What’s Left of The New School?
Leadership at the iconic progressive university has declared war on its own workforce, fired tenured professors, and shuttered whole departments. But what’s happening to the school is an increasingly common story across all of higher education.
It has been tough times for the New School. New York City’s iconic progressive university was founded in 1919 by faculty protesting the censorship of speech criticizing the First World War and later served as a refuge for European intellectuals fleeing mid-twentieth century fascism. Over the course of the school’s history, generations of professors took inspiration from these exiles’ stand against authoritarianism and proudly clung to the mission that made it “new” in the first place: a commitment to fostering creativity and critical thinking, with the aim of solving real-world problems.
Countless students at the school are drawn to its progressive bent, bringing with them fresh ideas about contemporary society and directions in rebel youth culture. (New School alumni, students, and faculty were key players in the 2011 Occupy movement.) Core departments, like economics and philosophy, embrace heterodox traditions that challenge the mainstream of their fields. The New University in Exile Consortium, led by the New School, offers sanctuary and other support to today’s scholars persecuted in their home countries. The world over, the New School is famous for dissent.
In 2016, the focus of faculty and students turned in a new way to fighting authoritarianism at home. The social theory tradition nurtured by the New School—running from the Frankfurt School through Hannah Arendt, proponents of “radical democracy,” and beyond—was always attuned to the authoritarian logics, structures, and mentalities in the liberal capitalist West. Under President Donald Trump, this authoritarianism has raged, stoking the opposition of a broad-based democracy movement. Trump’s return to office in 2025 brought ghastly assaults on higher education—student abductions, financial extortion, curricular bans, corrupt federal “investigations”—and deepened resistance among the New School’s professors and students. In April 2025, they helped spearhead a mass “Rally for the Right to Learn” in New York City protesting these measures. From that effort was born an unprecedented, citywide coalition of academic unions and professional associations to defend higher education.
Yet this academic year, the battle has been within the New School itself. New leadership at the university has declared war on its own workforce. Drawn from the arts world, the president and provost seek to bolster Parsons, the design school within the larger university, and retreat from the humanities and social sciences. Targeting these areas, forced retirements and layoffs claimed dozens of faculty and staff. Program closures decimated whole disciplines. (The history department, where I have taught since 2008, is “indefinitely discontinued.”) Whether the New School’s rebel legacy survives is in grave doubt. Fascinated by this question, the New York Times, the higher ed press, and even prominent European media have covered the story.
The saga is a chilling case of neoliberal austerity, pocked with disaster capitalism, descending on academia. But vastly more is on the line than the fate of one school. What’s happening to the New School is an increasingly common story across all of higher education, hit by a perfect storm of financial and political pressures. Well-paid bosses, touting fiscal crises, seek to fire their way to profitability. Praising their own shrewd leadership, they imperil the values and function of the institutions while claiming near absolute power for themselves.
The New School’s financial woes are real enough, though their causes and scope are matters of dispute. The administration counts a loss of nearly $50 million this fiscal year, on top of recent deficits. Bad real estate deals, administrative bloat, executive compensation, and enrollment decline are all culprits. University leadership, claiming a 20 percent enrollment drop from a peak in 2021, cites the loss of tuition revenue as its grand alibi. Critics, however, stress mismanagement and fixable failures of recruitment. (Other institutions, for instance, at least partially rebounded from COVID-era declines.) These critics have noted increases in executive pay that have far outpaced revenue and overall salary growth, a sucker’s deal on new housing for the president, huge spending on “professional services,” and the gutting of admissions personnel. Yet whatever the source of the troubles, faculty, staff, and students have paid the price.
Some universities will doubtless follow the New School’s slash-and-burn lead, abetted and accompanied by unprecedented assaults on the free speech and independence that have made universities a historic bulwark against authoritarian rule. Like so much else these days, the stakes are democracy itself.
“Involuntary separation” is the inhuman term used by the New School for firing its employees, recommended by expert consultants in “workforce reduction.” The whole scheme was sold as restructuring, the current vogue among universities desperate for market share in the cutthroat competition for tuition dollars.
Choked with corporate buzzwords, restructuring typically involves eliminating, combining, and rebranding programs and curricula to meet alleged student demand for new kinds of learning. Interdisciplinarity—once a cutting-edge effort to unsettle the boundaries between modes of knowledge—is now a cudgel to beat departments and jobs into extinction. Faculty themselves are drafted into this “visioning” (cue the PowerPoint) of bold futures defined by relentless “dynamism” and “innovation.” Whether any of this yields more students is unclear.
The New School’s own restructuring has been particularly odious. At the administration’s behest, countless committees spent much of last year drafting lengthy reports on curriculum and university life that were mostly ignored. With the box of “community participation” checked, the administration went after the real prize of austerity, achieved by slashing payroll.
