“Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
—Hamlet, Act One, Scene Five
When I began this endeavor, I was concerned that it might lack the tension and conflict that appear to be the essential ingredients of contemporary life and literature. Within the brief span of two years, that problem was solved for me by one of the personae of these pages who is not one of its heroes.
In the fall of 2003, as I neared the end of a ten-year decanal tenure, I decided that, having fulfilled my promise to launch the Actors Studio Drama School—by a multiple of ten over my initial intention of a year—the time had come to relinquish the tiller.
I had stayed ten times longer than I had planned because, to put it simply, I had fallen deeply in love with the school and its students. Since, uniquely among the university’s deans, I governed a school that was a partnership between two institutions, The New School for Social Research and the Actors Studio, and was a senior faculty member of one, as dean, and a vice president of the other, I was once challenged in a debate over my annual budget submission to the university with “Which side are you on, the university’s or the Studio’s?” to which I replied, “Neither. The students’.” The most important lesson I learned in my decade in the academy was that, at every moment of my working life, the students were my constituency.
Decades ago, I bought a small, framed antique slate, and found a place for it in my study, on the wall facing my desk. From time to time I glanced at it: Confronted with a genuine tabula rasa, I wondered what it ought to say. Then one day, shortly after saying no to a tempting offer that I couldn’t in good conscience say yes to, I rose abruptly, crossed to the slate, and wrote on it, “This soul is not for sale.” I thought at first that I liked the invention for the consonantal rhyme of soul and sale, but within moments I realized I’d gone to the blackboard to inscribe once and for all the lesson learned in the city room of the Detroit Times. That makes me sound a great deal more virtuous than I am, but the fact is it has proven to be a useful reminder at a number of crossroads, like the one that lies ahead in these final pages.
When our master’s degree program became the seventh division of the university in its first year, I signed for the standard five-year term asked of every dean. At the end of the first contractual term, the university offered me another five-year contract. On the theory that it was important for both parties to begin considering succession, I insisted on a three-year term. At the end of the eighth year, our school was in the midst of a move into the new quarters for which I’d campaigned from the day of our arrival, so I agreed to another year; and when that time had elapsed, I accepted a final one-year appointment, in order that the negotiations between the university and the Studio for a renewal of the ten-year agreement that had created the school would begin on my watch.
I pressed for appointment of my successor during my final year, so that the new dean’s tenure and mine would overlap, making me available to my successor to the extent that my counsel was needed or wanted. On March 1, my successor was put in place, and on May 4, 2004, the dinner following the school year’s final board of trustees meeting was marked by an unusual and, as it would turn out, prophetic occurrence, the simultaneous retirement of four of the university’s seven deans: 60 percent of the senior faculty, gone in a day. The fifth would be gone in a matter of months, and the dean who replaced Dean Banu, who retired May 4, would vanish after three months.
Something was afoot and increasingly amiss. Nineteen ninety-nine had marked a sea change when, after seventeen years as president of The New School for Social Research, Jonathan Fanton left the university to become president of the MacArthur Foundation, the institution famous for, among many other things, its “genius grants,” and in February 2001, former Nebraska governor and senator Bob Kerrey succeeded him.
Fanton had observed that Inside the Actors Studio had affected enrollment in every one of the university’s divisions, and Kerrey acknowledged the advantage of a television series that began each episode in eighty-four million American homes and 125 countries with the legend “New School for Social Research” and subsequently, when the name was changed, “New School University” superimposed on the opening shot, and a frame with the university’s Web site in the closing credits—exposure that would have been beyond any university’s means, if it were for sale.
In the three years between Bob Kerrey’s arrival and my departure, he and I developed what appeared to be a close friendship, on and off the campus. In this respect, I was unique among the deans. Bob, a man of impressive political gifts and considerable charisma, had nevertheless inspired famously mixed reactions among his congressional colleagues, where he earned the sobriquet “Cosmic Bob.” He quickly imposed an equally unsettling imprint on the university, especially among the deans who inveighed against him with escalating fervor in our weekly dean’s luncheons.
On March 11, 2002, a year into Bob’s tenure, the growing tension between him and the academic community over which he presided spilled into the Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article announcing the resignation of one of Bob’s first recruits, Kenneth Prewitt, dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, after less than a year in the position, in order, in Kerrey’s explanation to the community, “to focus on his research.”
“Students of the graduate school,” the article continued, “said they believed that Mr. Prewitt had resigned in protest of what they view as the administration’s shortchanging of the Graduate Faculty.”
