[Orig to FB]
Gothamist is running a story that’s ostensibly about the New School catastrophe, but it seems more like a retirement home for tired tropes. The question is what “it” in that sentence refers to — the story or TNS?
I love that school, not quite heart and soul but not far off, but give me a f—ng break. “They are trying to radically diminish the power and capacity of the liberal arts divisions, both graduate and undergraduate“? “an ideological attempt to decimate historic spaces of critical inquiry and social justice.” Umm, no, sorry, they really, actually, genuinely are trying to save the school from shutting down.
It’s been plainly obvious for twenty years that this was where TNS was headed unless the faculty intervened, but year after year they failed to do so. Instead of fighting to shape the future of their institution, they treated “shared governance” as fodder for the service section of their P&T submissions.
FFS, if I could rise to chair the faculty senate and use that position to give the administration a hard time — and I was routinely called in by the president and provost and told to chill the f— out — then surely some of those serious faculty members with actual credentials and job protections could have done it far more effectively, right? And could have taken advantage of the changes I made to empower the UFS, right? Nope.
I used to joke that TNS was the only school in the world that was “small enough to change and big enough to matter,’ but it wasn’t really a joke. It was and remains true. What’s happening now is in large part the result of faculties that decided it was better to go with the flow. That’s fine. But now that the flow is bringing “the largest attempted firing of faculty currently taking place in the nation,” they don’t get to fall back on this kind of hollow rhetoric.