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The Manhattan institution cut 19 faculty members and 68 staff members amid mounting financial shortfalls and declining enrollment.
The New School in Manhattan has laid off 19 full-time faculty and 68 staff members as the school faces a $160 million structural budget deficit attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and declining student numbers.
In a public statement this week, New School President Joel Towers billed the cuts as part of a “redesign” of the school, which has suffered a 20% decline in enrollment since 2021, including a record low of 8,900 students this fall. The cuts affect about 6% of full-time faculty and staff, respectively, Towers said, and would put the university on track to a “balanced budget” by 2028.
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), condemned the cuts as “catastrophic” for the university’s intellectual mission. In a June 4 statement, Wolfson attributed the cuts to “poor executive decision-making, real estate debacles and escalating executive salary costs.”
“These forced separations are a profound betrayal of the legacy of the institute’s founding as a refuge for critical social thinking for scientists fleeing fascism,” Wolfson said. “Today, President Joel Towers and Provost Richard Kessler are actively dismantling this historic intellectual community.”
According to the New School Free Press, all 19 faculty members affected were in the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the New School for Social Research. A New School spokesperson declined to provide an overview of the staff reductions or whether any visual arts faculty or programs were affected.
Hyperallergic has contacted the union representing New School staff, faculty and individual arts faculty for comment.
This week’s cuts follow the university’s attempts to oust nearly 40% of its full-time faculty through voluntary separation agreements or early retirement offers, prompting protests from hundreds of community members. These offers resulted in a 7% workforce reduction, which the university sought to address through this month’s layoffs. In total the Chronicle of higher education reports that the New School has lost 65 full-time professors since last year.
As a result of recent layoffs coupled with departmental mergers, the Parsons School of Design (the institute’s college of fine arts), the Mannes School of Music, and the New School’s jazz and drama departments will now teach 80% of the university’s students, narrowing the scope of the humanities colleges, including the School for Social Research.
“By systematically wiping out core programs in the humanities and social theory, breaking the boundaries of the tenure track, and forcing precarious temporary workforces on the remaining workforce, this administration is directly destroying the job security and academic freedom necessary for critical scholarship,” Wolfson wrote in the AAUP’s June 4 statement.
The cuts come as the Trump administration seeks to create new guidelines that would further impact enrollment in graduate arts programs, preventing schools from charging students with federal loans for degrees considered to have low earning potential.
