Professors at the New School say they are used to crises — a round of austerity after the pandemic, a strike by part-time faculty members, a fire in a dorm. But they’re now reeling from a crisis on a scale few faculties ever face. About 40 percent of the full-time professors at the institution received letters in early December offering them separation packages or early retirement as part of leaders’ attempts to address a budget deficit. If they do not accept the offers by mid-month, the paperwork stated, they could face “involuntary reduction” in the new year on less favorable terms.
“Faculty are afraid, confused, outraged, and hurt,” said Jeremy Varon, a professor of history. “We feel horribly abused.”
Leaders at the institution say cuts to faculty and programs are necessary to close a $48-million budget gap for the current year and put the New School on a path to longer-term stability. The institution has run substantial budget deficits in four of the last six years, said Joel Towers, who took over as president in the summer of 2024. At the same time, total enrollment shrank from around 10,400 students in 2019 to around 8,800 this fall. “Ultimately,” Towers said, “I have to get the university out of the structural deficit it’s in.”
Several turbulent currents in higher education are colliding on the New School’s Manhattan campus. Like many other colleges, it faces rising expenses and flagging enrollment, which has made its finances precarious. Like some other institutions, it is making faculty cuts quickly and with little or no significant input from professors, a departure from shared-governance ideals. And some faculty members worry that slashing the progressive institution, which was founded as the New School for Social Research in 1919, dovetails with the ongoing backlash against leftism and intellectualism across the country.
Towers, who joined the New School’s Parsons School of Design faculty more than 20 years ago and spent a decade as its executive dean, said that professors shouldn’t have been surprised that the New School’s finances were so parlous that it needed to make deep cuts. “We’ve made that apparent,” he said. “Last February, March, and April, we did a series of presentations to make this as abundantly clear as we could, because we could see the shape of the problem coming.”
Tight Credit
One key sign that the institution had reached the end of its financial runway was that its short-term credit was running low. Many colleges rely on short-term credit from lenders to cover the expenses of their week-to-week operations, like making payroll. The size of the New School’s deficit had started to limit its short-term credit, Towers said, hampering its ability to pay for its operations.
Over the summer, the institution convened five working groups, which included professors, to come up with suggestions on how to improve and restructure the New School. “Let’s recommit to what it is this university is fundamentally about,” Towers said. With its rich tradition of liberal arts and performing and visual arts, he added, the New School seemed ideally poised for “problem solving at its core. It’s design-oriented and innovation-oriented. It’s really focused on contemporary issues facing society.”
But Varon, who did not sit on any of the committees, said he and other colleagues were uncertain how restructuring would fix their immediate problems. And many faculty members are concerned, he said, “that the budget piece would be addressed through a completely top-down, non-participatory, non-consultative process.”
The restructuring is still in the works, but in November, institutional leadership announced a series of measures designed to cut costs, including pausing admitting Ph.D. students, temporarily reducing salaries, and discontinuing academic programs — two permanently and 13 pending curriculum redesign, with six others identified for mergers. A few weeks later, the letters went out about separations and retirements.
Some faculty members see the financial crisis as being caused by years of profligate spending by several administrations, said Sanjay Reddy, a professor of economics, and now leaders are using the budget gap as a lever to get rid of full-time faculty.
If the New School for Social Research, the graduate-education arm, is hobbled by cuts, it would be “possible to read that as a real attack on the politics of the institution and of people within the institution,” said Rachel Sherman, a professor of sociology. “I don’t know what their intention is, but certainly that is going to be the effect — to silence critical voices at this particular time.”
Towers sees such arguments as a trap, and that now is the most important time for the work that the New School does. “All of this argument about not valuing the social sciences, it’s just a frustration with the change we need to make,” Towers said.
Who does the work at the New School may shift after the dust from the changes settles. About one in five of the 2,100 faculty members at the New School are full-time. Parsons has been the economic engine of the New School for several years and operates mostly with part-time faculty — in 2022, only 17 percent of its professors were full-time. At the New School for Social Research, where many of the separation letters were addressed, only 16 percent of its faculty members were part-time.
What’s happening at the New School represents “another example of the reality that tenure is not the kind of guarantee that it used to be, and that the academic profession is increasingly unstable,” said Brendan Cantwell, a professor in the higher, adult, and lifelong education program at Michigan State University. While many colleges are feeling a financial squeeze right now, and some are using that pressure as motivation to make changes to become more competitive, the kind of cuts to social-science programs being suggested at the New School are “pretty dramatic,” he adds. “That’s exactly what they’re supposed to be known for doing.”
‘What Am I Opting Into?’
Whether they knew or not, and whether they fully understood what might be coming, many New School professors have been shaken by receiving the separation offers and the process they bode. “People were literally given less than two weeks to make life-changing decisions at the end of a busy semester,” Varon said. “We feel like we’re being DOGE-ed with all of the nuance and sensitivity of Elon Musk.”
For example, for Varon, there’ll be no more history major at the New School, but it’s not clear if there’ll be a history department or a budget for field trips and speakers. “How can we possibly know whether we want to stay here or not, if we don’t even know what the future of our institution will be like?” he asked. “What am I opting into or opting out of?”
The timing of the offers was also seen as troubling. If Varon were to leave voluntarily, or be laid off after the first of the year, he wouldn’t be able to apply for another university job until the fall, due to the rhythms of academic hiring, and wouldn’t be in another job for nearly 18 months, assuming he was successful on the first round — not a given in a humanities job market that is tighter than ever. At 58, he’s not sanguine that he could land another job and is concerned about paying his son’s college tuition and affording health insurance. “HR will say, ‘We understand the profound human impact of what we’re doing,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be doing it this, or you wouldn’t be doing this this way.’”
Towers, the president, knows that the affected professors are unhappy. “I’m deeply empathetic to what they’re going through,” he said. Offering voluntary separations and retirements, he said, is preferable to just instituting layoffs. “I actually think the New School is being pretty responsible and thoughtful and respectful to our faculty.”
Ultimately, the president’s focus has to be on the institution and the students, Towers said: “The sector is changing, and we have to change with it.”