Separate purges this winter and spring significantly shrunk the full-time faculty. Often shy of Medicare age, senior professors have meager chances of academic re-employment. Like the veteran civil servants sacked by DOGE, they must cope with healthcare, housing, and other basic costs of living without proper income. With lapsing contracts left unrenewed, many part-time faculty have been hurt too.
The impact on curriculum and morale has been severe. Beloved courses and valued mentors have vanished overnight, while confusion reigns among students over how to matriculate through canceled programs. Surviving faculty, told that the financial troubles are not fully cured, worry for their futures.
To reach its fiscal targets, the administration also did the unthinkable: It fired tenured professors, including ten in June. Nearly all were housed in the undergraduate humanities and graduate social science divisions, where most tenured faculty reside. No firing was based on performance; to the contrary, both current department chairs and recent recipients of promotions and teaching awards were let go.
Though small in number, these firings are a shot across the bow of all of academia and signal the full danger of the New School’s path. Tenure is commonly regarded as lifetime employment, so long as one’s institution remains solvent. A form of job security unimaginable to most workers, it has a logic and purpose worth defending. Tenure comes after the lengthy credentialing of a PhD and further years of rigorous evaluation. Institutions build their academic reputations through the careful cultivation of tenured faculty. Those tenured, in turn, gain the ability to plot the long arc of their scholarship and teaching, while investing deeply in their institutions. The ability to speak, write, and teach (within common-sense guardrails of propriety and relevance) without fear of being fired for one’s views has been a vital guarantor of academic freedom. It is a basic protection against capricious or vengeful authority, and partisan control over education and knowledge-making itself.
Yet tenure at the New School ultimately offered no protection at all. Administrators and their attorneys deviously noted, per the faculty handbook, that they could fire anyone part of a department, program, or school designated as “discontinued.” Financial exigency, broadly defined, could trigger this discontinuance. On these grounds, the administration, using metrics that remain secret, shuttered whole departments for alleged underperformance. It later decided that, by virtue of extensive bureaucratic reorganization, it had closed and reopened the entire university. It could therefore fire anyone, anywhere at the school.
The whole episode was a dispiriting lesson in the weakness of both laws and norms, familiar from the Trump administration’s dictatorial, stop-me-if-you-can rule. As with national politics, the “law” at the New School provided fewer constraints on executive power than anyone had imagined. So too, time-honored norms—like the sanctity of tenure and shared governance with faculty—are irrelevant if leaders have the audacity to smash them.
A coalition of the local American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter, academic labor unions, irate students, and historic friends of the New School put up a brave fight. It included “save our jobs” rallies, a letter-writing campaign to the school’s trustees, coordinated media outreach, consultations with labor attorneys, letters of complaint from their offices, a student video that went viral, and detailed analyses of the university’s finances and recommendations for nonpunitive ways to address the deficit. Appealing to decency and legacy, these efforts mostly had the faint power of moral suasion. Their effect was to at least limit the damage.
New School leaders insist that the austerity decisions were economic, driven by their fiduciary obligations, and in no sense political. This claim is deceptive, on multiple grounds.
Sanjay Reddy, a tenured senior professor at the New School, has been loudly critical of the university’s account of its finances. In the economics department, he alone was let go. Eminent professors, among them Joseph Stiglitz, filed a letter of protest, garnering hundreds of signatures from faculty worldwide. Reddy’s colleagues view his termination as both an intimidation tactic to coerce others into silence and a stunning betrayal of their university’s free speech origins.
More broadly, neoliberal austerity has a politics—one that favors management and the imperatives of the market (as defined by management) over labor. Management seeks maximum work for minimum cost. It values flexibility and contingent decision-making to address short-term fluctuations in the bottom line. It therefore disfavors unions, contracts, and tenure—anything that obligates it to future expenditures.
The New School’s attack on tenure—indeed, its entire “workforce realignment”—brazenly accelerates the long-standing adjunctification of academic labor. More and more, full-time faculty give way to part time, adjunct, or contract faculty. Their lot is poorer pay, fewer benefits, less research time, and more precarity. By 2023, 68 percent of faculty nationwide were part-time or contingent, up from 44 percent in 1987. That number is surely continuing to rise. At the New School, Parsons was largely spared austerity measures because its faculty—the great majority of which are part time—are paid less. This divide-and-conquer approach, however, was met by faculty solidarity based on a shared interest in fair working conditions for all.
Already, social research has been devalued at the New School. Last year, it froze PhD admissions for nearly the entire graduate social science division. There is as yet no announcement if these will restart. For faculty, increased teaching loads and the slowing of sabbatical cycles take away time from scholarship, arduous in any field. What a new generation of university leaders most wants from faculty—classroom instruction to meet core curricular needs—it can get on the cheap from part-time instructors. This shift threatens the fundamental meaning of the professoriat. No longer would it be a sizable community of expert thinkers, secure in their jobs, who collectively nourish democracy by probing mechanisms of power and imagining better futures. Instead, it would further morph into a vast precariat, consigned to the stresses of gig work and bitter labor struggles, now a routine part of campus life, for dignity and proper wages.
