The Tradition of the New: A History of Eugene Lang College
Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts is the newest and fastest-growing urban liberal arts college in the most sought-after city in the world. As part of The New School, Lang enjoys all the resources of a major university while retaining the intimacy of a small college.
“Considered by Princeton Review the best college for encouraging debate and discussion...”
Between 2003 and 2006, more than 40 new full-time faculty members were hired—an unprecedented number. This rapid growth is part of a university-wide trend: by 2010, The New School plans to hire 175 new full-time faculty members.
Considered by Princeton Review the best college for encouraging debate and discussion, Lang is becoming more competitive by the day, attracting top students in every field and the visionary leaders, scholars, and newsmakers who teach them and help them land coveted internships and jobs. The student-to-faculty ratio is 15:1. Everyone receives personal, individualized attention. Currently, about 900 students are enrolled, making Lang significantly smaller than colleges like Reed and Swarthmore.
Rather than saddle students with numerous required courses in a single academic major, Lang encourages them to explore highly interdisciplinary paths of study that make broad and deep connections among the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences.
The international curriculum builds the problems of today’s world into all areas of inquiry. Students gain a clearer sense of the lives and stories unfolding in regions and countries far from their own. They design and develop ways of including such lives and stories in their seminars, public service, internships, study abroad, and in the future work they endeavor to do.
The college was founded in 1985, but its spirit actually emerged years earlier.
If every history is ultimately about novelty replacing convention, you might say the history of Lang is a history of constantly updated educational practices, a history of developing original approaches to teaching and learning exactly when earlier approaches begin to look outmoded.
Just as The New School started, in 1919, as a progressive era experiment in adult education, informed by the pragmatic thought of John Dewey, so it began, in 1972, to recognize and satisfy the previously overlooked educational needs of young people.
That year The New School—which today comprises eight different divisions—established the Freshman Year Program. Open to high school graduates and exceptional high school seniors, it offered these students the chance to participate in small seminars in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences led by faculty devoted to helping them decide what it means to be an undergraduate. Professors were not only accomplished figures in their respective scholarly fields, but were also deeply invested in teaching students in an intimate setting.
The Freshman Year Program was neither an early admissions program nor the typical first year of college. Gone were the teaching assistants, massive lectures, and standard survey courses. And there were no competing undergraduate programs at the university. Attention and resources could focus solely on introducing students to the intellectual promises and demands of college life.
“On the streets of Greenwich Village, they could be heard discussing the art of fiction, literary revolutions, Social Darwinism, ancient Greek philosophy, even modern mathematics.”
The unusual opportunity afforded by the program resonated widely. The opening class, just shy of fifty students, matriculated during the 1972-1973 academic year. Students came from all over the country. Even a few from abroad were intrigued enough to make the trip: an early harbinger of the steady internationalism that would follow.
Between 1972 and 1975, freshmen kept flocking here. On the streets of Greenwich Village, they could be heard discussing the art of fiction, literary revolutions, Social Darwinism, ancient Greek philosophy, even modern mathematics. Complementing their coursework and sidewalk conversations were the many campus lectures, art shows, photography exhibits, poetry readings, films, and concerts they attended. They also audited courses offered throughout The New School.
Yet, oddly enough, they couldn’t receive credit toward a degree at the university. There was no undergraduate school here for them. (In 1944, the Senior College had been established for adult undergraduates. It couldn’t accommodate younger, more traditional BA students.) Freshmen had to finish college elsewhere, although many, after a successful year, wanted to stay.
Everything changed when, in 1975, the Seminar College—the direct precursor of Eugene Lang College—was created so that these exceptional freshmen could become sophomores, juniors, and seniors here. A four-year college experience at The New School was finally an all-ages affair.
The Seminar College expanded quickly, for it emerged during a period of rapid growth at The New School. By 1979, there was a full undergraduate division housing the Freshman Year Program, the Seminar College, the Senior College, and the BA/MA in Management and Urban Professions.
