It began more than a century ago as a haven for intellectuals and educators seeking a bolder approach to higher education. And it occupies a unique niche among American universities, drawing students and faculty members with its tradition of progressive scholarship, graduate-level research and highly ranked programs in arts and design.
Now, the New School in New York City is facing a financial crisis and a dramatic restructuring that some professors and students fear will lead to the collapse of its liberal arts and social science programs, even as its president vows the plan will lead to a stronger university. An unexpected drop in enrollment this fall raised the stakes, with leadership warning that the university will not be able to pay its bills by June if things don’t change.
Staring down a projected $48 million operating deficit for this fiscal year, administrators have started to implement a plan to close, overhaul or merge about 30 academic programs or majors; pause nearly all admissions to doctoral programs; and offer buyouts or early retirement to what professors say is about 40 percent of the full-time faculty.
At a protest in December, dozens of professors and students marched against the cuts, which some warned would send the New School into a death spiral by undermining its reputation and sparking more reductions in enrollment.
But Joel Towers, the New School’s president and leader of the restructuring effort, argues that a transformed university will emerge on the other side of the pain, one that is more relevant and interdisciplinary, drawing on the university’s strengths in the liberal arts, performance, and art and design.
“At least we are doing this with a vision for the future,” he said in an interview. “We’re not focusing this on cuts. We’re focusing this on what the New School’s unique place in higher education is.”
The crisis at the New School reflects the enormous pressures facing higher education across the United States at a time of ballooning costs, federal policies limiting research grants and international enrollment and decreased student interest in the liberal arts. But the problems are particularly acute at the New School, which has run at a roughly $30 million a year deficit for the last two years even though it charges undergraduates top-dollar tuition.
The proposed cuts are designed to put the New School, which includes the Parsons School of Design, the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts and the New School for Social Research, back on firm financial footing.
Though the New School relies on international students to help pay its bills, about 280 fewer of those students enrolled this fall compared with the year before, as the impact of new federal policies on student visas hit. Domestic enrollment also fell slightly. At a school with an estimated total annual cost of $88,000 for a full-time undergraduate student living on campus, the difference added up.
While faculty members agree that there must be changes at the university, which has 8,800 degree-seeking students, down from a high of more than 10,400 in 2021, there is passionate disagreement about whether the proposed plan is the right way to go.
The university’s financial plight is not driven by poor teaching or professors’ compensation, said Sanjay Reddy, an economist at the New School who is fighting the plan. Instead, he cited mismanaged spending on real estate, expanding administrative costs, incompetent marketing and student dissatisfaction with support services such as advising.
Rather than focus on those problems, the university is taking a “blitzkrieg, shock and awe approach” in an apparent effort to reduce the full-time faculty, particularly at the New School for Social Research, the social science and humanities graduate school that is the historical heart of the university, he said.
“And I don’t think that’s going to address the problems,” Professor Reddy said. “On the contrary, my fear, and the fear of many of us, is that this will set in motion events which will further accentuate our problems.”
Parts of the plan, approved by the school’s board of trustees in November, are not controversial, such as a move to combine the university’s colleges into two: Lang College will merge with the New School for Social Research, and Parsons with the College of Performing Arts.
Most disturbing to faculty members who are affected by the overhaul: About 90 percent of the cuts fall in the liberal arts and social science divisions, where most tenure and tenure-track positions lie. Undergraduate majors in anthropology, history and sociology will be discontinued and slated for redesign, as will programs in global, environmental and urban studies and international affairs. The administration has warned that there will be “involuntary separations” if not enough faculty take buyouts or retire; about 170 faculty have been given offers, professors said.
While administrators say the cuts were driven by enrollment declines or high overhead, some faculty members see an ideological overtone. They were given less than two weeks to consider leaving, some after decades of service.
“People are outraged; they feel betrayed,” Jeremy Varon, a history professor, said. “And at the same time, the university wants to say, ‘We’re this glorious institution that cares about equity and justice and democracy in the world.’”
The New School for Social Research was founded in 1919 by progressive intellectuals seeking a new, more relevant model of education. In the 1930s, it became a university in exile for scholars fleeing Europe, including Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, and Erich Fromm, the psychologist. “Dissenting opinions, radical ideas and progressive solutions have always had a home at the New School,” the school’s website states.
The restructuring is designed in part to benefit Parsons, the renowned design college that is the economic engine of the university and whose revenues subsidize the New School’s doctoral-level academics. The vibe, some say, is different at Parsons. Faculty members at a recent reception were talking with enthusiasm about the new opportunities to work with colleagues in the performing arts college, said David J. Lewis, who, like President Towers, is an architect who has been on the Parsons faculty for more than 20 years.
“We are at a key crisis point here, and we need to make clear decisions,” he said. “I know the decisions being made are being done with the long-term interest of this institution at heart.”
But even at Parsons, which mostly has part-time, adjunct faculty, there is skepticism.
“There is a real discord between the aims and means of this restructuring,” said Soyoung Yoon, the director of the Master of Fine Arts program at Parsons. While the aim is to promote interdisciplinary research and teaching, the way it is being implemented “produces more contingency, more precarity, more insecurity of faculty,” she said, “and would actually undermine the very grounds of the university’s reputation.”
Doctoral students are worried that they will have trouble putting together a viable committee to defend their Ph.D. theses, if their advisers and subject matter experts leave. And the pause in all new Ph.D. admissions, except for in clinical psychology, could reduce interest of future Ph.D. students in the school.
“I think they understate how central the Ph.D. program is to education here,” said Andy Carr, a doctoral student in politics who attended the emergency rally against the cuts.
President Towers, a former executive dean at Parsons, said he believed the plan would lead to more innovations in the social sciences. He said he wanted to bring in more cultural and intellectual leaders from New York City to serve as part-time instructors and to reimagine doctoral education to make it more relevant, while building an endowment to pay for it.
Other austerity moves include a temporary 5 to 10 percent cut to top administrators’ salaries and a temporary freeze on retirement contributions for faculty members. The university sold its presidential townhouse on West 11th Street for $10.3 million (about half its asking price), though it offset the gain by buying a $5.2 million condo on West 12th Street in late 2024. “It is a home for the president and a place for the community to gather,” a college spokeswoman said.
New School faculty members and students have rallied against changes before. A grueling strike by part-time faculty for better wages in 2022 shut down classes for three weeks. Protests also accompanied the school’s decision in October 2020 to lay off 122 clerical and other staff members.
Students and faculty at the recent rally said that they believed that collective action could still change the course of the restructuring.
“I think students are really committed to their professors, professors to their students,” said Danielle Twiss, a doctoral student studying Marxist political economy who spoke to the crowd. “We’re able to fight for each other and actually protect each other.”
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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