Course Information and Descriptions

The New School Archives does not maintain a comprehensive record of every course ever taught at the university. The presence of documentation depends on several factors:

the year the course was offered
the university division in which the course was offered
the type of document needed (course description or syllabus)
whether departments and schools transferred their documentation to the Archives for preservation

Transcripts

Only the Office of the Registrar at The New School can supply transcripts.

If you are seeking course descriptions or syllabi, once you have a transcript, please use the resources described below to begin a search, or contact The New School Archives staff (archivist@newschool.edu) with the following information:

course title
course code*
semester and year in which the course was taken

*Please note that if you are using course codes to search for information, official university transcripts may differ slightly from codes in the Archives. Specifically, the letter “Z” preceding a code was introduced during a database migration, which also eliminated the last letter of the code as it appears in archival records.

Course Descriptions

Course descriptions are summaries of course content and educational goals. They may include briefly stated information about assignments and readings, but they are not as comprehensive as a syllabus. In the pre-Internet era, course descriptions were often printed in course catalogs.

The following resources can be used to access course descriptions.

New School Archives Digital Collections

Many course catalogs are available through our Digital Collections database. They are keyword searchable, so you can try searching for the name of your course and limiting results by decade. The results will display in chronological order by default:

The New School and New School for Social Research (1919-2011)
Parsons School of Design (1912-2008)
Mannes College/Mannes School of Music (1916-2008)
New School Archives Course Descriptions collection
- This collection primarily covers the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, and may contain course descriptions not present in the larger course catalogs of the 1990s-2000s.

New School Course Description Archive

The New School’s online Course Description Archive contains course descriptions from Fall 2007-the most recent semester. However, many descriptions are missing, even though the course code and title are present in the database. If you locate your course in the database without a description, please contact us (archivist@newschool.edu) and we will examine our back-up files on your behalf.

Contact an Archivist

Not all New School course catalogs are digitized, so our staff may need to consult a physical, print catalog for you and photograph or scan the pages you need. This is especially true for Schools of Public Engagement graduate level catalogs.

Older, pre-1990s catalogs will contain more extensive information about courses, graduation requirements, and academic calendars.

Syllabi

Syllabi are more detailed documents than a course description. They will often include a list of required readings, topics covered in chronological order, assignments, and information about how faculty will assign grades.

There are two large collections of syllabi in the New School Archives:

Parsons School of Design syllabi (Fall 2006-Spring 2014)

This collection is not comprehensive, although we know when a syllabus from this time period is missing. These records are not available online but can be requested from the Archives and sent as email attachments or obtained through a scheduled visit to our reading room.

The Schools of Public Engagement Bachelors Program for Adults and Transfer Students (BPATS) syllabi (1995-2014)

These syllabi are also unavailable online, but Archives staff can conduct a search on your behalf.

For all other syllabus requests, it will likely be necessary to contact the university division using this chart.