The targeting of the humanities and social sciences, where the New School’s dissident roots most deeply lie, compounds these worries. Crying “corporate takeover,” AAUP national president Todd Wolfson blasted the New School for “dismantling” a “historic intellectual community.” Judith Friedlander, a former New School dean and the author of a history of the school, A Light in Dark Times, declared that the university “no longer represents what this institution stood for.”
Each week brings news that more cash-strapped institutions are planning or implementing restructuring and some version of “workforce reduction.” The headwinds they face are stiff: a demographic dip in college-age young people; a steep decline in foreign students, driven away by Trumpian xenophobia and ideological vetting; the punitive cancelation of billions in federal grants; chronic affordability issues, worsened by an inflation economy; a distressed federal student loan program; and savage attacks on higher education from the right and even “anti-woke” liberals, discouraging college attendance.
Even wealthy Harvard, citing multimillion-dollar shortfalls, has hired consultants to help it downsize. State legislators are getting into the act. In April, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a law, overriding Governor Andy Beshear’s veto, that would permit the firing of tenured faculty at public universities for fiscal reasons alone. More states are likely to pass similar measures. Troubling for labor, the Kentucky law holds added danger: Beshear warned that it “may be misused to target people, programs and research based purely on subject, politics, or many other unconstitutional grounds, under the guise of economic necessity.” It is a terrible time, in short, for an industry-wide economic crisis, now fully interwoven with ideological attacks.
Academia has long been a prime target for culture war rantings about the “wokeism” of educated elites. Making it a real war, Trump’s new reign seeks to discredit, censor, bully, extort, bankrupt, and ultimately control higher education. So far, it has been an uneven effort of headline-grabbing assaults: the kidnapping and attempted deportation of foreign students and faculty for pro-Palestinian speech; the banning of whole subject matters from classrooms to accord with state laws and ludicrous executive orders; the cancelation of huge grants and the extraction of cash payouts for alleged violations of federal anti-DEI directives or failures to police antisemitism on campus; proposed loyalty oaths to the Trump education agenda as a condition of federal funding.
The response from universities has for the most part been galling. Some have collaborated, like Texas Tech, which now vets thousands of syllabi to purge targeted content about race, gender, and sexuality. Some have capitulated, like Columbia University and the University of Virginia. To win back federal funds or quell investigations, they and other marquee schools have accepted the dismantling, alteration, or intrusive federal oversight of programs, curricula, hiring decisions, and disciplinary processes.
A principled few have pushed back. Using its unmatched legal war chest, Harvard has challenged Trump’s comprehensive threats on free speech grounds. The most successful resistance has come from faculty plaintiffs and AAUP chapters filing lawsuits. In Massachusetts, a federal judge declared that the entire campaign against foreign students backing the Palestinian cause was illegal. In Florida, a Trump appointee blasted the state’s anti-DEI law seeking to control the speech of public university faculty. Both framed their rulings as defenses of core constitutional rights and the essential value of free speech to education.
Yet most universities, including the New School, have chosen quiescent silence. Fears of government reprisals or donor pushback for speaking out are real. (Even successful legal challenges, as Harvard is discovering, do not fully restore withheld funds). Overcoming them, and managing any blowback, requires a courage, smarts, and will that university leaders plainly do not have. The result is a wicked irony: At precisely the moment when the United States faces unprecedented threats to democracy, a civil society institution as important as the university stifles its own voice. That itself is the authoritarian condition.
The second Trump administration has modeled a leadership style with a stunning insensitivity to the victims of its workforce purges. We may be seeing that style, predicated on disregard for the rights of labor, reach into more liberal institutions like higher education, which is increasingly run by super-wealthy trustees and, among public institutions, hostile political appointees.
The economic and political pressures facing universities are sometimes connected and sometimes coincident. Absent Trump, higher education would still face serious financial and cultural challenges. But budgetary concerns are too easy an excuse for silence, which only encourages government efforts to defund universities. The prevailing sense among institutional leaders—palpable to anyone in academia—is that getting one’s financial house in order must precede taking any risk.
The opportunity costs are enormous. The New School spent a whole year figuring out how to fire its own faculty, tying up activist energies on campus. During that time, it made no statement nor sponsored any dialogue about how the institution might meet the current authoritarian threat. Instead, it took a page from DOGE, echoing the power grabs, pettiness, and disdain for workers that are part of that threat. At best, it confused the question of whether the New School has any role to play in the defense of democracy. At worst, it walked away from its own legacy. Few recent times have been darker than these. May those still committed to the best of the New School turn its light back on.
Jeremy Varon is a professor of history at the New School and a member of the Leadership Council of the New School chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
