New School Lays Off Nearly 90 People, Dealing Blow to Humanities
Article excerpt
New School, the Manhattan institution known for its humanities programs, eliminated nearly 90 positions, 19 faculty members and 68 staffers, as the university grapples with mounting financial deficits and declining enrollment. The layoffs strike at the heart of the university's identity, particularly affecting departments that have long defined the school's mission. The cuts reflect a broader crisis in higher education, where institutions are struggling to maintain operations amid shrinking student populations and budget pressures. Faculty and staff across disciplines face uncertainty as the university restructures to achieve financial stability.
The New School in Manhattan has laid off 19 full-time faculty and 68 staff members as it confronts a cumulative $160 million structural budget deficit attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and declining student enrollment.
In a public statement this week, New School President Joel Towers billed the cuts as part of a “redesign” of the school, which is facing a 20% drop in enrollment since 2021, including a record low of 8,900 students this fall. The cuts account for about 6% of full-time faculty and staff, respectively, Towers said, and would put the university on track to a "balanced budget" in 2028.
American Association of University Professors (AAUP) President Todd Wolfson condemned the cuts as “catastrophic” to the university’s intellectual mission. In a June 4 statement, Wolfson attributed the cuts to “poor executive decision-making, real estate debacles, and ever-bloating executive salary costs.”
“These forced separations are a profound betrayal of the institution’s founding legacy as a sanctuary for critical social thought for scholars 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 impacted faculty members were in the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the New School for Social Research. A New School spokesperson declined to share a breakdown of the staff cuts or whether any visual arts professors or programs were affected.
Hyperallergic has contacted the union representing New School staff and faculty and individual arts faculty for comment.
This week’s cuts follow the university’s attempts to push out nearly 40% of its full-time faculty through voluntary separation agreements or early retirement offers, prompting protests from hundreds of community members. Those offers yielded a 7% reduction in the workforce, which the university sought to close 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 the recent layoffs in tandem with department mergers, the Parsons School of Design (the institution’s visual art college), the Mannes School of Music, and the New School's jazz and drama departments will now instruct 80% of the university’s students, shrinking the scope of its humanities colleges, including the School for Social Research.
“By systematically wiping out core humanities and social theory programs, slashing tenure-track lines, and forcing precarious contingent labor onto the remaining workforce, this administration is directly destroying the job security and academic freedom required 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 matriculating students paying with federal loans in degrees deemed to have low earning potential.