 The new school has now for decades been kind of one of the beacons of alternative thought and deeply theoretical, not just kind of alternative political thought, but deeply interested in theory and not just Marx's theory. You know, if you think of the people who have taught over these years at the new school, and that original group was David Gordon, Anwar Sheikh, Edward Nell, Robert Albrunner, but then it was supplemented by really interesting thinkers, Alice Amston, John Eatwell, et cetera. I'm sure I'm leaving wonderful people out. Lance Taylor, I should mention, of course, because he's been so integral at INET and is really a deep thinker in this tradition of the new school. I'm Will Milberg. I'm the dean of the new school for social research at the new school in New York and also professor of economics. The new school is an unusual institution and has a very rich history, as a matter of fact. So the history of the new school is an interesting topic. It's been the topic of actually three books, which is unusual for a small, quirky institution like the new school. And its history starts in World War I. And it starts as a rogue group of faculty who resigned from Columbia University in protest of the university's insistence that faculty signed some kind of oath of allegiance to the U.S. entry into World War I. And Columbia had fired a couple of faculty members for their failure, their unwillingness to sign this oath, and a group of faculty there resigned in protest. And it was not, in fact, that they were against U.S. involvement in World War I. It was their kind of insistence that no institution should be forcing someone to sign such an allegiance. And they decided that the structure of American university with its boards of trustees and its very hierarchical power arrangement and the nature of debate that was emerging in that period, we're talking about World War I, was starting to close off openness, close off academic freedom. They wanted something new. And they decided to resign and start a new school. And that new school, which was about a hundred blocks south of the old one, set up in 1919. Just one other kind of founding moment at the new school in our kind of one of the great deans, my predecessor Ira Katz Nelson, who actually is at Columbia University in the political science department, described the history of the new school as having two great founding moments. The first I just told you about. The second was the founding of what is today the new school for social research. Today in 1933, when the newly elected, as it were, Nazi regime in Germany declared in April of 1933, the Civil Service Adjustment Act, which led to the firing of Jews, communists, certainly gay members of any public institution, including the universities, led to a recruitment effort by the same people, Alvin Johnson in particular. And I didn't mention the names of the 1919 rogue group, but they included some pretty prominent people, Charles Beard, Thurston Veblen, and Alvin Johnson, who became the president at that first founding moment, then took on the task of recruiting these wonderful scholars who had been fired from their positions in Germany in 1933 and created a faculty. That faculty was called the University in Exile, and it was part of the new school for social research, which had been founded previously. And that idea of that, which again is kind of the subject of these three books that I spoke about, is to not just bring an individual scholar and place them one at Yale, one at Berkeley, one at Michigan, one in Florida, but to bring a group of thinkers together to kind of preserve and maintain an intellectual tradition. Johnson was really brilliant and courageous, and he raised the money to bring, at that point in 1933, the fall of 1933, a group of about 10 or 11 scholars, very interesting, many of them economists, by the way. And that formed the University in Exile, which then became the graduate faculty of political and social science, and then, more recently, in the last 15 years, what became known as the new school for social research. We call them the Mayflower Group, because ironically, of course, because they're all Jews, and they were all German Jews who were quite at, I mean, they weren't the, they were quite at the top of their game academically. Johnson had edited what was called the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in the early 30s, and he had been in Germany and visited German universities, invited the top scholars in the German universities to contribute to the Encyclopedia, and he knew the terrain. He knew he had, you know, many, many people had been fired and were really under enormous pressures, much worse than being fired, simply. And so Johnson knew who the top scholars were, and he was quite, he was a bit selective, and he brought a great group over. And they were an interesting group. They were social Democrats who had really thrived in the Weimar period. They had been from socialists to kind of reformists, and they mostly weren't economics, but there were some also in psychology, philosophy, and they came to the U.S. really under false pretenses, because the university in exile, the word exile typically refers to someone who is temporarily out of their home country with the intention of returning. And from what I've read about the history, and since I've become dean, I've become quite interested in the history, they really didn't intend to go back. They were, of course, kind of shocked, stunned, and puzzled by the rise of fascism in Europe and did not leave that question out of their query as they began their scholarly careers in the United States. But they didn't, except with a rare exception, have an intention of going back. And in fact, they became quite integrated quite quickly into U.S. political discussions. And the scholar that I've actually researched the most is a guy named Gerhard Kohl. And Kohl was in the Mayflower Group. He had been head of the Kiel Institute, kind of a young star, who was a little younger than some of the others who came in that group. And his office got attacked by Hitler Nazi sympathizers, and he and his family were under really physical threat, and he quickly got out of the country and was saved by Alvin Johnson, if you will. So he arrives in New York in 1933. By 1939, I believe it is, he has left the new school and is in the Roosevelt administration and becomes quite influential. It's a long, interesting journey. He's a public finance economist who is very influenced by German thinking in public finance, some very fascinating foundational work on the role of the state in relation to markets and the role, I will add, of democratic processes in relation to resource allocation. And Kohl becomes very influential