In American Prospect Online, under the headline, KERREY’S QUAGMIRE and the subhead, THE FORMER SENATOR AND NEW PRESIDENT OF THE NEW SCHOOL TURNS THE LEGENDARY INSTITUTION INTO A FREE-FIRE ZONE, Scott Stossel wrote, “On the afternoon of Friday, March 15, the last day before spring break, New School University President Bob Kerrey made one of his periodic star turns on the Tishman Auditorium’s stage.” After reviewing the escalating conflict, Stossel wrote, “When students kept asking if Kerrey knew why Prewitt had resigned, Kerrey finally said, ‘Well, why don’t you ask Dean Prewitt directly. Ken?’”
According to the account, Prewitt twice asked Kerrey, “Are you sure you want me to do this?”
Reporting that “Kerrey told him to go ahead,” the article relates that Prewitt said “he was resigning because it seemed to him that that the administration had its academic and financial priorities reversed, and risked subordinating intellectual values to market values. Someone asked for an example. Prewitt, looking pained, said that one particularly egregious example was a proposal by the provost to have ‘private bonuses’ issued to deans who boosted the tuition-paying enrollment of their divisions—the size of each bonus commensurate with the number of students a dean could bring in. This, to Prewitt’s way of thinking, was tantamount to placing a cash value on each student; each division would have to place profit over learning.
“Kerrey then swept across the stage and grabbed the mike from Prewitt. ‘You know whose idea the “private bonuses” were?’ he asked. ‘Mine.’ There was an audible gasp from the crowd—the university president had just admitted, in effect, that he saw dollar signs on his students. And Kerrey continued, ‘I concede now that it was a bad idea. But it was not my first appalling idea. Nor will it be my last.’”
He was as good as his word. In Bob’s first five years, he went through more than a dozen deans and all but one of the university’s senior officers, and shuffled three provosts. The New School became such a swiftly spinning revolving door that, in my last year as dean, I who had begun as a neophyte professional academic ten years before, and was still scrambling up the learning curve, was now in a position of time-served seniority over every academic and administrative officer of New School University—which led me to feel sometimes like Groucho Marx, who wasn’t sure he wanted to belong to any club that would have him as a member.
At the May 4, 2004, board of trustees dinner, each of the retiring deans was saluted and presented with gifts. In my case, there was an additional honor—a significant one for which I was, and am, grateful. When my turn came, Bob announced that at the board meeting, the trustees had voted to present me with the university’s highest honor, the Founders Medal.
I include the citation in this account not out of vanity—though, to be as honest as my Inside the Actors Studio guests, I wouldn’t put it past me—but to set the stage for what was to follow.
The resolution, which was signed by Bob Kerrey as president and Philip Scaturro as chair of the board of trustees, read in part:
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of James Lipton’s service to New School University, first as founding chair of the Master of Fine Arts program in dramatic arts; then as the first Dean of the Actors Studio Drama School, following its establishment as the seventh school of the University; and from 1994 to the present, as creator, producer, writer, researcher and host of “The Craft Seminar,” Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, which has provided a training-ground for the school’s students and brought the University into millions of homes in the United States and worldwide.
Jim’s ideas and achievement have transformed the educational landscape of this University. Embodying the New School’s historic commitment to the performing arts, he played the lead role in establishing what is today the nation’s most distinctive, prominent and largest graduate drama school. Together with members of the Actors Studio, including Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn and Arthur Penn, he implemented his vision of a unique collaboration between the Actors Studio and the New School to provide the highest-level training to aspiring actors, directors and playwrights. In an environment where new educational ventures often fail, Jim has been an enormous success as dean. In just ten years, he created an innovative three-year, professional MFA curriculum, developed the program from 59 students in 1994 to more than 200 students by 1996, sustaining this enrollment ever since while at the same time continually improving quality; built a distinguished roster of longstanding faculty that has included Ellen Burstyn, Lee Grant, Romulus Linney and Lloyd Richards; and was instrumental in securing a home for the program within the Westbeth Artists community.
A paragraph of the resolution described the history of Inside the Actors Studio, and the document concluded with:
Teacher, actor, director, producer in theater, television and film, playwright, choreographer, lyricist, screenwriter, author of fiction and non-fiction books, equestrian, pilot, and recipient of the French Republic’s Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Jim’s accomplishments astound. For Jim’s pioneering spirit, which recalls the venerable tradition of Alvin Johnson, the New School’s first President, for being an inspiring leader who has been deeply committed to the excellence and success of the school, for being a dedicated educator who cares deeply about his students, for furthering the arts in the United States and abroad, and agreeing to continue to serve the University as Dean Emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School, the Board of Trustees and the University community are eternally grateful.
