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In May 1970, students at Parsons School of Design sent an invitation to President Nixon to attend the opening of their exhibition, My God! We’re Losing a Great Country. An expression of their distress and loss of faith in the administration, the exhibition was a direct response to the Kent State shootings, and in solidarity with the National Student Strike. The White House sent a telegram of regret.
The year had not been without event at the university—only in February, a merger had been effected joining Parsons with The New School. Three months later, graduating students were hard at work getting ready for their end of year showcase at Parsons’ uptown building. For the nation, these had been years of tumultuous protest—against the war in Vietnam, and for civil rights and women’s rights—but by the end of 1969, even a disillusioned and shocked population had hopes that the troops would be withdrawn. Nixon’s announcement, on April 30th, 1970, of the expansion of the war into Cambodia was perceived as a reversal. Four days later, the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio shot, killed and wounded unarmed students. Campuses across the country exploded, calling for a nation-wide strike.
On May 7, at Parsons, 650 students voted not only to suspend classes but also to cancel the end of year show that they felt would be a ‘travesty’ at this time; instead, the students mounted a radically different exhibition, demonstrating how “an academic institution can function in dissent at the height of its productive powers,” as the Parsons dean phrased it. Created over four feverish days by students, faculty and administrators, it included posters, graphics, photographs, drawings, sculpture and installations. Fierce, direct and anguished, the swift-grown exhibition packed a “crude socko,” as one critic put it.
During the same period downtown, student-organizing committees, with the initial support of the faculty and the administration, had turned The New School Graduate Faculty’s new home, 65 5th Avenue, into a center for rallying protest. Over the course of the next 20 days, however, the university’s perception of student ferment went from legitimate action to disruptive occupation. It ended in the removal of students from the building by the police at the request of the administration.
The 5th Avenue building was also home to The New School Art Center whose director, Paul Mocsanyi, had a progressive bent, organizing exhibitions on provocative social and political themes. He invited the Parsons students to re-mount their exhibition downtown.
Critics writing about the My God! lamented its limited impact outside the university as they recognized the political potential of techniques of persuasion. Within the school itself, the powerful possibilities of this moment of merger—of art, design and politics—would be unclear for a long while. The strategies of the two student bodies, uptown and downtown, were distinct—one deploying its arsenal of art, design and visual methods to serve a political rather than a corporate end, and the other, enlisting its training in politics and theory toward political organizing and demonstration. This historical episode prefigures The New School’s current commitment to the intersections of design and social research.
Can multi-disciplinary training encourage more effective social and political intervention? Is the university, as an institution, able to handle the far-reaching effects of its own education on the students? What are the limits of productive and effective forms of student dissent?