This is the second in a three part series “Principle and Practice.” See here for Part 1.

At the New School for Social Research, my intellectual home for just about my entire career, the relationship between principle and practice is counter-intuitive. Principle, in my judgment, has been, since the institution’s founding, at least as important as practice, and, ironically, probably of more practical significance. The New School’s history has been set by its principles, even as sometimes in practice the principles were not fully realized.

I am thinking about this at a turning point in our history: a relatively new university president, David Van Zandt, has just appointed, following faculty review and recommendation, a new dean, Will Milberg. It is a hopeful moment, rich with promise and possibility for our relatively small, financially strapped, unusual institution. How we now act has, potentially, significance well beyond our intellectual community. This is directly related to the founding principles of our place, their historical significance and continued salience.

Founded in 1919, as an academic protest, The New School has represented, and worked to enact, central ideals of the university in democratic society, doing a great deal on relatively little. The New School’s founders were critical of the way economic and political powers interfered with the intellectual and scholarly life of American universities. While they were responding proximately to the firing of two Columbia University faculty members for their disloyalty during WWI, they were, more generally, concerned that those in control of American universities, their trustees, who were (as written in the mission statement) “composed for the most part of men whose views of political, social, religious and moral questions are in no way in advance of those of the average respectable citizen. Their tendency is therefore to defend established thought than to encourage a fundamental reconsideration of long accepted ideals and standards.”

Just a few years after the American Association of University Professors was founded to defend academic freedom and after the association wavered and didn’t defend the principle as it was systematically compromised during WWI, The New School was formed, primarily dedicated to independent social research, addressing pressing social and political problems. The New School’s principled commitment has been its distinction, with twists and turns, and up and downs.

The founders raised one key question and offered their solution in their original mission statement, “A Proposal for An Independent School of Social Science”:

“The question naturally arises, how can the Social and Political sciences be given the opportunity to develop at least as freely as the natural sciences…. The answer is by establishing an institution free from the ancient embarrassments.”

“Free from ancient embarrassments,” The New School opened in 1919, seeking to address the challenges of those times. The mission statement highlighted a variety of concerns: the expanding role of government, the importance of the labor movement and its organization, the problems of the modern economy. The makers of the school sought to develop modern social science and public policy that would respond to changing order of things. I particularly find intriguing the prescient declaration on women’s education and its purpose:

“The granting of suffrage to women and the extension of women’s interest into new and important spheres of public life will lead them to seek a better equipment both for power and service.”

The new institution emphasized interdisciplinary study and engagement in practical problems. Its founders sought a lean and mean educational enterprise, focused on research, teaching and public engagement, with a minimal administrative apparatus.

They sought to “Secure a sufficient endowment on the understanding that the greater part of the income shall be spent on research and education and the least possible amount on administration.”

But they were not just dreaming. The great American historian, Charles Beard, perhaps the most prominent mover and shaker behind the establishment of this new school, revealed an inventive practical side in his personal account of its project, making a special appeal.

“Those who give financial assistance to the New School are not so ingrained in their distrust of liberated human minds that they are not willing to accept the result of free inquiry… In other words, the New School is a cooperative concern, a pooling of interests intellectual and financial, designed to advance knowledge of the world and its pressing problems. ..It proposes to build up a center where those who care to work at the modern and industrial problems may find guidance and imagination. Those who have found ‘the one road’ or are now convinced that they can exercise the evil spirits of the age by single incantations will find no peace or comfort there. Those who have highly resolved that the human mind which has been so fertile in its inventive genius in the material world shall be freely applied to the problems of the social world will find welcome, good cheer, and if it is not too bold, some genuine help. The door is open and the way is broad”

Reading the original mission statement and Beard’s note, I am struck by how true The New School has been to its original mission, even at it seems to be long on idealism, short on realism. The theme of engaging the world using the advanced means of social and political science early on was extended.

In the twenties and thirties the arts and design were added to The New School’s agenda, formally pushed forward in 1970 when Parsons School of Design was merged with The New School. Aaron Copeland, Martha Graham and Erwin Piscator contributed to an expansive definition of social research at The New School.

The missions of academic freedom and opposition to dogma were radicalized when The University in Exile was created, as a refuge to endangered European scholars, artists and intellectuals from Hitler’s Europe. An independent center linking European art, social science and philosophy with American intellectual and public life was established.

