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Dear Gallatin Parents:

I am delighted to welcome first-year parents of the Class of 2024 and parents of new transfer students to our Gallatin community, and also to welcome back parents of continuing students. I hope to have a chance to see you in the Fall, perhaps even in person! But certainly we will be in close touch. 

I imagine that you may have some questions about what the Fall semester will be like at NYU. The coronavirus pandemic has truly presented such an international and national disaster that NYU along with all other universities has had to make dramatic shifts to many of our teaching modes and expectations for the Fall semester. Nonetheless, we look forward to a very exciting Fall, and I am happy to tell you about it.

First, we are planning an online information session for you as Gallatin parents, which will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, July 29, at 12 noon New York time (EDT). I will be leading the session, and several other deans and faculty members will be present. So we will be able to answer your questions in real time then. RSVP here for the information session on the NYU Experience in Fall 2020.

Here are some updates that may be useful to you:

Across NYU, courses will be offered in three modes of instruction: in-person, blended, and online. Gallatin students will find an intellectually challenging mix of in-person seminars (including small classes and tutorials, some arts workshops and some larger interdisciplinary seminars); blended classrooms (in which some instruction will be online and some in person, often by rotating groups of students), and fully remote or online classes. The online courses and the blended classes help us with the space problems created by the need to maintain social distancing in classrooms, which has radically shrunk the number of students who can fit into our usual seminar rooms. About two-thirds of Gallatin courses will be fully online—the percentage of online courses varies some across NYU but most schools are about like ours. In the College of Arts and Sciences and the Stern School of Business, for instance, all lecture classes larger than 30 students will be moved to online instruction, though some recitation sections will be in person. I include a list of some examples of Gallatin courses so you can get a feel of the different kinds of options described below my signature.

Your student can find the mode of instruction listed on Albert (our course registration system) and, for Gallatin courses, on the Gallatin course website ) by clicking the expanded description of each course. Towards the bottom you will see the mode of instruction listed if it is online or blended. Continuing students can revise their schedules if they wish starting this week. Entering Gallatin first-year students register at 11 am on July 21, though first-year students have been having advising meetings last week and this week to help them select their courses and get ready for registration.

NYU is launching a new Big Ideas course series in Fall 2020. These large online courses are being offered by some of NYU’s leading faculty members and engage pressing and timely themes. The courses are open to all students. Students can find them on Albert using the “Academic Threads” filter on the right-hand side of the Course Search page. As parents, you can read more about these courses here.

During the Fall semester, we are planning to generate a lot of lively online social opportunities for students, and we also plan to prioritize in-person social activities, including creating affinity groups so students have more chances to meet each other. By necessity these groups will be small, as we need to maintain social distancing, and many of our available meeting places in Gallatin can only accommodate 7-8 students with social distancing. Nonetheless, we want to do everything possible to provide some interesting in-person opportunities for students.

These affinity groups can participate in co-curricular activities with field trips to museums and other New York landmarks—the Metropolitan Museum just announced it will open on August 29, for instance!—and we will also offer field trips that are online to visit collections and museums not yet available to the public. This inspiring in-person and online programming will go along with our dedicated academic advising and mentoring.

To help students begin to get ready for the fall, our Dean of Students and Advising offices have been offering a series of workshops this Summer on registration and course selection, as well as student spotlights where new students can talk with current students who represent a given interest group. Faculty have also been running information sessions about their areas of expertise, such as music , politics and philosophy , and fashion . All of these online activities can serve as a kind of orientation welcome to students and a chance for students to get to know each other online before they even arrive. If you are interested in learning more about these sessions, you can sign up to receive the weekly newsletter listing the events organized by Patrick McCreery, our Associate Dean of Students, our director of community engagement, assistant director of student life, and advisers when you RSVP for the Information Session .

A top priority for the University and Gallatin is to ensure the health and safety of faculty, staff, and students . At Gallatin, this includes maintaining social distancing throughout our building and throughout all NYU classrooms, staggering the start times of our in-person classes so that elevators and stairways do not have too many students (only four people at a time will be allowed in our elevators, so we will be encouraging the use of the stairs, as well as putting many of our classes on the first floor); requiring that students wear masks at all times in classrooms and common areas, and holding most workshops and meetings virtually. As you have heard in communications from the University, across all of NYU masks will be required, and students will be asked to live up to a serious set of social expectations which the University is summing up in our “ Keep Each Other Safe ” campaign. To make the University safe, everyone has to contribute, and we know the students will live up to our expectations in this regard.

Students who requested University housing will receive information about their housing for next year by next week, if they have not already heard. We have made the dorms less dense, eliminated all triple-occupancy rooms, provided rooms for quarantining, and provided many more single rooms than usual. If you have a student who applied for housing and has decided not to take it, the deadline for withdrawing and getting your deposit back is July 20.

Our first welcome back event will be our undergraduate Convocation where entering first-year and new transfer students and Gallatin faculty will discuss the book selected for NYU Reads this year,  Just Mercy , by NYU Law Professor Bryan Stevenson. Convocation will be held the morning of Tuesday, September 1, the day before the Fall semester begins. First-year students should shortly receive information from Yevgeniya Traps , the first-year class adviser, about how to access this book online, and we will inform our transfer students as well. Students who will be living in the dorms should therefore request to move in before September 1 so that they won't be moving in during Convocation! Students who will be remote should not feel left out—we will have several online discussion sections that morning to accommodate them.

