The Liberal Arts+ Task Force (sometimes written out as Liberal Arts Plus) was a short-lived university-wide initiative launched by New School Provost Tim Marshall and President Dwight McBride in September 2020. Soon after the project launched, Provost Marshall passed along responsibility for leading it to his successor, Interim Provost Stephanie Browner, who co-chaired the project with Schools of Public Engagement faculty member Julia Foulkes. Members attending task force meetings included the deans of all five New School colleges, faculty and staff.

Minutes from the kickoff meeting held September 4, 2020 in this collection indicate that Provost Marshall introduced the charge for the task force, stating, "We need a more integrated approach to the Liberal Arts at The New School and this Task Force is charged with generating ideas for how to achieve this."

As soon as the task force began its weekly meetings, members expressed the need for clarification from leadership on terminology and purpose in order to proceed. Frequent requests for clarification from the task force representatives led President McBride to clarify that the purpose of the task force was to outline a restructuring that would merge three of the constituent colleges of The New School—The New School for Social Research (NSSR), Eugene Lang College (Lang), and the School of Public Engagement (SPE)—into one or two colleges. In addition to the task force, New School leadership had also engaged a consulting firm, Huron Consulting, to work on the restructuring.

Task force representatives continued to ask the president what the relevance of the category of “liberal arts” had to the process with which they had been charged, and the extent to which they were to consider financial and administrative constraints, as opposed to purely academic ones, in proposing a merger strategy. Following the October 2020 layoff of 122 New School employees, faculty and staff representatives of Liberal Arts+ wrote President McBride that they were, "firmly resolved that our work cannot be a cover" for changes that the task force had no part in.

An email from the interim provost dated November 2, 2020, disbanded the task force, indicating that the work of the task force would "pause and fold any further work into university-wide strategic planning scheduled to begin in spring 2021."

Source

New School Archives staff used many of the documents in this collection to create this historical note. Liberal Arts+ Task Force records, New School Archives and Special Collections.