I am particularly proud and honored to have been a part of extending this division’s activity to East and Central Europe’s democratic opposition in the 1980s, with my colleagues Elzbieta Matynia, Andrew Arato, Jose Casanova and Ira Katznelson. The New School’s board, importantly including Walter Eberstadt, Henry Arnhold and Michael E. Gellert, and the The New School president, Jonathan Fanton, supported our efforts, in the manner Beard imagined. And Fanton pushed this forward forging a cooperative relationship between The New School, and Helsinki Watch and Human Rights watch, taking a leadership role in both.

New School faculty became supporters, colleagues and collaborators with key opposition figures of the region, Adam Michnik, Martin Butora and Janos Kis, among many others, engaging in clandestine seminars before the changes of 1989, and open meeting and educational initiatives after the changes. In the region, The New School developed a significant reputation, known for its founding principles.

Independent scholarship pitted against tyranny and small mindedness, opposition to intellectual dogma, and engagement with the pressing problems of the day, these are the ideals of The New School’s founding, which have informed its history. The stated principles provided the opportunity for innovative actions. They are also strikingly present in the daily life of the university, in the faculty’s creative work and scholarship, and in their teaching, and in the problems and the challenges student pose in our classrooms and in their own work. I would love to document this in the future – an idea for a book or at least a series of cooperative blog posts.

There have been times, of course when practice has ignored principle. Many in the institution, even among its leadership, have forgotten what makes The New School, The New School, especially in recent years. And, there are a variety of different readings of its distinctiveness. More about this soon.

For today, though note my major point: the principles of The New School’s founding have persisted. I believe that these principles define the university’s history, including ups and downs, constitute its importance, and suggest its future promise.

Ideological clichés are deadly. In 1989, the end of the short twentieth century (1917 – 1989) with all its horrors, I thought this simple proposition was something that had been learned, broadly across the political spectrum . I was wrong, and the evidence has been overwhelming. This was my biggest mistake as a sociologist of the politics and culture.

When Soviet Communism collapsed, I thought it had come to be generally understood that simple ideological explanations that purported to provide complete understanding of past, present and future, and the grounds for solving the problems of the human condition, were destined for the dustbin of history. The fantasies of race and class theory resulted in profound human suffering. I thought there was global awareness that modern magical thinking about human affairs should and would come to an end.

My first indication I had that I was mistaken came quickly, December 31, 1989, to be precise. It came in the form of an op ed. piece by Milton Friedman. While celebrating the demise of socialism in the Soviet bloc, he called for its demise in the United States, which he asserted was forty-five per cent socialist, highlighting the post office, the military (a necessary evil to his mind) and education. He called for a domestic roll back of the socialist threat now that the foreign threat had been vanquished. Friedman knew with absolute certainty that only capitalism promoted freedom, and he consequentially promoted radical privatization as a solution to all social problems. This was an early battle cry for the neo-liberal assault of the post-cold war era.

The assault seemed particularly silly to me, and hit close to home, since I heard Friedman lecture when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and even taught one of his true-believing graduate students when I gave a summer school course there on social problems in American society. Friedman and his student’s absolute conviction that the market is the source of all good perfectly mirrored my Marxist friends’ convictions that it was the root of all evil.

Today neo-liberalism and anti neo-liberalism are in an ideological dance. The Republican positions on taxation of the job creators, deregulation and the denunciation of standard social programs as socialism constitute one sort of magical thinking. Newt Gingrich is particularly proficient in spinning the language of this political fantasy and developing its newspeak (with his concerns about the United States becoming a “secular, atheist” country promoting sharia law, and the like). The criticism of neo-liberalism from the left too often present magic: dismantle capitalism and all will be well. As I see it, both propose a future based on a failed past, often with a certitude that is disarming and dangerous.

I wonder how people can imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, when there is overwhelming evidence that it has never worked, in Europe or Asia, in Africa or Latin America. I wonder how Republicans can ignore the evidence that the market does not solve all economic challenges and social problems, and that sometimes, indeed, it is the primary cause of our problems, particularly evident in the shadow of the world financial crisis and the great recession.

Friends in the academic ghetto, on the cultural grounds of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, Berkeley, Ann Arbor and Austin, imagine revolution with little serious consequences. On the other hand, the Republican market fundamentalists pose a clear and present danger. On the right, there is ideological tragedy. On the left, there’s farce, except to the extent that they enable the right.