in the Roosevelt administration. I mean, this is remarkable. First of all, six years after leaving his country in a prominent established position in his country. Second of all, a country which is the enemy from a country which becomes the arch enemy of the United States, and yet he is embraced for his ability to think through issues of taxation, spending, and their connection, by the way, something we forgot about for a while. He becomes quite influential even in the writing of the Full Employment Act. He becomes one of the authors of the Full Employment Act, which is kind of the last great moment of New Deal politics in the mid-40s. We're very proud of a tradition that insists, like Heilbrunner, and very Heilbrunnerian, if you will, that you must study the history of economic concepts because textbook treatment, which treats them as already accepted truth, is not doing a service to the depth, the relation to other social sciences, and the, quite frankly, the contention with which theory emerges. And theory emerges, evolves, and becomes dominant in very complicated ways that even the philosophers of science kind of don't capture in economics. It's filled with tensions connected to actual economic and political histories. To leave that out is not just to kind of ignore something that's peripheral, but it's to really miss what's at the core of the theories themselves. And so that's a first level of insistence in the training that takes place at the new school, which is that it has to be students are required to take the history of economic thought. They're required to really understand economics in historical context and not just the last journal article that was published. Secondly, is an insistence that students, an insistence, and a kind of an appeal to students to reach out across disciplines. And this is where we have found it under my deanship, something called the Robert Heilbrunner Center for Capitalism Studies, where it fits in the picture. But there are many opportunities at the new school for students to do this kind of cross-disciplinary work. And the Heilbrunner Center, very briefly, to put in a little plug for it, is a space where economic dynamics are discussed by people who are not necessarily economists. And it's been really driven by historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and an occasional economist. And it's been a very rich, I think, you know, I think it's very much in the spirit of Bob's work in that sense, or his appeals to the profession to try to move in that direction. I'm not convinced we've succeeded at the Heilbrunner Center in creating what we think has the promise to be a kind of new way of talking about economics. But let me get back to the new school training and why it's different. So it's different by insisting on the history of economic ideas. It's different by insisting particularly on studying alternative paradigms of modeling the economy, both at the micro level and the macro level. And this emerges both out of this 1933 tradition of kind of social democratic applied policy thought on how capitalism can be molded to be more democratic and more equitable. But it also is very influenced by the 1970s turn at the new school towards what was called political economy. And that was an infusion of a clear infusion of concerns with Marx and exploitation, race and its relation to class dynamics, gender and stratification in general in the economy. So that move towards the political economy in the 1970s, which brought in a whole slew of really fascinating economists, has really molded the way since then, and that's 50 years. Then we have thought about our relation to the profession and in particular our relation to our students and what our obligation is and what we're trying to accomplish in terms of their training. It's very self-conscious, very aware of the fact that the kind of Marxian tradition, the Keynesian tradition, the Koleckian tradition, these are important alternatives not just to pose as next to a neoclassical or a neocansian paradigm, but to develop and to render relevant for the current moment, to scrutinize and to utilize as lively and as robustly as we utilize the other tools. The new school has now for decades been kind of one of the beacons of alternative thought and deeply theoretical, not just kind of alternative political thought, but deeply interested in theory and not just Marx's theory. If you think of the people who have taught over these years at the new school, and that original group was David Gordon, Anwar Sheikh, Edward Nell, Robert Howe Runner, but then it was supplemented by really interesting thinkers, Alice Amston, John Eatwell, et cetera. I'm sure I'm leaving wonderful people out. Lance Taylor, I should mention, of course, because he's been so integral at INET and is really a deep thinker in this tradition of the new school. What is the continued importance, kind of the relevance today of having a heterodoxy economics department like the new school institutionally grounded, historically insistent on the history and on the theoretical? I think I like to be very optimistic about this, that what has emerged in the first two decades of the 21st century is a kind of renewal of many of the questions that the new school was founded on, and which really drove the new school through these earlier periods that I referred to earlier. They are questions about authoritarianism. They are questions about capitalism and inequality. They are questions about the sustainability in today's world environmentally, in earlier periods, other issues of sustainability, and of course today we have again questions around military conflict and the stability of contemporary society. These are things that drive the new school still, and they always did, and now they are renewed questions. Capitalism was, as Bob Halbrunner used to say, kind of a taboo word for a while. For quite a while it had negative connotations. You couldn't even use the word capitalism. Now you find it everywhere in the popular media. One question is why? I think the answer to that question is that some of the great inequities of capitalism have emerged to such a great extent again that they can't be ignored. Economics has some responsibility to address these. A department of economics that thinks about these big issues, the big questions in relation to economic dynamics and relation, as I insist at both the micro and macro level, is going to play a crucial role again. I think the new school has a very hopeful future precisely because, unfortunately, these big social questions that kind of emerge again around the possible future of capitalism make us again a really important voice within economics and hopefully more broadly in social political thinking.