October 10, 2019
Ann Snitow May 9, 1943-August 10, 2019 Ann Snitow, a founding faculty member of Lang College and the creator of the Gender Studies Program at the New School, passed away on August 10, 2019. She was a beloved member of the Literary Studies faculty. While indeed her books and essays are crucial texts in feminist studies and in the life of the mind, as Literary Studies colleagues our remembrances here are more personal, testaments not just to her work but to the power of her being.
June 30, 2020
Carolyn Vellenga Berman, associate professor of Literature, reflected in Public Seminar on the experience of teaching our core course, Literary Reinvention, as it moved online in the spring of 2020 due to the pandemic. Thanks to all the students who are quoted; there were more quotes, though some were cut in the editing process! Read her Public Seminar essay on teaching Literary Reinvention online this spring: […]
by Helaina Hovitz, Class of 2011
November 13, 2016
It had already been a dark week for us, full of fear, disbelief, and confusion.
The physical acts of violence, hatred, and intolerance have been the most difficult to understand, and when I heard about what happened at your dorms on November 12th, I thought I heard wrong.
I’ve never known a more accepting place than The New School, a place that is—because I refuse to say “was”—as blind to gender, race, religion, or sexuality as any place could truly be.
During my time there, from 2007-2011, it was the one place that I felt accepted when I myself felt unacceptable and damaged. I lived through my tumultuous teenage years with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that went undiagnosed and mistreated for years, and made daily life almost unbearable. My love for learning and writing and for the teachers I had met kept me going until I started a real recovery, and it just got better from there.
I had been through three different high schools over the course of four years.
At my second high school, I was bullied for many reasons, but the remark “Jewish whore” was one that stayed with me the longest—especially since it came from the mouth of my former Sunday school teacher’s son (for the record, I’m half Jewish, half catholic, and not religious, though I do consider myself “Buddish”).
While making my decision about colleges, I sat in on a class at Eugene Lang until a fire drill erupted and caused me to have a silent panic attack on the sidewalk as I spent 20 minutes biting my cuticles and speculating about what could be happening. I was so shaken up that I left before attending the second class they’d lined up for me to observe, but I had seen enough to know it was the place for me. On my first day, I knew I was home, and that’s where I stayed for all four years.
I’d lived in New York City my whole life and it wasn’t until I sat next to a transgendered classmate that I met someone who used the pronoun “they” and wore a Yarmulke, and I, like everyone else, saw them as just another person trying to survive their first semester with one of the toughest teachers on the payroll. We were there to learn about the world around us and figure out our place in it. That was all.
Diversity was, without question, accepted and encouraged. It was something that just “was,” like the walls and the floor and the ceiling. People had mutual respect for one another. It held our college together.
Students worshipped the ideals of tolerance and equality as much as they worshiped their hand-rolled cigarettes and skinny jeans, and it felt like we all recognized something in each other that was real. You could cry in the courtyard, and that was okay. Someone might even hand you a tissue and ask how you’re doing.
At the time, the word “Liberal” in Liberal Arts didn’t mean anything to me, it was just a tagline, a description, something that categorized us as creative, thinkers, poets, writers, journalists, videographers, lovers of the literary and the artistic and ideas that were new.
Now, I look back and see just how perfectly that word describes what we were, what we are: open to many different beliefs about many different things, to new perspective, and respectful of the individual rights and freedoms of all people.
It is unthinkable to me that people carried these hateful and bigoted views around with them, and now they have been unleashed in the form of Swastikas on your dry erase boards. I hope you have erased them.
But if I know anything about The New School community, the one that nurtured me and accepted me when I felt I didn’t belong anywhere, it is that they take care of their own.
I know you will all meet this weekend’s events with bravery, strength, and dignity. You will feel sad and afraid, but you will show up for class and for life with dignity. You will not meet this hate with more hate. You will not incite violence and riots.
You will write. You will speak. You will act in a way that shows the world that whoever was responsible for marking that dorm room door does not represent you as a student body or your college as a whole.
One person, or two people, or a mob of ignorant trolls will not shake you.
I found my voice at Lang, and I still use that voice today to try to make a difference in the world—now it’s time for you guys to do the same.
Helaina Hovitz is a Eugene Lang alumni, an editor, journalist, author of the memoir “After 9/11” and co-founder of media startup Headlines for the Hopeful. She has written for The New York Times, New York Observer, Glamour, Salon, VICE, Forbes, Newsday and many others. Visit her at www.HelainaHovitz.com to read more of her work, or follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