I didn’t anticipate that market and anti-capitalist fundamentalism would have such a role in the twenty-first century. I also did not anticipate or understand the possibility of the replacement of the secular totalitarian imagination by religious ones, Islamic, but also Hindu, Jewish and Christian. “Religionism” is replacing “Scientism.” I didn’t see what was brewing on the religious/political front. The attacks of 9/11 and the American fundamentalist response forced me to pay attention, which I attempted to deliberately consider in The Politics of Small Things.

Chastened, I have become accustomed to the persistence of modern magic, of ideological thinking and its appeal, but quite uncomfortable. How can a thinking person accept and actually support the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez? It and he are so transparently manipulative and fantasy based, so clearly squandering Venezuelan resources and not really addressing the problems of the poor. Yet, many critical people in the American left can’t bring themselves to observe that this king of the ideological left, this revolutionary hero, is naked. How can the sober Republicans believe what Gingrich and company say about the economy and also about international affairs? If they do so and prevail electorally, I am pretty convinced that they will preside over the decline and fall of the American Empire, what they claim to be most against. Perhaps that is reason for true-believing anti-globalists to support the Republicans.

P.S. As it turns out since 1989, I have been bombarded with evidence that ideological thinking is a persistent component of modern politics. It seems that everywhere I look its importance and its dangers are to be observed, but so are its limits. I am thinking again about my big mistake as I reflect on Occupy Wall Street and its prospects, and its extension to the New School. As Andrew Arato pointed out in his critique of the idea of occupation, there is a danger that when people, who speak ideologically for the 99%, will turn themselves into the 1%.  True-believers are convinced, but the rest of us in the end aren’t. Sooner or later the insights of ’89 prevail. On the bright side, from my political point of view, I think this is likely to apply to the Republican Party, with its true-believing, fact-free ideology. This is the major reason why I think that the Republicans will fail in the upcoming elections. I think this is why the Republican field is so dismal, as Paul Krugman has cogently observed. But I am trusting that ideology will end again.

Growing out of the broader Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, a bit uptown, at the New School, there was another occupation. It began on OWS Global Day of Action, November 17^th. About one hundred broke away from a march from Union Square to Foley Square. The march was a part of a city-wide student strike in solidarity with OWS Global Day of Action. The breakaway group occupied a student study floor on 90 Fifth Avenue. The headlines of The New York Times about the action captured how many of us at the New School understood it: “Once Again, Protesters Occupy the New School.” I was quite skeptical about this action. I didn’t understand why The New School was a target. But initially, I didn’t simply oppose. I thought that there was a real possibility that New School President David Van Zandt’s accommodating approach to our occupation might open up space for creative activity.

Unfortunately, things didn’t develop that way.  As time progressed, the aggression that the tactic of occupation of university space is, defined the action more and more, while the opening in public life that OWS has provided took a backseat. Once again, for me, Hannah Arendt’s insight that in politics the means define the ends was confirmed. The object of my concern is most readily perceivable by the photos of the graffiti on the occupied space accompanying this post. The damage to The New School facilities is disturbing, but I find the content of some of the slogans even more serious. In addition, there were reports of some students having worries about their safety in the occupied space as events progressed. Instead of the space being open and inviting, some rather perceived and experienced it as hostile, disinviting and dominated, due to the some of the occupiers’ tactics and politics. There were also the very reasonable concerns of many students about losing access to the space for their studies.

It is with these factors in mind that I signed the following letter, composed by my colleague, Andrew Arato, to The New School community in support of President Van Zandt’s approach to the challenge, an approach that led to a relatively peaceful, to this point, end of the occupation.

Monday, November 28, 2011

To the New School Community

Dear Friends:

We need to express our strong appreciation for the way our president, provost and some of our faculty members handled the unfortunate occupation of a part of the New School. They were right not to call in the police, and to be conciliatory, ready to negotiate until a full democratic vote of those present could be taken.

They were also right (letter of November 23) in calling attention to the destructive and undemocratic practice of a minority that initially refused to leave in spite of the vote. This act of firmness also facilitated the favorable outcome.

Some of us, probably a relatively small minority of students and faculty, may think that it is acceptable to occupy the New School whether or not there is any school specific contentious issue at stake. Let us note however, that as against the recent past, the leadership of Van Zandt and Marshall (not to speak of the faculty mostly enthusiastic about OWS) has provided no conceivable excuse for this action. On the contrary, it was all extremely hospitable to the movement and its reasonable demands for time and space. We are aware of possible motivations why the New School was selected: namely our very tolerance and liberalism made us a much easier and less defended target than the real enemies of the movement. But the existence of opportunity is not in itself a justification for anything.

