Eugene Lang College, located in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, is the undergraduate liberal arts division of the New School University. The school grew out of the freshman year program in 1973, and was then called the seminar college for the style of teaching employed therein. In 1985 the college was renamed to the Eugene Lang in the honor of a sizable donation by that worthy.
The school's goal is to actively meet the needs of its students, and teach them to think in a functional fashion. This is advanced by the small class size and "seminar approach to teaching"[1] There are five curriculum groups[2];
- Literature, Writing and the Arts
Literature and Writing speak for themselves. "The Arts" consist of music, art, architecture, photography, cinema, and dance.
- Social and Historical Inquiry
A comparative study of the world's history beginning in the seventeenth century. The core reading list is thought-provoking in itself: "Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Habermas, Polanyi, Schumpeter, and Arendt".
- Mind, Nature and Value
Studies of the mind; Religion, Philosophy, Psychology, Contemporary Archaeology, and Quantitative Reasoning.
- Urban Studies
Urban History, Theory, Public Policy, and Cultural Studies. All urban, all the time.
- Cultural Studies
Including a heavy focus on the Media.
The college provides a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts, which requires one hundred twenty credits, nine or ten courses' worth of which lead to specialized knowledge of a single subject. Eighty-eight of those credits must be in the field of liberal arts.[1]
Physically, the school occupies a space between Eighth and Fourteenth Streets, and between Third and Sixth Avenues, as well as buildings at Fortieth Street (David M Schwartz Fashion Education Center) and Eighty-fifth Street (Mannes College of Music).
References:
Assorted pages on the Eugene Lang College site:
- About Us. (http://www.lang.edu/about/about.cfm)
- Academic Concentrations. (http://www.lang.edu/academics/academics.cfm)
- Our Setting. (http://www.lang.edu/about/location.cfm)