigmatizes students, you are pre-emptively withdrawing your affection from them, and it hurts. All students want to be liked, even–perhaps especially?–by teachers they disagree with.
New School DeansParsons School of Design’s Dean Joel Towers and Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy’s Dean Michelle DePass—provided testimony for New York City’s People’s Hearing on the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.
The New Yorker covers “Bail Bloc,” a collaborative social-justice/data/journalism project led by Rachel Rosenfelt, the Associate Director of Creative Publishing + Critical Journalism at The New School for Social Research.
“The app turns your computer into a cryptocurrency-mining tool and donates the proceeds to the Bail Project in order to free incarcerated people awaiting trial.”
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Mia Charlene White reframed black capitalism.
“It is not that buying art negates the opportunity for healing; it’s that the processes which produce art as commerce are implicated in the processes which trap us all and they require some critique, even if we do not have all the answers yet.”
Diana Goetsch, the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at Eugene Lang College, tackled the NFL “scandal.”
Here’s a slightly harder question: How come NFL teams will employ players who’ve been arrested for domestic violence, including five who were newly drafted in 2017, but will not employ Kaepernick? In other words, what’s worse in the eyes of the NFL — players beating women or kneeling for the national anthem? Answer: kneeling, and it’s not even close.
Brendan Griffiths, director of the MPS Communications Design program at Parsons School of Design, alleges that typography will be Trump’s downfall.
“I mean, with all the stuff that’s going on right now, especially on a platform like Twitter,” he asked, “isn’t the typography the least of your worries?”