I presume to include the citation because anyone who has read these pages knows that it is not an account of what I achieved, but rather The New School’s salute to what we achieved—all of us, faculty, administration and students of the Actors Studio Drama School.
And I include it because, within a few weeks of signing his name to the words of the citation—words I took then, and take now, to be a sincere and truthful expression of the university’s view of what we’d built with our hearts and minds and souls and muscle and sweat for The New School—Bob Kerrey presided over the systematic dismantling of the product of our labors.
One of the many ironies of the weeks that followed the trustees dinner was a letter I received the morning after the dinner from Jonathan Fanton that read in part, “It pains me not to be present at the board dinner in your honor this week. I would very much like to celebrate you and one of the most remarkable and creative stories of institution-building I have ever seen.
“I count the partnership between the New School and the Actors Studio as one of the two or three most important developments during my 17 years as President. You have been generous in your comments on my role, but you are the genius (not a word MacArthur uses lightly) who had the vision, the diplomatic skill, the patient determination, the unbending devotion to quality and the stamina to make it happen. The combination of high aspirations, decency, fairness and kindness made the school a supportive community. I can feel it when I walk into a room of students. That accomplishment is a tribute to your character and it will endure.”
Again, knowing what I know about who did what (there is no coquettish modesty in this: Every brick of the Actors Studio Drama School bears an assortment of fingerprints), I took Jonathan’s letter as an acknowledgment of a collective achievement. For ten years, the Actors Studio Drama School was one of the most stable divisions of the university, reaching its annual target of eighty admissions while achieving one of the lowest, hence most desirable, selectivity ratios in the university; maintaining the university’s lowest attrition rate at less than six percent; reconciling each year’s budget within a margin of one percent; delivering every year’s projected net fund surplus without fail—and transmitting the drama school’s and The New School’s message to America and the world on Inside the Actors Studio.
But Jonathan’s confident prediction that the Actors Studio Drama School of New School University “will endure” was wrong. In the academic world and outside it, countless uncomprehending voices have asked, “How could this have happened?” No one, with the exception, of course, of Bob Kerrey, can answer that question—and I now have reason to suspect that his answer would be no more reliable than the one he offered when Ken Prewitt resigned: to “focus on his research”; but here, in brief and with admitted bias, is my view of the causal chain of events (I end as I began, with a determinist stance) that led Bob and his deputies to take a pile driver to the Actors Studio Drama School.
The dean who followed me was the candidate I favored—though academic custom precludes a dean from naming his successor, so I was at a distance from the selection. It is not Bob Kerrey’s fault that my immediate successor, who, although a member of the Studio and a longtime teacher in our school, found the managerial duties of the deanship so overwhelming that he resigned within three months, opening a door to Bob and his newly appointed provost, Arjun Appadurai, who began his relationship with the Actors Studio Drama School with seemly modesty, professing ignorance of our history, our philosophy, our curriculum and faculty; then promptly reappeared on the school’s doorstep with a “Special Advisor,” who was not a Studio member but would, in the words of Bob’s formal announcement of the appointment, “assure the highest standards of administrative efficiency and academic rigor during the search for a new Dean for the School.”
Bob’s announcement was followed quickly by a more specific, and faintly ominous, memo to the school from the provost: “I am writing to clear up some understandable confusions about lines of authority as between ASDS Chairs and my Office. The Special Advisor to the Provost for Dramatic Arts has the full authorities (sic) to make all decisions affecting the School until a new dean is appointed. This includes all personnel, budget and curriculum matters, as well as related budgetary and fiscal issues.”
The memo instructed the school to make its “best efforts to respect this line of reporting and communication so as to avoid the unintended impression that you do not accept or trust her judgement (sic). She has the 100% support of Bob Kerrey and myself in this important transition and is full of enthusiasm for her role in the ASDS.”
Whether by chance or design, the provost displayed ignorance of the original contract between the two institutions, which provided, at the New School’s insistence, that the director of the MFA program must be a member of the Studio. The purpose of that provision was, of course, to ensure that The New School would acquire what it was seeking: an MFA drama program created and operated by the Actors Studio.
