A month into The New School’s first entirely online semester, Stephanie Browner officially assumed The New School’s Interim Provost position.
Filling a vacancy left by Tim Marshall, Browner left her long held post as the Dean of Eugene Lang, one that she held amidst the beginnings of the pandemic. During this time, Browner has been involved in every aspect of university administration, from the creation of the Lang Student Emergency Fund to the continuing practice of remote learning.
We spoke with Interim Provost Browner last Monday to discuss her changing roles and what projects she aims to work on as provost, The New School’s remote learning journey, and her own quarantine activities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was conducted via Zoom on October, 19th, 2020 by News Editor Haley Bartel and reporter Emmet White, with university spokesperson Amy Malsin present.
Having been the Dean of Eugene Lang for nine years, how does it feel to be leaving that position and moving to a new one?
Sad, like leaving home. I’ve been a provost and a dean before at another institution. And I wasn’t even necessarily looking to leave that institution, which was also a good match for me. But The New School, they knocked on my door. I love The New School, I always knew about it. I figured someday in my life, I’d end up in New York and suddenly it was possible. And then when I came for my interview, I was never so at ease and being who I am in terms of academic vision and style.
I met students and faculty, and it’s just been a really good match for me. I think we’ve collectively had some real successes, including Journalism+Design. It’s like leaving a home that’s been a really good home for me. I was at Lang as we moved online, but because I love The New School and Tim Marshall was stepping out, President McBride asked me if I would step in. Richard Kessler and I are the longest serving deans at the moment. I have been a provost before, so it seemed appropriate for me to say yes, even if it wasn’t my first choice. I love The New School, and I wanted to help and pitch in. I thought I could bring some of the basic skills to the job.
What does the dean do and what does the provost do?
They’re not dissimilar. The dean thinks constantly about students, curriculum and faculty – and not by herself, but in the community with students and faculty and staff. [Deans] think about how to always make that excellent, nimble, forward looking, and meeting compliance. Interacting with enrollment and admissions. Deans can do it differently. As a dean, my choice was to do a lot of external facing. I did a lot of fundraising, a lot of sort of visioning and facing outward, but then also, still a robust internal facing deep relationships with faculty, their scholarship, their curricular development.
A provost, in some ways, does that, but for the entire university. And that’s when it’s not just a difference in scale. It’s a difference in sort of fundamental work. It’s all students, it’s all the faculty. The provost office was recently restructured, it includes enrollment and student success. It includes the research support offices and the libraries. It’s to be on the president’s leadership team. There’s a similarity, but there’s a massive difference in scale.
What’s entailed in passing the torch? And how’s that learning curve been from scaling up from Eugene Lang to dealing across the university?
There are people who work on these lower down, so there’s a curriculum committee for the whole university. There’s a Faculty Review Committee for the whole university as well as at Lang, for example. Tim Marshall has been a great provost. He’s been in the job for 11 years. Although I officially took the title on October 1, I started basically shadowing him within days after President McBride asking me to do the job, going to all meetings with him virtually, of course. It’s a lot to learn but a lot was familiar to me, and the weight of the responsibility is not unfamiliar to me because I had been a provost at a college where all the academics reported to me. There at that college, I did have responsibility for admissions and enrollment. The registrar reported to me. I worked with the Board of Trustees a lot. So in that way, the scope of the job was not unfamiliar, but I needed to learn the specifics. What are the issues here today, beyond what I know about Lang. Having been here for nine years, I knew Parsons pretty well. You know, the deans work very collaboratively, and spend a lot of time together. I’ve been through two deans at NSSR – Michael Schober, now Will Milberg. I’ve known Joel Towers very well, and now Rachel Schreiber. Richard Kessler and I came in the same year. I’ve put my toes in the water. I had a lot to draw on, but a lot to learn. Tim has been very gracious.
Do you have any projects or opportunities in particular that you’re hoping to work on as Provost?
