New School disorientation guide

The campus has been dead for months now, it yearns for the hustle of students running late to class, meeting each other in the courtyard and recanting their nights, marching angrily or partying in the streets. During the summer the administration had the time and space to put everything back in its right place: sandblasting graffiti, installing a Starbucks, closing the 65 5th Avenue building for good, prosecuting and fining rebellious students, sweeping up the broken glass and letting the pepper spray disperse in the air. For the University administrators, the last two semesters were a nightmare, but they are hopeful that with Kerrey’s announcement that he will resign in 2011 (which effectively fooled many into thinking he had already resigned) that the action on campus will calm down. Students will return to focusing on trivial “quality of life” issues such as “greening” the campus and getting more organic food into the cafeteria, so the New School’s return to radicalism will finally come to the end.

What they didn’t count on is the incoming student body actually knowing what they are entering: a war-zone. . . .