As part of a radical “restructuring” to address a $48 million deficit, New York’s New School for Social Research is offering voluntary severance programs to a large group of faculty and staff. A December 3 email laying out the terms of the offer, which ARTnews has reviewed, went to 169 members of faculty and staff, including some forty percent of full-time faculty. The letter named a December 15 deadline to decide on whether to accept the offer.
According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the school has indicated that layoffs will ensue if insufficient numbers of employees opt for the voluntary severance. Speaking recently to Gothamist, AAUP called the school’s latest move the “largest attempted firing of faculty currently taking place in the nation.”
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The school faces declining enrollment. It also has come under threat from the Trump administration as one of 60 universities to be warned by the Department of Education in March that they would be placed under investigation if they failed to protect Jewish students on campus after students organized a pro-Palestinian encampment and faculty pitched tents in solidarity.
School president Joel Towers has said that as part of a restructuring, the university will combine several schools into a two-college structure: the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the New School for Social Research will be combined into one unit and Parsons School of Design and the College of Performing Arts and Media into another.
Founded in 1919 by, as Gothamist describes it, “dissident intellectuals,” the New School went on to give safe harbor to a wave of intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany. The school currently has 75 full-time faculty across ten departments and many programs, according to its website, such as anthropology, creative writing, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, offering masters and doctoral degrees to 800 graduate students from 70 countries. Arts are concentrated at the Parsons School of Design.
Demonstrators outside the New School for Social Research on Wednesday.
Hayden Tutton
The school boasts a lengthy roster of distinguished graduates in the visual arts, including Nina Chanel Abney, Richard Avedon, Adolph Gottlieb, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Ryan McGinley, Rob Pruitt, Norman Rockwell, and Ai Weiwei. Fashion designers Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Jenna Lyons, Anna Sui, and Alexander Wang are also graduates, as were writers James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Jack Kerouac, and Tennessee Williams.
The school is eliminating over thirty programs, per AAUP, the majority focused on social sciences and humanities. “A motion passed by the University Faculty Senate on November 25, 2025 expresses alarm that the President and Provost have circumvented principles of shared governance in making these decisions,” according to an email from AAUP. The New School Free Press reported two days later that the school would implement tiered salary reductions for the highest-paid employees and pause retirement contributions for eighteen months. The school would also pause almost all doctoral program admissions for 2026–27. The paper noted that the school has run a deficit in excess of $30 million for three consecutive years.
Economics professor Sanjay Reddy told Gothamist that the school’s cuts are a “scorched earth policy” that could lead to “a death spiral.”
Dozens of students, faculty and staff gathered on Wednesday outside the Greenwich Village school as a cold rain fell to protest the school’s actions as a board meeting occurred inside. The protesters demanded that the school rescind all voluntary separation package agreements, institute a $200,000 salary cap, and call a public meeting between the board and the entire school community. Towers and provost Richard Kessler came in for sharp criticism from speakers at the rally.
“The administration is trying to balance the budget but the approach feels really corporate,” Molly Ragan, part-time lecturer at Parsons, told ARTnews during the protest. Some executives come from a background in mergers and acquisitions and corporate restructurings, she pointed out. Until a few years ago, she said, the school was operating at a slight surplus, so when asked how the school found itself in its current predicament, she said, “It’s a great question.” She noted that a recent faculty investigation of the school’s finances uncovered significant real estate investments as well as long-departed faculty remaining on the payroll. She also pointed out that Towers, appointed in 2024, is the school’s third leader since 2020.
“There are some stark inequities here,” she said, “and it’s troubling, to say the least.”
The New School’s part time faculty union pointed out in a recent Instagram post that between 2022 and 2023, numerous high-level officers, directors, trustees and other well-compensated officials received considerable pay increases, including Joel Towers (then on the faculty, his pay rose 11.6 percent to nearly $417,000), executive dean Richard Kessler (11.7 percent, to $469,000), and provost and executive vice president for academic affairs Rene White (10.9 percent, to over $712,000). “The New School’s $30.3 million deficit,” says the union, “could have been a $7 million surplus if spending on administrative costs, professional services, and facilities had grown at the same rate as revenue.”