Whether any of us do agree with the occupation of a part of our place, we are sure none of us can accept the fact that the occupiers have deliberately caused serious damage to the facilities. $40,000 dollars is mentioned as a figure. That is quite a sum. Just to pick an example of alternatives, the equivalent of 10 graduate assistantships will go for renovation instead, at a time when we already cannot reward at all some of our best students.

We are not calling for the punishment of the students concerned by the University. This would be counter-productive. But we do think that any serious movement-to-be has the responsibility to police its ranks, and discipline its membership by excluding those who violate democratic rules and engage in random violence.

Again the president and the provost need to be offered our sincere thanks. Had someone else been in their place, the results could have been tragic, and not only for the short term. The long shutdown of universities from Greece to Uruguay and Mexico has happened in the past initially for equally fortuitous reasons. It is our job here, faculty and students, to make sure that this cannot happen to the New School.

Signed by,

Elaine Abelson
Andrew Arato
Jay Bernstein
Emanuele Castano
Doris Chang
Alice Crary
James Dodd
Federico Finchelstein
Carlos Forment
Laura Frost
Teresa Ghilarducci
Jeffrey Goldfarb
Eiko Ikegami
Elizabeth Kendall
Marcel Kinsbourne
Benjamin Lee
Arien Mack
Elzbieta Matynia
Joan Miller
Edward Nell
Julia Cathleen Ott
Christian Proaño
Vyjayanthi Rao
Janet Roitman
Jeremy Safran
Willi Semmler
Ann-Louise Shapiro
Rachel Sherman
Ann Stoler
McWelling Todman
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Terry Williams
Eli Zaretsky
Vera Zolberg

Some further explanation

This was our third occupation in four years, but was quite different from the previous two, when Bob Kerrey was the university president. The issues then had much more to do with the tension between Kerrey, on the one hand, and the students and the faculty, on the other. The local and national contexts were also very different. Now the New School occupation has occurred at the time of the broad social movement that is Occupy Wall Street. While President Kerry called in the police, to the deep consternation of The New School community, David Van Zandt, was much more open and understanding. His first response as reported to the Times: “As long as they’re not disrupting the educational functions of the university they can stay… It’s a tough time for students right now, and we’re aware of that. These are big social issues.” And he followed with a series of additional statements in which he sought common ground with the occupiers, attempting to avoid conflict. Yet, perhaps inevitably, there was conflict and controversy. The different perspectives are illuminating.

The occupation was from the outset planned and executed by the “All City Student Occupation.” This is an overarching body of the NYC university students. They are not necessarily representative, but are linked to all the individual school assemblies. They posted a series of statements throughout the course of the occupation.The New School General Assembly reposted from there and at its own site. These sites provided a student view of the occupation, until a fateful General Assembly in which the pressing issue was whether to accept or reject an offer by Van Zandt of moving and limiting the action. A telling majority accepted the offer. A committed minority questioned the legitimacy of the decision and stayed.

At the GA: there were about 150 people. The vote accepting the Van Zandt offer was about 90 yes and 25 no. The vote wasn’t completely clear, though those in favor clearly prevailed. The discussion at some points was civil and reasonable, at other points, not.

Then things became difficult. In the night of Nov 22, a group of the “no voters” decided to stay. Most of the participants by then had vacated 90 Fifth. They left or moved to the Kellen Gallery. The remaining 90 5th Ave occupiers opened a new blog and published statements there.

The students, both activists and non-activists, were split on the occupation. Although they overwhelmingly are, along with the faculty, very supportive of OWS, the occupation of The New School was not as broadly supported. Among many of the faculty, including me, there was the additional factor: strong support for the way David Van Zandt has handled the crisis, always supporting the mission of the school, which includes its traditional openness to progressive social, political and cultural expression and action, coupled with a strong commitment to its various educational divisions and programs.

In the end, my ambivalence about the occupation turned to opposition, not understanding the justification of occupation, being appalled by what some did in the occupied space, supporting the President’s response, wanting to minimize the negative impact of the occupation on my intellectual home, while still supporting the project of OWS.  I think this was the conclusion of many, probably most, of my colleagues and students. I look forward to further informed reflection on the issues involved here, which are far from settled at The New School, and beyond.

Andrew Arato is an expert in constitutions, a pressing topic in Turkey right now.