In short, lots of exciting work is planned, and there are going to be major challenges. I very much look forward to meeting or seeing again your students, and to being a part of what I hope will be an exciting semester in whatever mode and location students are choosing.

Yours, 
Susanne L. Wofford
Dean
Gallatin Examples of Courses Fall 2020

The Gallatin School will concentrate in all our courses, whether online, in-person or blended, on intensive seminar-style discussion. For Gallatin professors and students, exciting interactive exchange in classes is the key to education, and we emphasize it in all modes of instruction. Gallatin will also continue to sponsor our signature tutorials, some of which will be in-person and some online. These are gatherings of 5 students and a professor around a chosen topic of study. 

IN-PERSON: Gallatin will have lively in-person classes such as Professor Patrick McCreery's "Coming Out Stories" which will meet in person and will look at the emergence of Queer Identity from gay liberation and the Stonewall rebellion through the AIDS crisis to the present by studying many different kinds of sources including Alison Bechdel’s “tragicomic” graphic novel  Fun Home (which was made into a musical at the nearby Public Theater and became a hit on Broadway), Audre Lorde’s autobiography  Zami: A New Spelling of My Name , Michael Warner’s work of social theory  Publics and Counterpublics , and Kenji Yoshino’s memoir-cum-legal analysis  Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights .   One unit of the course examines how queer identity enters into public memory, so students will work on-site in socially-distant small groups to study LGBTQ memorials in Greenwich Village -- in Sheridan Square across from the Stonewall Bar, at the LGBT Community Center on 13th Street, and at the New York City AIDS Memorial at St. Vincent's Triangle.
 

BLENDED: Professor Karen Holmberg's interdisciplinary seminar “New York City Coastlines: Past, Present, Future” will be a blended class, and will combine in-person work in class with field work that can be done both in person and online. Here are two exciting examples of assignments:

  • Each student will take a virtual field trip to the NYC Archaeological Repository through its online collection and choose an artifact to ‘adopt’ for the semester. The artifact options will be from excavations of archaeological sites in lower Manhattan landfilled starting in the 17th century, in particular many will come from one site owned by everyone from Captain Kidd to Alexander Hamilton for which we have detailed archival records. We will think through the carbon footprint of each artifact in the past, its object counterpart in the present, and what the future of a comparable object may be. Students will be able to make appointments with the repository to visit the actual artifact in person individually as part of their research process.
 
  • Following Superstorm Sandy, the MTA implemented a remarkable series of new flood doors and water damage mitigations in the subway terminus stations of lower Manhattan. The most recent - and still in process - climate change response by the MTA is the Coney Island Yard and its unprecedented floodwall, drainage system, and debris shield. After reading the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report about coastal changes and sea-level rise, students will provide the instructor with a series of questions and requests for a virtual field trip by GoPro. They can watch the field trip live in order to make special requests for questions or direct the instructor to focus on particular areas or in recorded form later. What we learn on the field trip will provide material for a collaborative online forum about what we think the future of mass transit in a coastal megapolis like NYC will be. 


ONLINE WITH IN-PERSON ACTIVITIES: Professor David Clinton Wills , a philosopher who will be teaching a first-year writing seminar online called "Writing about Ethics," will build several assignments around visits to the Metropolitan Museum. Students will choose an object in one of the museum's collections and write about it from the perspective of one of the ethical discourses they will be studying. These assignments will also be possible to be done virtually through the Metropolitan's online materials and by asking students to choose works that are on virtual display. 

ONLINE WITH IN-PERSON ACTIVITIES:  Professor Leslie Satin’s interdisciplinary seminar “City Streets/Paris/New York: Reading, Walking Seeing, Writing” will be taught online. In this class, students will explore the experience of space and place, centered on the vibrant street life of two cities fabled for the continuing allure of their walkers, especially Paris’s poetic roving flâneur —“stroller” doesn’t do the term justice—celebrated since the 19th century. While we can’t go to Paris together, we can walk (literally and figuratively) through the streets of New York, guided by the writing and ideas of others who have looked carefully at the streets themselves, and at the movement of people animating them. Readings will come from philosophy, cultural theory, humanist geography, photography, experimental literature, and a range of sociopolitical perspectives on race, class, gender (including the relative dearth of women identified with city walking), and walking itself. The students in small groups will walk with the professor to discover New York through their own experiences as participant observers.

ONLINE: Professor Michael Dinwiddie's online first-year interdisciplinary seminar, “Migration and American Culture,” examines the immigrant and migrant narratives of varied racial and ethnic groups in the United States. The professor has invited a number of virtual guest lecturers to talk with the students about the history of migration in New York and the US. Students will also watch films and take virtual museum tours throughout the semester. Notable sites including the National Museum of the American Indian, the Tenement Museum, the African Burial Ground, the Museum of the City of New York, El Museo del Barrio, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Museum of Chinese in America, and Ellis Island can be visited virtually. Students will also be able to visit individually in person those museums that do open in the fall.