The New School AAUP slams faculty layoffs

“The New School ’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors on Monday denounced the private institution’s recently announced layoffs and its past workforce cuts as “a major gutting” of full-time faculty. The AAUP chapter called for laid-off faculty to be reinstated or offered a phased retirement. Rather than saving money, the layoffs “will instead destroy lives and fundamental structures of the academic institution that have been built over years,” the group said. Those calls came after the New York City university announced last week layoffs of 19 faculty and 68 staff to help manage a fiscal deficit. The measures are expected to shrink The New School’s fiscal 2027 budget by 15% and put it on track to balance the budget by fiscal 2028, university President Joel Towers said in a public message. AAUP accuses new school of ‘actively dismantling’ faculty The New School’s AAUP challenged the necessity and wisdom of the faculty layoffs. “Faculty were not fired on the basis of job performance. Some of those affected have taught at the New School for decades,” the group said in a news release Monday. “A significant number of faculty and staff fired are people of color.” The group also pointed out that cuts disproportionately landed on faculty in the humanities and social sciences. National AAUP President Todd Wolfson described the faculty eliminations under Towers and Provost Richard Kessler as “actively dismantling this historic intellectual community.” By the numbers 19 Faculty members laid off in the latest round of cuts at New School. That’s in addition to 68 staffers 8,300 The estimated size of the university’s student body going forward, down from 9,068 in fall 2024 4.8% The annual growth in administrative salaries at New School, compared to 2.9% for full-time faculty, according to an analysis out of the university’s economics department. When Towers announced the layoffs on June 4, he framed the cuts as “rebalancing our faculty and staff levels to align with our enrollment, budget realities, and the needs of our new structure.” The New School is working toward consolidating four of its colleges into two. The cuts came on top of other job reductions through voluntary buyouts and the elimination of vacant positions. He also invoked a cumulative structural deficit of $160 million amassed since the pandemic and a 20% dropoff in The New School’s enrollment since its peak in fall 2021. From 2021 to 2024, fall enrollment at the institution declined 13.6% to 9,068 students, according to federal data. Going forward, the university expects to serve around 8,300 students. Within that projection, there could be variance within schools, not to mention uncertainties about the future, according to Kessler . In an interview Tuesday, Kessler pointed to potential growth in the university’s art and design college as well as its performing arts college, while its liberal arts unit has seen significant declines. Of the latter, he added, “we are going to be moving forward with a significantly different and exciting vision that we think will turn the tide.” As part of The New School’s restructuring, it plans to merge its liberal arts and social research colleges. Among other unknowns hanging over The New School’s future size is the policy environment. “Changes that are being made to higher education, in terms of loans, in terms of visas, and all kinds of things, have placed it into an extremely volatile economy nationally and globally,” Kessler said. Republicans passed legislation last year to phase out Grad PLUS loans and add new limits to federal student borrowing. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been moving to tighten visa programs for international students. ‘Completely ridiculous’: A debate over the fiscal need for cuts In disputing the necessity of the layoffs, the New School AAUP pointed to an analysis from the institution’s economics department arguing against university leaders’ financial logic. The analysis found that The New School had run small surpluses every year until recently, and that revenue growth kept pace with spending on faculty salaries between 2014 and 2024. It concluded that the $30.2 million deficit from fiscal 2024 “could have been a $7 million surplus if spending on administrative costs, professional services, and facilities had grown at the same rate as revenue.” Sanjay Reddy, a New School economics professor, said in a statement Monday. “Faculty costs are not the core problem.” Kessler called the conclusion that The New School could have run a surplus with different choices “completely ridiculous.” “We have 20% fewer students,” Kessler said. “The revenue hit on that is extraordinary. And the expenses continue to grow all across the board, including extraordinary growth in healthcare costs.” The university's faculty and administrator ranks have both grown over roughly the past decade, Kessler added. “The staff was too large, and the faculty is too large, and it becomes exacerbated” with a shrinking student body, Kessler said. New School faculty have also challenged how the cuts have been made. A measure passed overwhelmingly by the faculty senate in May called on the institution’s leaders to disclose more information on the criteria for selecting faculty for termination. T he measure also asked about efforts to place faculty in other jobs at the university, as required by the faculty handbook. In his message last week, Towers said The New School has placed 30 full-time faculty members in teaching positions elsewhere in the institution, which helped limit the scale of the layoffs. Kessler said he spoke to the faculty senate last week to explain in more detail the context and rationale for the cuts but told the body’s leaders that he couldn’t share details at the individual level. Decisions were based on the economics of courses at The New School, with a “firewall” between that process and performance reviews, according to the provost. “This was really based on instructional need and courses available,” Kessler said. He also pointed to several shared governance mechanisms that played a part in the university’s downsizing process, including multiple committees of faculty and staff working on aspects of the restructuring process. Additionally, faculty serve on finance and budget-related committees that receive information from the administration and provide feedback. “There's more information available today than this university has ever shown,” Kessler said. But he also said those faculty bodies don’t have the fiduciary duties that university leaders do. “There are all sorts of ways in which we've situated shared governance throughout the university that is vital and vibrant,” Kessler added. “Some people would like decision-making authority in areas that we just can't provide to them.”

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