I read the news about the Turkish referendum on constitutional reforms with great interest. Turkey is a bridge between East and West.  Europe meets Asia in modern booming Istanbul. It’s a place where the commitment to democracy and to an open Islam is the official policy of the governing Justice and Development Party.  It’s a place of great hope and promise, where instead of the clash of civilizations, there is dialogue and reinvention. But it is also a place where people committed to secularism worry about the prospects for their modern way of life.  I tried to follow the news reports about what happened, but they were unclear.  I understood that a sweeping package of constitutional reforms were approved, that the referendum purported to bring the Turkish constitution up to European standards, but also that the opposition was claiming that the package was a systematic power grab.  Is this a sign of democratic progress as the ruling party spokesman declared, or is it, as the opposition declared, a significant regression?  I called my friend and New School colleague, Andrew Arato, a distinguished expert on constitutions, who has been working with a group of young scholars on constitutional issues in Turkey.  He agreed to answer my questions. I opened by asking him whether the referendum results were good or bad news?

I think bad. The successful Turkish referendum of September 12 was ultimately about court packing. Not only is the manner of choosing judges for the Court now altered, but six new judges presumably friendly to the government will be added to the Court within 30 days.

This is a point missed by almost all Western commentary on the event. Court packing is always bad business. The way is now almost open for the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, the ruling Party with leaders who have an Islamist, but are committed to membership in the European Union) to remake the country’s secular constitution entirely on its own.

I understand that it is never a good idea to have a political party, let alone a political leader, even one that we passionately support, to have the power to remake a constitution at will. FDR was one of the greatest Presidents in our history, but when he was having a hard time getting his New Deal reforms through the court and tried to pack it with his supporters, it was in retrospect a good thing that the American public and their representatives turned on him.  So the general concern I get.  But do you have particular reasons to be concerned?

It was indeed wrong for Roosevelt to try control judicial outcomes by Court packing.  But the meaning of this device is especially troublesome in potentially more authoritarian settings, for example, the introduction of formal apartheid in South Africa, and during Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency in India. In South Africa, the parliament was about to deprive the colored (mixed race) voters of their franchise, and the Appeals Court resisted. This was overcome by packing  both the court and the Senate. As to Mrs. Gandhi, at issue were both her so-called corrupt practices in an election, as well as the Court’s ability to defend rights against the easy amendment possibilities of the constitution. In the end the Court won, but only after a destructive emergency when the democracy was almost lost.  The packing of the court in Turkey is reminiscent of these two dangerous cases.

Further, it is not obvious that the Turkish electorate would have voted for this type of scheme had it been honestly presented. It was not. The Court packing and changing provisions were only two articles of a highly attractive twenty  six article package that the voters could approve or reject only as a whole. The people had to choose between all or nothing.  This tragically repeats the approach of the military dictator, General Evren, in 1982.  Then: vote for military’s constitution if you want one good thing (namely the end of the junta’s rule) or continue the military dictatorship.  Now: the population had to confirm an immense increase in the power of the ruling party if it wanted any of the many goodies in the package…

The AKP has operated as a moderate Islamic one (they say conservative) so far. But, there is no guarantee that it would continue to do so when it has the power to change the constitution of the country at their will.  The project to combine the secular traditions and institutions in Turkey with the religious commitments of the vast majority of the Turkish population is now apparently going to go unchecked by any political or social force other than the ruling party.

Why just apparently unchecked?

I qualify my judgment for three hopeful reasons. First, because even a packed Court may still act like a Court. The eternity clauses of Turkey’s present constitution concerning secularism and republicanism, plus the preamble involving the separation of powers (incorporated in an eternity clause) still gives the Constitutional Court a foothold to control constitution making, if it wishes to. While the apartheid regime did control its newly named  judges, Mrs. Gandhi in the end did not.

It’s possible that just as in the United States there is no guarantee that the appointed judges will act in the way their patrons want.  They may actually take their constitutional responsibilities seriously using their own judgment.

And there are the relevant European institutions, which until now seem to have been fooled by the package. But, once its real meaning becomes clear, I think they will not be fooled and the response could be devastating.

And further there is the matter of the Turkish electorate itself, it has means to respond and defend the constitutional order.

Nonetheless the key problem remains – the referendum permits Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul of the ruling party to pack the court.  The editors of  The New York Times naively call on them to “not pack the court with political loyalists and religious extremists.” I fear that was the very point of the exercise.