With “the 100% support” of the president and the provost, the Special Advisor set to with the promised enthusiasm for her role, methodically replacing the Actors Studio Drama School administrators; and, with them, the schools institutional memory.
With a single exception, the school’s entire playwriting department was fired by the Special Advisor or resigned in protest. In his letter of resignation to the Advisor, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Lee Blessing wrote, “The recent record of administrative decisions at ASDS doesn’t suggest to me that rationality (or even good sense) has been the highest priority involved. I no longer feel I can trust anything that is told me by the powers that be at ASDS. That’s why I have no interest in returning. May we all see better times.”
For the first time in the school’s history, the faculty fell into warring camps, and what had been the university’s most stable division, in faculty, administration and student body, spiraled into anomie. One group of teachers, composed principally of those who had been brought in after my tenure and were therefore untainted by experience with, or even knowledge of, the school that was so respectfully described in the Board of Trustees Resolution, was loyal—and wholly beholden—to the Special Advisor. The second group comprised those who had participated in and built the program during its first ten years. What some in the new group apparently took as the Advisor’s undisguised preference for them emboldened the more ambitious of them, possibly sensing advancement and profit, to launch attacks against the founding teachers.
On February 9, 2005, 112 Actors Studio Drama School students signed their names to a petition to the university that read, “The Special Advisor to the Provost, who is not a member of the Actors Studio, has made changes without consulting or obtaining the support of the creators of the program. Because of these changes we have lost the core philosophy of the Actors Studio and the integrated approach of the training, which are two reasons we all entered this school. We also chose to attend the ASDS because it offers the establishment of a relationship with the Actors Studio following graduation. This benefit is now in jeopardy.
“This petition is to let the administration know that we will not sit by while they make changes without the Studio’s or our input or consent. This petition is also to let the administration know that we did not come here to go to the New School of Drama; we came here to go to the Actors Studio Drama School because we believe in that for which it stands.”
Bob’s response was a series of meetings with the students. At the students’ insistence, the meetings were openly tape-recorded, for use in a student class-action lawsuit against the university. At one of the meetings, a student asked Bob, “It’s not guaranteed we will all graduate from the Actors Studio Drama School, right?”
“Well, here’s—you’re surfacing a very sensitive issue,” Bob replied, “one that we haven’t—frankly, we didn’t pay as much attention to as we should. It was a mistake to tell you that this is the Actors Studio Drama School. It’s not. It’s New School University’s Drama School.”
The room erupted into angry protest, which was interrupted by Kerrey with “You can argue with me about this all you want. You asked me a question. I gave you a truthful answer. If you want me to lie to you, if that’s what you’re asking me to do, then I will lie to you.”
A student responded, “Where is our money back for our credits lost, that the actors got shorted on this year? Where is the rebate for the workshop that was stolen from the first-year students? And I do say stolen. This is expensive. This is a hundred thousand dollars. Right now, this is not a hundred-thousand-dollar institution. Would Yale School of Drama have as many applicants if it was New Haven School of Drama? No. And that’s why the name is important.”
In the days that followed, the students were so incensed that they began demonstrating in front of the school’s Westbeth building, where the Special Advisor was headquartered, drawing the attention of the media and finally forcing Bob Kerrey’s hand: On March 2, 2005, Bob sent a memo to the school informing it that “the Special Advisor to the Provost for the Arts has asked to resume her advisory role in the Office of the Provost,” which effectively ended her tenure at the school.
But the Actors Studio Drama School remained an occupied territory in constant turmoil, with the students, in a meeting with Kerrey, demanding to know whether the university was still advertising itself to applicants as the Actors Studio Drama School.
A short time later, at a negotiating meeting with the Studio, Bob insisted that the Studio’s representatives permit him to send a “positive” acceptance letter to the fall applicants, promising them, among other things, a guarantee of Studio Observer and Working Finalist status upon graduation, two of the central program elements that arrived with the Studio, and would leave with it if the negotiations failed.
The Studio’s representatives replied that the moment the contract was concluded, a positive letter could be sent. Until then, the Studio contended, it would not be complicit in what it viewed as a deception.
Bob argued heatedly that the Studio’s position on his letter indicated a lack of trust in him, a cardinal sin in the new New School environment, and Bob’s most frequently voiced theme—to the deans, the Studio, the students, to any potential transgressor. The Studio’s position was that the policy had nothing to do with Kerrey, but everything to do with the welfare of the incoming students, and expressed the hope that the matter would be moot if the two parties could come to terms.
