Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The Old New School

NSSR students don't have space. They don't have a library. But things used to be really bad. According to John McCumber, who taught philosophy at the New School in the 80s, American philosophy departments in the 70s had largely removed traditional philosophical texts from their curricula as the result of a philosophical culture that had arisen during the McCarthy era.

Indeed, the dismissal of the philosophical canon from American philosphy departments McCumber writes, "provided another, more timely motive for anguish among the people who met in January 1978 in the Manhattan apartment of Charles Sherover, a professor at Hunter College. An accrediting committee of the state of New York - its personnel supplied by the APA - had just visited the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research. The committee had recommended that the program be disaccredited, on the grounds that it was so far removed from he mainstream of American philosophy as to be overspecialized and sectarian." (Time in the Ditch 51)

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