That can mean something as seemingly small as creating processes for making clothing that minimize waste and transportation of materials, or planning urban environments that are more resilient and attuned to extreme weather events, he said.

The school will study its own facilities to find ways to reduce its carbon footprint and save energy costs, and reduce paper use and waste. And it plans to promote environmentally sensitive food services through such measures as working with small-scale suppliers in the Hudson Valley. The school has consulted with Bill McKibben, the writer and environmental activist, on its initiative.

Climate change, said the New School’s chief operating officer, Tokumbo Shobowale, is “a wicked design problem.” Shifting the curriculum across all of the school’s disciplines, he said, is a way to go beyond divestment, a step that he said drew skepticism at first from many faculty members.

“A lot of people said this is not going to make a difference in terms of hurting these companies or hurting their ability to conduct oil and gas exploration,” he said about the divestment plan.

Still, he added, divestment can be used as a teaching tool — economics students are studying the companies in the school’s $340 million endowment and their practices to help devise principles to add some nuance to their decisions about which stocks to keep or sell.