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What Students Want. The goal of the New School, says President John Everett, is to "educate adults." The university did not set up undergraduate credit courses until 1944, still has no plans to admit freshmen and sophomores. Currently, its only bachelor-degree candidates are enrolled in the experimental New School College, which offers a two-year program in the humanities and social sciences. The students get no grades, pursue no major, but receive plenty of individual attention, and pass or fail on the basis of interdisciplinary final exams. New School Dean Allen Austill selected the college's seven-man faculty on the basis of what subjects students want, since "faculty interests are not only different from but detrimental to students' interests."
"The machined and polished liberal arts curriculum first developed for the production of ministers, doctors, financial and government people," says President Everett, "is just not applicable in a world that changes so damned fast." Under Everett, former chancellor of the City University of New York, the New School hews to no philosophy except, as he puts it, that "human problems are only going to be solved by the application of highly literate, active intellects."