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Eugene Lang College Office of the Dean floppy disks

 Record Group
Identifier: NS-02-24-05

Abstract

With roots in earlier undergraduate initiatives at The New School, Eugene Lang College was named in 1985 for its benefactor, establishing for the first time a division at The New School dedicated solely to educating traditional college-age undergraduates. The collection consists of files produced by the Eugene Lang College Dean's Office and saved to floppy disk, covering a range of topics from space allocation to curriculum development to strategic planning, budget projections and faculty salaries.

Dates

  • 1991-2004

Creator

Extent

0.00171 Gigabytes (100 files on floppy disk in WordPerfect for MS-DOS and Microsoft Word formats.)

Language of Materials

English

Scope and Contents

Files generated by deans and staff in the Eugene Lang College Dean's Office related to the administrative and academic operations of the college between 1991 and 2004. Files are typically generated by office staff or by the deans, in particular Deans Bea Banu, the second dean of Eugene Lang College whose tenure ran from 1993 through 2003; and Mary C. Rawlinson, who held a brief tenure in 2003. Topics include salary parity, enrollment, curriculum development, space allocation, budget projections and strategic planning. The files on these disks almost certainly represent only a small fraction of administrative files produced by the dean's office in the years represented in this collection.

Conditions Governing Access

Collection is open for research use. Please contact archivist@newschool.edu for appointment.

Conditions Governing Use

To publish images of material from this collection, permission must be obtained in writing from the New School Archives and Special Collections. Please contact: archivist@newschool.edu.

Historical Note

Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts is the division of The New School university dedicated to solely educating traditional college-age undergraduates in their late teens and early twenties. All other university divisions offer graduate degrees. Although The New School began granting undergraduate degrees in 1944 to serve veterans, the origins of the contemporary Eugene Lang College date to the 1970s.

The program that was to become Lang College originated in 1972 as "Freshman Year at The New School" (no records in the collection date from this era). In this program, high school students enrolled in first-year undergraduate classes to explore different topics and disciplines, and were then expected to transfer as sophomores to another institution for degree completion.

The New School established a four-year, bachelor of arts granting Seminar College in 1975 or 1976. In 1978, the Freshman Year Program and the Seminar College were combined. First year students could then either continue their New School education in the Seminar College or transfer to another institution of higher education.

A substantial donation from philanthropist Eugene Lang precipitated the renaming of the Seminar College to Eugene Lang College in 1985. From 2005 until 2015, the college was renamed as, "Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts." In 2015, the college name changed to "Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts" following a university-wide rebranding.

References

Larrimore, Mark. "The New School's Long Road to a Four-Year College." In Realizing the New School: Lessons from the Past, edited by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore, 80-89. New York: Public Seminar Books, 2020.

The New School for Social Research, 1981. "Self-Study Report: New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Design." https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS010105_000007

Arrangement

Arranged chronologically.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Transferred to The New School Archives by Stephanie Belk, Eugene Lang College Dean's Office, in 2020.

Related Materials

Information about Eugene Lang College will be found in many collections in the New School Archives and Special Collections. Researchers should consult in particular the following collections:

The Eugene Lang College collection (NS.02.24.01) contains a small number of administrative files as well as student-run periodicals; New School Gender Studies minor program records (NS.02.24.02); Eugene Lang College Senior Experience Map Project (NS.02.24.03); Eugene Lang College administrative records and audio recordings (NS.02.24.04); New School course catalogs and bulletins collection (NS.05.01.01) Eugene Lang College series and the New School course descriptions collection (NS.05.02.01); New School marketing and promotional materials (NS.05.08.01) Eugene Lang College series; Ann Snitow faculty records (NS.02.08.01) and Mark Larrimore faculty records (NS.02.09.01); and the New School photograph collection (NS.04.01.01).

Processing Information

Titles that differ from disk inscriptions are based on content of disk.

Title
Guide to the Eugene Lang College Office of the Dean floppy disks
Status
Completed
Author
Jack Wells and New School Archives staff
Date
March 24, 2025
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin