Education: School for Adults

A higher educator last week discussed without tears the state of liberal education. Said he: “Liberal education in America has never been exclusively a preserve of the college. The great liberals . . . were largely self-educated like Benjamin Franklin. In the middle of the 19th Century, colleges were small, few. . . . Everywhere there [were] reading clubs, lyceums . . . well in advance of academic life with respect to art, literature, philosophy, psychology. . . . Millions of adults … refuse to believe that [liberal education] is closed to [those] not attending college.

These were the opinions of Alvin Saunders Johnson, director of Manhattan’s campusless New School for Social Research, which had just opened for its 25th year of adult education. Director Johnson was confidently looking forward to a day when war veterans might want to dedicate spare evenings to the pursuit of culture.

His New School, which does not depend on draft-age students, was booming despite the war, hoped to exceed its 1936 record of 4,034 registrants. The school had come a long way from its small, but distinguished, beginnings. Among the founders in 1919 was no less a quartet than James Harvey Robinson, Thorstein Veblen, Charles Austin Beard and John Dewey. To get the academic dust out of their lungs they set up their own school in a musty Victorian house in New York’s Chelsea district. In 1922 Johnson took over the institution.

Bits & Pieces. For more than a decade it was an informal evening haunt of lecturers and avid students. They might study bits & pieces of history, psychoanalysis, drama, philosophy. They pooh-poohed examinations, degrees. It was all very earnest, and somewhat mixed up. New-Schoolers took the unacademic hash and let the credit go.

Today adult students can take integrated courses over a period of years, can aim at a rounded liberal education. In the process they have the benefit of deanly aid and close to an all-star faculty.

Adolf Hitler had a lot to do with that.

Director Johnson brought to the U.S. a flock of German refugee professors called The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science (who give masters’ and doctors’ degrees quoted at par on the academic exchange). By the time the North African landing sealed France’s leaky borders, the school also had a brilliant French troupe known as the Ecole glibre des Hautes Etudes (Free School of Advanced Studies). Director Johnson’s native faculty includes such stars as N.Y.U.’s ebullient, scrappy Philosopher Sidney Hook; Columbia’s handsome, encyclopedic Art Historian Meyer Schapiro; Queens College’s lively Sociologist Kimball (grandson of Brigham) Young.

Dirt Farmer. Owlish Alvin Saunders Johnson is himself a savory ingredient in this academic melting pot. In his nearly 70 years he has taught economics at Columbia, Nebraska, Texas, Chicago, Cornell, Stanford, Yale. Much to the puzzlement of his more exotic colleagues, he remains in manner the Nebraska-born yokel. Slow-spoken, foot-shuffling, pipe-sucking, he is as crammed with rural lore as an October silo with corn. Johnson’s happiest moments include working with his seven children in his Nyack, N. Y. garden.

Yet it was this expert on manures, markets and mortgages who had the late Joseph Urban design a pioneering example of modern school architecture for the New School.

Johnson’s researchers work on such projects as: comparisons of U.S. public administration with that of other countries; management in Soviet industry & agriculture; German radio propaganda; German demobilization. The results of such studies are carefully conned by U.S. war agencies.

Recently Johnson demortgaged his school. Charges of unorthodoxy and radicalism do not bother him.*In a period when most college presidents feel like Good Humor vendors in November, Johnson feels as perky as a Nebraska farmer who held his hogs for a high ceiling.

*Among the New School’s sponsors: Universal Oil’s Hiram J. Halle, Mrs. Thomas Lament, the First National Bank of the City of New York’s Director Leon Fraser, Manhattan Lawyer Grenville Clark (Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine).