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Students at Columbia Given College Credit for Organizing Protests!
Students Given College Credit for Attending Nazi Rallies! Teachers College Students Awarded Scholarships for Organizing Communist and Socialist Student Organizations! New College Students First American students to hear Hitler Speak in Person! These would have been inflammatory headlines during the 1930’s. They would have been as controversial in the 1960’s at the height of the Cold War. Yet, despite the powerful images that these stories conjure in the imagination, in essence, each one was true, and in of all places, one of the most prestigious places in the world, Teachers College at Columbia University. |
In 1932, an experimental undergraduate school for the purpose of teacher training was established at Teachers College (TC) during the Great Depression, a period of global, political and socio-economic turmoil. Planted amidst the conservative ivy of Columbia University, “the New College for the Education of Teachers” found itself rooted on the progressively left side of the greenhouse within an emerging social-reconstructivist tradition.
Established under the leadership of Dr. Richard Thomas Alexander (1887-1971), New College, as it became known, was originally designed to operate as an undergraduate college level unit granting a Bachelor of Science and/or a Master’s degree after a period of study from three to five years. It was to serve the dual purpose of preparing young people for teaching positions in elementary and secondary grades and of affording a demonstration college for graduate students in Teachers College. Students would ultimately become professors in colleges and universities with teacher training programs. What the institution evolved into was so much more. It took almost every accepted convention in higher education and rewrote it.
Established under the leadership of Dr. Richard Thomas Alexander (1887-1971), New College, as it became known, was originally designed to operate as an undergraduate college level unit granting a Bachelor of Science and/or a Master’s degree after a period of study from three to five years. It was to serve the dual purpose of preparing young people for teaching positions in elementary and secondary grades and of affording a demonstration college for graduate students in Teachers College. Students would ultimately become professors in colleges and universities with teacher training programs. What the institution evolved into was so much more. It took almost every accepted convention in higher education and rewrote it.
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"Getting ready to teach in the schools of tomorrow is a long and difficult task, there is no royal road to preparation. But the teaching profession takes on a new dignity to those youths who are looking for adventure and are fitted for pioneering; it opens a vista of possibilities which can scarcely be equaled in our modern society."
(Dr. Paul Limbert 1937, on WEAF Radio’s "American Education Forum", a panel discussion with the topic, “How New College Trains the Teachers of Tomorrow”) Among the huddled group of students listening intently in the North Parlor of Whittier Hall a lone voice said, “Pioneers, that’s us.” |
Whittier Hall, Teachers College, Columbia University
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