Protests as New School Threatens Severe Cuts to Staffing and Programs

As a part of a radical “restructuring” to deal with a $48 million deficit, New York’s New Faculty for Social Analysis is providing voluntary severance applications to a big group of school and employees. A December 3 e mail laying out the phrases of the provide, which ARTnews has reviewed, went to 169 members of school and employees, together with some forty p.c of full-time school. The letter named a December 15 deadline to determine on whether or not to just accept the provide.

In line with the American Affiliation of College Professors (AAUP), the college has indicated that layoffs will ensue if inadequate numbers of workers go for the voluntary severance. Talking not too long ago to Gothamist, AAUP known as the college’s newest transfer the “largest tried firing of school at the moment happening within the nation.”

The college faces declining enrollment. It additionally has come underneath menace from the Trump administration as one among 60 universities to be warned by the Division of Schooling in March that they might be positioned underneath investigation in the event that they failed to guard Jewish college students on campus after college students organized a pro-Palestinian encampment and college pitched tents in solidarity. 

Faculty president Joel Towers has stated that as a part of a restructuring, the college will mix a number of colleges right into a two-college construction: the Eugene Lang School of Liberal Arts and the New Faculty for Social Analysis will likely be mixed into one unit and Parsons Faculty of Design and the School of Performing Arts and Media into one other.

Based in 1919 by, as Gothamist describes it, “dissident intellectuals,” the New Faculty went on to provide protected harbor to a wave of intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany. The college at the moment has 75 full-time school throughout ten departments and plenty of applications, in response to its web site, comparable to anthropology, inventive writing, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, providing masters and doctoral levels to 800 graduate college students from 70 international locations. Arts are concentrated on the Parsons Faculty of Design. 

The college boasts a prolonged roster of distinguished graduates within the visible arts, together with Nina Chanel Abney, Richard Avedon, Adolph Gottlieb, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Ryan McGinley, Rob Pruitt, Norman Rockwell, and Ai Weiwei. Trend designers Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Jenna Lyons, Anna Sui, and Alexander Wang are additionally graduates, as have been writers James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Jack Kerouac, and Tennessee Williams. 

The college is eliminating over thirty applications, per AAUP, the bulk targeted on social sciences and humanities. “A movement handed by the College College Senate on November 25, 2025 expresses alarm that the President and Provost have circumvented rules of shared governance in making these selections,” in response to an e mail from AAUP. The New School Free Press reported two days later that the college would implement tiered wage reductions for the highest-paid workers and pause retirement contributions for eighteen months. The college would additionally pause nearly all doctoral program admissions for 2026–27. The paper famous that the college has run a deficit in extra of $30 million for 3 consecutive years.

Economics professor Sanjay Reddy advised Gothamist that the college’s cuts are a “scorched earth coverage” that would result in “a dying spiral.”

Dozens of scholars, school and employees gathered on Wednesday exterior the Greenwich Village college as a chilly rain fell to protest the college’s actions as a board assembly occurred inside. The protesters demanded that the college rescind all voluntary separation package deal agreements, institute a $200,000 wage cap, and name a public assembly between the board and the whole college group. Towers and provost Richard Kessler got here in for sharp criticism from audio system on the rally.

“The administration is attempting to steadiness the price range however the method feels actually company,” Molly Ragan, part-time lecturer at Parsons, advised ARTnews through the protest. Some executives come from a background in mergers and acquisitions and company restructurings, she identified. Till a number of years in the past, she stated, the college was working at a slight surplus, so when requested how the college discovered itself in its present predicament, she stated, “It’s a fantastic query.” She famous {that a} latest school investigation of the college’s funds uncovered vital actual property investments in addition to long-departed school remaining on the payroll. She additionally identified that Towers, appointed in 2024, is the college’s third chief since 2020.

“There are some stark inequities right here,” she stated, “and it’s troubling, to say the least.”

The New Faculty’s half time school union identified in a latest Instagram post that between 2022 and 2023, quite a few high-level officers, administrators, trustees and different well-compensated officers obtained appreciable pay will increase, together with Joel Towers (then on the school, his pay rose 11.6 p.c to just about $417,000), government dean Richard Kessler (11.7 p.c, to $469,000), and provost and government vp for tutorial affairs Rene White (10.9 p.c, to over $712,000). “The New Faculty’s $30.3 million deficit,” says the union, “may have been a $7 million surplus if spending on administrative prices, skilled providers, and services had grown on the similar price as income.”