The fact was that at that point there were no outstanding academic or financial items in dispute between the parties. In the wake of the Special Advisor debacle and the student protests, the university’s negotiators had returned to the aims and structure of the original contract—to the point where the lawyers for both sides had been instructed to prepare a final contract for signing, and two Studio members were interviewed by Bob for the chairmanship of what both sides agreed should be an MFA program, rather than a New School division, obviating yet another decanal search.
Bob proposed that during the upcoming weekend he would make a final choice of one of the two applicants, both of whom, he said, had impressed him. On Saturday of that weekend, an article appeared in The New York Times, under the headline BOB KERREY WEIGHING RUN FOR MAYOR OF NEW YORK. In the article, when Kerrey told the reporters, “You know me, I am just crazy enough to do this,” he was reminded by them that he had accepted the chairmanship of Democrats for Bloomberg. The Times reported, “‘That is exactly right,’ he said last night. But he said that he began having second thoughts almost as soon as he had accepted. He said that he had not informed Mr. Bloomberg that he was thinking of running for mayor, or that he had decided against heading the committee. ‘I guess they know now,’ he said.”
The Times account included what turned out to be an omen. “Mr. Kerrey, 61, said that he just signed a contract extending his stay at the New School through 2011, but that he could break it if necessary.”
On Monday, the day of Bob’s promised choice of a program chair, the Studio’s lawyer reported that her calls to the New School’s lawyers were going unanswered, as were the negotiators’ calls to Bob. On Tuesday morning, Bob called Ellen Burstyn and Bob Wankel, who had led the Studio’s negotiating team, to tell them that he no longer wanted a partner, and would create his own school.
His announcement to the “The New School University Community” stated, “As you know, the University has been in negotiations with The Actors Studio for some time regarding the governance of the drama program. Yesterday a decision was made not to continue a contractual relationship with The Actors Studio as part of its master’s program in drama. The University will operate its drama MFA as the New School for Drama.”
His announcement to the Actors Studio Drama School students promised them, “Your faculty will not change as a result of the transition,” and “Your curriculum will not change as a result of the transition.” Both changed profoundly.
The heart and soul of the Actors Studio Drama School faculty resigned, even though the attenuated negotiation effectively prevented the Studio from reestablishing itself at another institution in the fall of 2005. The teachers who resigned paid a grievous financial price, giving up seniority and security for a principle and unemployment. Andreas Manolikakis’s letter of resignation summed up the feelings of all of them, beginning, “I have been a member of the Actors Studio since 1987. I consider myself a product of this institution,” and concluding, “I cannot in good conscience work with the people who participated in the destruction of the ASDS. There is no money or position that can make me betray my own home.”
Kerrey’s about-face with the Studio put him back in familiar territory. On April 21, under the headline KERREY RILES UP NEW SCHOOL, the New York Post reported, “Bob Kerrey flopped before he could flip as a mayoral candidate by bowing out before he was even in the race. Now some colleagues at New School University, where he’s president, have gotten fed up with Kerrey’s capriciousness. ‘The guy’s out of control,’ one member of the university’s board of governors told Page Six. ‘After renewing his contract till 2011, he threw his name into the mix as a candidate to chair the Democratic National Committee, to head Democrats for Bloomberg, then to run for mayor of New York. Now he has decided to stay at the New School. Until when?’”
Writing that Kerrey “‘forced out’ well-respected dean Ann-Louise Shapiro and trustee Anne Ehrenkranz,” and “ended an affiliation with the Actors Studio and James Lipton, star of the long-running Bravo show Inside the Actors Studio,” the Post quoted its New School source again. “Kerrey ‘pulled the plug on the Actors Studio, a major strategic move, when his own credibility is in tatters,’ the insider fumed.”
The next day, the Post followed up with “Students at the prestigious Actors Studio demanded answers from New School president Bob Kerrey yesterday about the future relationship between the acting school and the university. Chanting, ‘Hey, Hey, B. K., how many schools did you kill today?’ and carrying signs that urged Kerrey to ‘Go run for mayor, Bob!’ roughly 50 drama students protested in front of the school, demanding that the Vietnam vet and mayoral near-contender give them a straight answer. ‘He has changed his stance time after time—just like he did last week in his position on running for mayor. We can’t get a clear answer,’ said Adam Kee, 22, a first-year student in the drama school. ‘It’s really sickening what he’s doing.’”