I have a couple of top order priorities I have in mind. One of them is taking care of our community in a time of crisis. That’s a collective job, no one person does it. Holding ourselves in community through a pandemic, remote learning, a finite financial crisis, layoffs, and so much change when people are weary and just deeply tired. I think you can work on community during a crisis. In fact, crisis can’t be a mode, we have to care about our processes, we have to care about consultation and transparency and connection to one another. I think about that all the time, think about how that can be nurtured in everything I do.
The second thing I think about, and I want to make a sort of top priority in my head – these are, quote unquote, soft skills – but there are things you can do concretely. That would be to make sure social justice, a rich and ongoing sort of engagement with theory and practice, [is] across The New School and everything we do. Whether it’s a meeting about being online or hybrid in the spring, how do you bring that lens? While I was at a college deeply committed to social justice before, my nine years at The New School have given me yet a deeper and richer education in those two little words, in the depth of practice and theory that doesn’t stand still, that we continue to develop. What does it mean to hold on to that when you’re doing non-stop administration? And not just saying the words, but what does it mean to look at every meeting and say, “Hmm, have we asked the question of inclusion and equity? Have we asked about how we’re working in community with one another respectfully?”
How do you think challenges with remote learning so far have played out across each school? How do you think some of these have been remedied so far? How can they continue to be remedied?
I meet with the Deans these days, two or three times a week, all of us in a Zoom meeting to address those [questions]. There are challenges and opportunities that are distinct in every area. Without a doubt, the making and performing areas that need hands on and need to touch things and be with one another poses challenges. We’ve all watched artists across this nation, performers, and makers come up with incredibly creative solutions that may be enhancing the democratization of the arts and culture and making. The New School faculty and deans are participating in that. They are absolutely thinking about what it means to suddenly have things that are open to 700 people from around the globe, whether it’s a lecture, a dialogue, a panel, a performance. And not just sort of superficially attending, but to be involved.
Faculty and students are starting to integrate that, not only as a means of doing their classes, but as something to learn to do, as part of your practice as a maker, a designer, a performer. I think the same goes for the seminar classroom. You both know the seminar classroom well. Yes, Zoom is exhausting, and we’re weary of it. But we also know that it’s interesting because you can see everyone’s name. There might be a kind of egalitarian-ness of the whole Zoom platform that can be different from the classroom. I’m also struck by the fact that we can’t talk over each other. With Zoom, you really have to stop talking. And the next person starts because when people talk over it just kind of collapses, and you can’t hear each other.It’s interesting to have a little shift in that, just the tempo of it.
Would you view any of these differences in learning as benefits of remote learning? Like, would you say that in a way, where we are having some positive effects from being in class online?
I’m very cautious about saying that too eagerly. Because it’s a pandemic… people have lost loved ones. They have lost the ability to do things with loved ones, to get together for someone getting married, for funerals, for births, for weekend gatherings. I mean, there’s great loss, and there’s stress in online learning. There’s a lot of stress and exhaustion associated with it. But there are also these hidden learning opportunities and moments, and to look at them is to find some little joy or something sweet. And how to open that up, I think is one of the possibilities that lies before us.
We all kind of started out last March frenzied about what remote learning was going to look like. What does the successful model for continuing remote learning next semester look like to you?
It’s pulling out the good stuff, attending to the weariness and the exhaustion. Making sure we don’t try to do everything. As a culture, and as a society, we’re addicted to more, and what does less mean? What is a recognition of the pace that is appropriate for the moment? In some ways, we’ve just participated in the biggest experiment in higher education in a century by everyone suddenly going online. The people out in the world have been saying, “You guys should be online, and it’s more efficient, and you can save money.” And so we have the Massive Online Open Courses. Lots of corporations are jumping in and full of ideas, wisdom, and maybe not so much wisdom. This has been a grassroots experiment. And I think that, as an experiment, we’re still in it, but I think people are tweaking and getting better and better at it.
How do you think The New School has done with online learning? Do you think it is close to hitting that successful model? Or is it faltering a little bit? How do you view it’s positives and it’s negatives?
