About Clara Mayer

"The larger aim is to incorporate learning in life, to remove every vestige of the formality of the academic while striving to retain its seriousness." 

Clara Mayer, The New School Celebrates its Second Anniversary, January 1933 

"It would not be an overstatement to say that The New School, as we know it, would not exist, if it were not for Clara Mayer."

Carmen Hendershott,  Histories of the New School 

Who was Clara Mayer? 

Adapted from the New School Archives and Special Collections' Biographical Note on Clara Mayer

Clara "Woolie" Mayer was an important trustee and administrator during the first four decades of The New School. Se served as dean of the School of Philosophy and Liberal Arts from 1943 to 1961 and vice president of The New School from 1950 to 1961.

Mayer was born in New York City in 1895. At Barnard College, she attended lectures with James Harvey Robinson Charles Beard, both founding faculty of the New School. She eventually left her graduate studies at Columbia University to attend the new institution. She became a trustee and was actively involved in major fund-raising efforts. Mayer worked in a variety of administrative positions at the New School, until 1961, when incoming president Henry David forced her resignation, as part of efforts to put the school, a larger and more complex institution in the 1960s than it had been in the 1920s. Shortly thereafter, the board of trustees fired David, in part because he had fired Mayer. Mayer was asked to resume her association with the school but declined and permanently severed ties with the New School.

A 1982 New York Times article notes her participation, at age 87, in a Manhattan nuclear disarmament demonstration. On July 16, 1988, at age 93, Clara Mayer died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles nursing home. 

​In the 2026-2027 academic year, the Distinguished University Teaching Awards ​were renamed in ​her honor​.

Learn more

• Explore Clara Mayer's papers in the New School Archives

  • Digital collection

  • Commencement addresses

  • Collection inventory 

• Read Carmen Hendershott's Histories of the New School post on Clara Mayer