Britannica –
“The New School was established in 1919 as an informal centre for adult education by a group of independent–minded scholars that included economist Thorstein Veblen, historian Charles A. Beard, and philosopher John Dewey. It soon became the first American university to specialize in the continuing higher education of adults. Among the early lecturers were John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and W.E.B. Du Bois. The school received its charter in 1934. That same year it established a graduate faculty in political and social science that was staffed mainly by refugee [primarily Jewish] academics from Nazi Germany, who gave the school a Continental focus with a heavy emphasis on European philosophy and social thought [that graduate faculty was named the ‘University in Exile’].”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online (accessed February 9, 2009)