“At issue is how the drama graduate program will be managed,” the article concluded, “since Kerrey cut contractual ties with the venerable acting school last year. Students say they don’t even know which institution’s name will be printed on their degrees, or whether New School courses will count toward credit totals. Several said the deal felt like a bait-and-switch scam. The New School, however, says the program will continue on as always, but with a different name: The New School for Drama.”
On the last day of June 2005, after nearly eleven years on Twelfth Street, I packed the contents of my office and left The New School. So did the Actors Studio Drama School.
What did The New School lose that day? Our curriculum, Bob Kerrey’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding; our senior core faculty, with more than a hundred collective years of Actors Studio experience; the Studio’s history, reputation and knowledge; the unique side-by-side training of our actors, writers and directors, which was one of the first targets of the new regime; a fully produced repertory season, designed to present our graduating actors to the professional community and the public in five or six roles, and the work of our playwrights and directors in as many offerings, five times a week for twelve to fifteen weeks; the privilege extended to our students of observing the Studio’s sessions periodically for three years; as many as forty Inside the Actors Studio experiences in each student’s time with us; the Actors Studio’s name—and cachet—on their diplomas; working Finalist status at the Studio for every graduate, providing an additional year of postpostgraduate training; and the opportunity for membership in the Actors Studio, providing, to the extent the graduate wishes, a lifetime of continuing training in our craft…all of it sacrificed on the altar of a self-esteem so self-assured that it couldn’t countenance what it could never comprehend.
Of course it’s possible that I overvalue the Studio’s offerings, but I will always wonder: For what grand, superior principle did Bob Kerrey and his adherents jettison them? What did Kerry and Arjun Appardurai know about the theatrical arts that the Studio collectively didn’t know, and what part of “transformed the educational landscape of this University” and “the nation’s most distinctive, prominent and largest graduate drama school” did they fail to understand—or elect to renounce?
Mr. Appadurai’s view of us quickly became irrelevant, since his brief tenure as provost barely outlasted the Actors Studio Drama School. In another rumbling of tumbrels that would also take down Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic of The New York Times and The New Yorker, two years after his appointment by Kerrey as dean of The New School’s Parsons School of Design, Arjun Appadurai’s resignation was announced by President Kerrey on January 30, 2006.
As I have set this account down, I have been struck forcibly by a remarkable irony that wasn’t apparent to me as events were unfolding in 2004. In March 1996, the Studio and I, wielding the invaluable “no,” walked away from the Bravo network and Inside the Actors Studio, rather than accede to the focus-group person’s bidding that we eliminate from the series the students, the school and New School University. It remained for President Bob Kerrey, eight years later, to fulfill the focus group’s goal of driving Inside the Actors Studio out of The New School, and The New School out of Inside the Actors Studio.
Bob Kerrey’s New School for Drama continues to walk a tightrope, delicately balanced between proclaiming the superiority of its vision and, in every one of its publications, offering, as evidence of it, long lists of “alumni of the New School for Drama” who have gone on to accomplishment and acclaim. The problem is that none of the “alumni” in their lists attended The New School for Drama, which, as of the writing of these words, has yet to graduate a single student who wasn’t admitted by the Actors Studio Drama School, and trained from 1994 to 2004 by the teachers The New School cavalierly pushed aside.
In The New School for Drama’s zeal to proclaim its difference from the Actors Studio Drama School and, simultaneously and paradoxically, claim continuity with it, they have even had the hubris to publish, in memoriam, a proprietary tribute to former Yale Drama School dean Lloyd Richards, whom I persuaded to come to New York when he had graduated from the university we attended together, and whom I brought into the Actors Studio Drama School after his distinguished career at Yale. Lloyd left The New School with us and, though he was the gentlest of men, thereafter referred frequently and fiercely to Bob Kerrey and our New School successors as “dream-killers.”
Early in this journey, I admitted that “simply saying ‘truth’ doesn’t answer inevitable questions: It asks them. Whose truth—and to what end?” So, I admit readily that this account of the events that ended a ten-year dream may be colored by a bias that was succinctly expressed by, and that I share with, Dean Richards.
Nevertheless, I would submit that it is not colored by sour grapes or bitterness. For two reasons. First, because what the Actors Studio Drama School accomplished for ten years can’t be erased: It lives in The New School’s Founders Medal and, most important, in our graduates. And second, because The New School, however unwittingly, did the Studio the inestimable service of launching it toward a remarkably happy outcome, which will serve as the end of this journey—and the beginning of a new one.