Learning How to Be Human
Still slim at 83, Barack Obama stands a bit stooped, hair and beard white, eyes alert. He’s in the courtyard of the partially renovated Melrose Houses in the Bronx, sun casting shadows through the scaffolding, listening to a circle of residents debate the city-wide housing plan.
A rich human sound emanates from a nearby patch of grass, where a professor of vocal arts is teaching residents to warm up their voices. Next week, all of the Melrose House residents will be singing their grievances on the big stage, arranged into vocal harmonies — a facet of the latest Learning To Be Human show, the civic spectacle series co-organized by the city, the New School, and many other organizations.
A holographic camera from the city’s Planning Commission hovers overhead. New School students quietly take notes. But no one can quite ignore the protestors on the other side of the black iron gate.
“Hey, Barack. You’re not welcome here. Get the fuck out of the Bronx!” shouts a young man, maybe thirty, pressed against the gate.
Obama is headlining the Bronx show, but even the organizers understand his legacy is complicated. His early drone program cast a long shadow over the increasingly unmanned wars that followed. The post-2008 crash was a failed opportunity, and the inequalities that compounded through the Trump era — the floods, the evictions, the AI displacement of working-class jobs — shaped a city still sorting through the wreckage. The young protestors don’t remember his presidency, but he’s a symbol of complacency.
Obama approaches the gate. “You folks have a moment?” A few protestors nod. “I know I’m part of what you’re angry about. That’s why I’m here and not somewhere else.”
“YOUR ARTWASHING PROJECT IS A JOKE!”
Obama listens. “Maybe. But I’ve seen what happens when people make something together. I saw it in Chicago in 1985. I’m seeing it here.”
The artwashing accusation has a history. In the 2010s and 2020s, murals appeared on walls months before the rents went up from Bushwick to the South Bronx to Sunset Park. New Yorkers have reason to be skeptical.
But Learning to Be Human arrived at a new chapter in the city’s history. The post-flood decade brought displacement at a scale the city hadn’t seen since Robert Moses. Democracy sputtered — elections halted, polarization eviscerated civic culture. Universities shuttered.
The New School, facing its own existential reckoning with AI displacement and shrinking enrollment, searched for a survival strategy. Its concentrations in visual art, music, and performance, research, and theory were increasingly merging. Its union, UAW 7902, had taken over the board in the last strike. It was the union that negotiated with the city to create Learning to Be Human — the giant, interdisciplinary, often chaotic experiments which breathed new life into The New School.
The Hunts Point Accord of 2036 is the most cited example: a two-year process after the second flood left large sections of the peninsula uninhabitable. Three hundred residents, two city agencies, the Hunts Point Produce Market cooperative, and a cohort of New School students built a public performance series on a former waste transfer site. Two hundred thousand people came. Four Hunts Point participants ran for local office the following year, and three won. The waterfront plan that finally passed in 2039 was first brainstormed in a Learning To Be Human workshop.
Making, it turned out, did something debate couldn’t. Argument activates defenses — words, especially online, turn into polarizing weapons. But when people physically negotiate a sound, a color, a line of dialogue, they access capacities for empathy that language suppresses. A century ago, John Dewey, one of The New School’s founders, wrote that democracy, learning, and aesthetic experience are not separate projects. The New School claims it has returned to that insight.
Obama rejoins the participants. They move toward a rehearsal space in a basketball court: scaffolding rigged with lights and fabric, a sound system. On the circular outdoor stage, local musicians from Melrose jam with a New School jazz faculty member and a graduate student — a battered upright bass, a keyboard, hand drums, and instruments the musicians built themselves in the New Jersey fabrication workshops.
The sound is hard to describe. It carries the specific acoustic of a South Bronx courtyard — buoyant and grieving at once. The faculty member listens with her eyes closed. “There,” she says.
“Every place has a soul sound,” says Marlene Webb, jazz faculty and lead sound designer on three Learning to Be Human projects. “Every conflict has a sound, too. The job is to find it together. If you find it together, we can build all kinds of things together.”
At a fabrication table nearby, New School students Jaylen Ortiz, 24, from Tremont, and Sun-Yeon Park, 27, from Busan, South Korea, are editing holographic videos of the day’s workshop. Jaylen grew up eight blocks from here, came to the New School through a city partnership offering full scholarships to young people from flood-affected neighborhoods. He’s assembling his education in pieces — community facilitation, sound engineering, urban ecology. This six-month project is his first full micro-credential, recognized by the city as a qualification for community planning work.
Sun-Yeon completed her degree in Seoul and came to New York for what she calls the “sublime complexity” Learning to Be Human is known for. “Back home, I could learn any skill on my interface,” she says. “But I had to come here to do this.” She gestures toward where residents and students are painting a mural behind the stage.
Faculty member Amara Diallo teaches this project each semester, then spends the rest of her time facilitating civic-artistic processes in Medellín, Beirut, and Nairobi. She is a part-timer — like most of the New School’s faculty — and a union member. At the New School, the union has been the governing body since the strike of 2031, and faculty like Diallo have been key to building the new model.
“We were in the community room in the second week,” Jaylen says, “and she stopped everything. Nobody talks for the next hour. We’re going to draw what this room smells like. We were with older residents — people who’d been through the ICE years. It had apparently been the site of a temporary detention. People began to weep. After that, the conversations were different.”
Diallo doesn’t mystify it. “AI does most of the skill-building now. But it’s made the experience of connection a lot harder to locate. What I do is put them back in spaces where the only thing that works is being present.”
Obama approaches alone, pausing at the students’ table, glancing at the AR reading list projected above Sun-Yeon’s wrist.
“Let me see what you’re reading.”
Near the top: David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope.
“That’s a valuable one. They used to say there’s no alternative to Capitalism. Harvey tried to open up a pathway to new possible worlds. You can’t separate where people live from what they’re able to imagine.”
The provost has come over. “We used to talk about innovation, design thinking — harnessing creativity for the market. AI forced us to name the processes more honestly.”
Obama looks back toward the musicians, still finding the sound. “Interconnection,” he says.
That evening, Jaylen and Sun-Yeon take the cross-Hudson express to Newark, where the New School’s residential campus opened in 2037 — fabrication studios, a black-box performance space, student housing built into the bones of two former industrial buildings on Halsey Street, and workshops open directly onto the street.
“A previous provost — Richard Kessler, back in the 2020s — used to say,” the current provost had told me earlier, “that the New School would one day figure out that if it wants to be involved in urban issues, it has to connect to the greater New York area — beyond the glamour of Greenwich Village — where there’s space and where the need is real. Newark was a way to be equitable and not displace people.”
The union negotiated the Newark expansion as part of a new model: project-based contracts, shared surplus, and six consecutive balanced budgets. “It’s back to 1919,” says union president Dominique Ferrera. “You came, you took the course from the person who knew the thing. The degree was a detour. We’re back. And since the strike, we all understand that we’re here for the students and workers equally.”
Back in his room, Jaylen adds today’s documentation to his credential portfolio. Outside, the streets of Newark are alive. Somewhere back in the Melrose courtyard, the musicians are still at it.