In the news accounts on graduation ceremonies, the speeches of public figures are highlighted. This is not a bad thing. Important matters, more deliberately considered, are put on the public agenda. Thus, to take a key example, President Obama has used commencement addresses to present his deep assessment of the state of the union, as a recent report by NPR reveals. Obama, as the ceremonial speaker seriously reflects on the gap between past and future, assessing American promise and problems, using his full intelligence, free, or at least somewhat free, of the inside the beltway logic of official Washington and the popular media. A good thing, no doubt.
Yet, for me, significant oratory by Obama, and lesser public speakers, is not where the real action is on graduation day. Rather, I focus on the achievements of the graduates, our students and their promise, what they have said and done already, and where they may bring us. They help me understand the personal and the political, and all that lies in between. It is with this in mind that I am leaving my house this morning for The New School’s commencement, thinking once again about the relationship between promise and practice at The New School, specifically as it is revealed in the work of three new Ph.Ds.
Julie Tel Rav, a trained architect, turned sociologist, and a rabbi’s wife, used her broad creative and intellectual interests, and her communal experience to examine how the material environment influences ritual and everyday life of a religious community. In Set in Stone: The Influence of Architecture on the Progressive Amercan Jewish Community, she explores Jewish synagogues and community centers across the country, and how the built environment supports and undermines the goals of congregations. Particularly interesting is her thesis that the makers of the buildings seek to use physical space as a key support for Jewish ritual communal life, substituting space for time. This was her unanticipated finding, which emerged as her research proceeded. It was her discovery, which I found particularly interesting, as I have been exploring the relationship between the material world and the human world, and the way the human condition is specified in the social condition. I chaired Tel Rav’s committee, and have had, therefore, a great opportunity to learn from her.
I proudly served as an adviser on Lindsey Freeman’s dissertation committee (Vera Zolberg was the chair). I hope that Lindsey has benefited from my advice. I know I have learned a great deal from her scholarship and creativity in her dissertation: a study of the collective memory of the making of the atomic bomb in the (at first) secret utopian project in Oakridge, Tennessee, her hometown. Her study is to be published next year by the University of North Carolina Press as Longing for the Bomb: Atomic Nostalgia in Post-Nuclear Landscape. She analyzes the rise and fall of an atomic city: from top – secret war project, to post WWII memory center of patriotic heroism, to the ambiguities of the present day. This is a special kind of community study: focusing on the creation of the modern mythology about the bomb, moving on to nuclear nostalgia, and then to the struggle for meaning as myth and nostalgia fade.
One of the great interdisciplinary events at The New School for Social Research in the past decade has been an annual conference on memory. Freeman has been an important organizer. In her dissertation, she makes her unique contribution to “memory studies,” showing how imagination and memory shape ordinary everyday practice in an extraordinary place. The locals and the nation did indeed learn to build, live with and love the bomb, until the passion cooled.
Ana Mallen in her dissertation, Participatory Democracy and Social Polarization in the Times of Hugo Chavez, shows how the move from a corrupt liberal democracy to a promised participatory democracy, led to a rethinking of popular sovereignty, and the emergence of two mutually exclusive, antagonistic publics. Daily interactions, media representations, key political actors and the media combined to create a deeply polarized society. It is a dissertation in historical studies and sociology. The focus is on key turning points in the recent past and the way significant actions pushed forward polarization. Mallen concludes, surprisingly, with a community study of a district of Caracas that seemed to move against the polarizing trend (with an opposition leader using the ideology of Chavez to prevail over a Chavez supported candidate). Her account of the way the media wars and the civil strife interacted, leading to social polarization is without heroes and villains. She illuminated a complex story from multiple angles in a way that really informs.
Mallen’s committee included my New School sociology department colleague Carlos Forment, an eminent historical sociologist of civil society in Latin America, and María Pilar García-Guadilla, of the Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela, with whom Mallen had studied and worked with in Caracas on the Chavez phenomenon. As a non-expert, I was a little embarrassed to be the supervisor. Although Ana assures me that my approach to politics and media were a key to her work, my colleagues obviously had the historical knowledge to judge Mallen’s work that I lacked. That said, I realized at the defense that I actually have been understanding political developments in “the times of Chavez” quite well. This, of course, is thanks to talking to and reading Mallen over the years, as she has been developing her project. She has been my teacher as I have been hers. This is also true of Freeman and Tel Rav. That in fact is what advanced study and research is all about, what it ideally is, and where it quite often does lead.
The special mark of The New School: critical insight, careful social, political and historical investigation, and theoretical sophistication, beyond parochial clichés, worldly, socially and politically consequential: Tel Rav, Freeman and Mallen, along with many other New School students, have kept it alive in their work. I am grateful, and off to celebrate them for making an ideal, real.
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