I have sort of anecdotal information, but we’re also assessing this in a robust way. All the colleges are reaching out to students and faculty and saying, “What works? What doesn’t work? When is it failing? When is it succeeding?” What are the elements of that? More than just saying “success” or “failure” is giving the full story of what was successful and what didn’t work and throwing out the things that didn’t work and iterating and improving it. The reports I hear, you know, students came back, they’re enrolled. Yes, we had a tick down and I think a lot of new students said, “I think I’ll take the semester off, I’ll do my gap year now.” But our returning students returned, pretty much as we expected, and we don’t see a high attrition right now. People are finding their way. I think, largely, mostly a success at the level of human commitment to this endeavor. Because to a certain extent, we’re committed to what we do at The New School. The medium has jumbled the process, but it probably hasn’t changed the fundamentals about why a student chooses to be here or why a faculty member chooses to teach here.
For next semester, there’s going to be a slow influx of a hybrid model. What kind of precautions is the university looking towards to have that work next spring and hopefully continue to have it be a possibility for semesters to come?
So in terms of just safety, absolutely top priority. We did a lot of that work for this fall for spaces that students could use for making – the making centers open, rehearsal rooms. Actually, we haven’t even had maximum use of what we offer. So we’re going to continue to do that.
I’m really proud that we made the decision relatively early in the summer. The fact that we’re like, “Are we online?” “Let’s make a decision.” We’re watching all the other universities. And even before that, sort of second spike, then we said, “We’re ready. We’re going online, and it’s the responsible thing to do.” People worried about losing students and revenue, and at some point was just very clear that the science made it clear. I’m just really proud we did, for us, the right thing. Some schools are doing okay, when they’re sort of standalone, and they’re in some areas where they can really control who comes and goes. But we’re in the middle of New York City. We really have to be responsible about health.
So, I’m very curious to know if you succumbed to any of the quarantine trends. Examples are sourdough starter, going on excessive amounts of walks, making whipped coffee, and TV shows.
I did some bread-making and I’ve stopped doing that. I’ve done that on and off my whole life, though. I mean, one thing I’m not sure you won’t put it in the article, but I got COVID. I had it. I had it early, in late March, just as the city shut down. I had a mild case. I did not get tested at the time.
Do you know where you got it from?
I think from my husband, who got it from a client. We think we’ve traced it. He had fever for about eight days. I had a fever for about five. We weren’t certain and we didn’t want to go to our doctors to get tested. The city was going crazy. I’m not sure if you guys were in the city then, but it was heartbreaking. I live in Brooklyn and there were nonstop sirens. It was exhausting and we were sick. At about day 12 we lost our senses of smell completely. We were feeling better, and I suddenly realized, as I was making coffee, I said, “I can’t smell the coffee.” I put my nose into the bag, zero smell. I put blue cheese up to my face, zero smell. It’s only now coming back. We got the antibody tests, and we both have antibodies, so we definitely had it. So that was kind of my COVID hobby – actually having it.
The other thing I do is I have a dog and I spent an hour and a half every morning in Prospect Park with her. Out by about 6, home by about 7:30. We do the whole park, we jump, I do agility training with her. I make her put her paws on different things. So I do dog training in the park on my own.
And just one last question pertaining to some of your personal work, which work of Charles Chesnutt should one begin with?
I would recommend the Marrow of Tradition. It’s his second novel. It’s the fourth or fifth book he published, he had collections of short stories. It’s really an important book because it is a novel version of the 1898 Wilmington race massacre. For years I’ve been wanting someone to make a movie of this novel – it is like, just ripe for being turned into a movie.
This work is not just about knowing Chestnutt, it’s about knowing our past. And if you know the past really differently than we’ve tended to know what 30 years ago, the future can be different. And I am a deep believer in that. And novels are a quite great way to know the past through this sort of vision and imagination of different people from different walks of life. It’s a great novel about a critical moment in US history that school kids in Wilmington, North Carolina were not taught about until very recently, as part of the things we’ve hidden.