The year 1979 was pivotal for The Seminar College and for the undergraduate division. The BA/MA degree in Management in Urban Professions was introduced through the newly founded Graduate School of Management and Urban Professions—the only graduate division to provide training in such areas as urban affairs and policy analysis, human resources and manpower development, health services administration, and fundraising.
The very idea of a BA/MA pointed up the innovative integration of flexibility and rigor that defined undergraduate education at the Seminar College and The New School as a whole: the extended invitation to specialize and explore simultaneously; to understand that practical purposes are well served by theoretical reflections; to shape intellectual passions so that they endure; to realize how often undiscovered and familiar paths of thinking cross.
With the institutional precedent firmly set, additional BA/MA degrees were introduced in the early 1980s. They coincided with a substantial increase in graduate course offerings in the humanities and social sciences throughout the university. By 1983, Seminar College students and other undergraduates could choose accelerated degrees not just in management and urban professions, but in media studies, economics and political economy, anthropology, philosophy, political science, sociology, and liberal studies. Participating graduate programs and divisions included The Graduate School of Management and Urban Professions, the Masters Program in Media Studies, and the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science.
During those days, undergraduates pursued more fields than ever, and at a faster pace. They also did more in the world and at other institutions. By 1984, fieldwork, internships, coursework at other New York universities, and study abroad, had all become cherished components of a Seminar College education.
In 1985, following a generous $5 million gift from educational philanthropist Eugene Lang, the Seminar College was renamed Eugene Lang College. For more than twenty years now, the mandate of Lang has been to promote complex and diverse approaches to understanding and improving humanity. It’s an urban liberal arts college where engaged learning and responsible action rule. Students and faculty reap the benefits of a small seminar college within a progressive university committed to intrepid research, artistic excellence, and social change.
What shaped the identity of the Seminar College—the small classes, the intellectual independence, the distinctive BA/MA programs, the deep connection to local, national, and world affairs, the wide investigations across disciplines in lieu of a compartmentalized curriculum—has also shaped the current identity of Eugene Lang College. Many of the opportunities available to Lang students are improved versions of opportunities once available to Seminar College students.
There are many more accelerated degree programs. They now span the fine arts and can be found at both the bachelor’s and master’s level. For example, there is the BA/BFA for students who seek a solid liberal arts education along with special training in art, design, or music. Those interested in art and design complete the dual degree at Eugene Lang College and Parsons the New School for Design (the leading design school that became part of the university in 1970). Those interested in music complete the dual degree at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.
There are even more internship and fieldwork prospects. Today Lang students work in a vast array of institutions and organizations in the public and private sectors. To name a few: Common Cause, South Street Seaport, Environmental Action Coalition, HBO, NBC, MTV, Vogue, the New Yorker, The Museum of Modern Art, The New-York Historical Society, Urban Justice Center. The internship program provides real work opportunities and ample resources for professional growth and civic engagement in exciting organizations and institutions in New York City.
There is increased academic freedom and opportunity. Nearly 900 students today study writing, the arts, culture and media, education, literature, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, social inquiry, and urban studies.
In recent years, many new faculty members were hired across disciplines. And the college continues to grow. In New York City, the fastest place on earth, Eugene Lang College has reinvented undergraduate education in record time.
A hallmark of the Lang curriculum is integrative courses that bring the arts into lively, often unexpected conversation. Many courses emphasize aesthetic integration, since that’s what most contemporary artists, performers, dancers, and musicians are doing—talking and collaborating together. The arts program, launched anew in fall 2006, enables students to focus on theater, dance, music, and visual arts.
Interdisciplinary collaborations also increasingly drive courses on the environment at Lang. In 2002, university trustee John Tishman considerably strengthened environmental studies. He established the Tishman Environmental Merit Scholarship to support serious undergraduate study and to help fund environmental internships in Alaska, where outstanding Lang sophomores and juniors spend a summer working with top national environmental organizations to protect the cultural heritage and natural resources of the wilderness.
Eugene Lang College was recently renamed Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.
This is just the latest phase in the tradition of the new.