Academic Freedom at Stake in The New School’s Restructuring
- Endangered Scholars Worldwide
- 11 minutes ago
- 8 min read
A shock-therapy restructuring currently being carried out by senior administrators at The New School threatens the institution which, from its beginning, has been dedicated to academic freedom and critical inquiry. This current crisis shows how threats to academic freedom are intimately connected with the growing power of a managerial class within neo-liberalized universities as well as the changing financial landscape of higher education in the United States.
On November 17, 2025, in a university-wide email, The New School’s President, Joel Towers, announced that the school’s projected deficit of $31 million for the 2025/26 academic year had fallen drastically short of the actual deficit of $48 million due to “enrollment shortfalls” and “other increased costs” and introduced a set of radical “cost-saving measures.” The message reiterated an earlier November 7 decision to pause all PhD admissions for the next year (except for the Clinical Psychology PhD program), after applications were opened in September and there was less than a month left until the application deadline of December 15, 2025. Courses that do not meet minimum thresholds would be cancelled, and programs that are deemed to be duplicates and for which there is “low demand” would be discontinued. Aside from changes to academic programs, President Towers also announced in the same message that the school would be pausing retirement contributions and that employees, including both faculty and staff, would soon be receiving “voluntary separation packages” with those eligible receiving early retirement packages. The message stated that some “involuntary separations” would also be happening with the exact number depending on how many employees take voluntary separation and retirement offers. When the voluntary separation and retirement letters eventually arrived in early December, faculty and staff were given only about two weeks to decide if they wanted to take them or not. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), about 40% of all full-time faculty at the university received offers.
While President Joel Towers, Provost Richard Kessler, and Executive Vice-President for Business Operations Francisco Pineda (the three main decision-makers in the restructuring process) have held community meetings where they have personally spoken to campus members, it does not appear as if the restructuring decisions were made through shared governance. Over the summer of 2025, a series of “working groups” had been formed and charged with coming up with suggestions about how to restructure the university and adjust its finances while maintaining its core mission, but the procedure regarding the selection of the members of such groups, as well as if/how their suggestions were to be followed by senior administrators was not clearly stated. While some faculty have been involved in these working groups, there has been no student involvement in any part of the process. In addition, controversial measures, such as pausing all PhD admissions (except for Clinical Psychology), were decided without consulting the Board of Governors of the New School for Social Research, the division that houses all PhD programs. Meanwhile, the PhD pause was presented to the Board of Trustees only after it had already been publicly announced and initiated.
A November 18, 2025, statement by TNS-AAUP criticized these decisions. In the statement, TNS faculty stated that the administration’s actions “force [faculty] to pay for years of financial mismanagement of the university.” Citing an analysis by the NSSR Economics department faculty, the statement claimed that had the school’s expenditures on administrative salaries, professional services, facilities and real estate, and employee benefits (“mostly attributable to administrative salary growth”) grown at the same rate that revenues grew (about 3%, which is the rate at which faculty salaries grew annually), the school would have a $7 million surplus today instead of a deficit. Another document prepared by economics faculty shows that the PhD pause is also a very ineffective measure to combat a financial deficit. Not only do PhD students generate revenue by working on campus, but 50% of their funding comes from restricted donations and grants that cannot be directed away from PhD education. Furthermore, the report draws attention to the very likely possibility that the PhD pause will cause a drop in the number of new tuition-paying MA student which is the main source of students in its PhD programs.
Students, at several community meetings, also raised this issue with senior administrators, expressing concern that a decrease in demand for MA programs because of a pause on PhDs could be cited as reason to merge or close more programs and departments. In a December 5 community forum, President Towers confirmed that he rejected an offer by a member of the Board of Trustees to cover the cost of PhD stipends for the coming academic year through a large donation, claiming that this would not have covered “broader costs” of PhD education, without elaborating what those costs are.
As the TNS-AAUP statement underlined, this makes clear that alternative paths have not been taken to address the financial problems of the institution, such as capping salaries at $200,000 across the university, which was proposed by NSSR faculty. In a December 11, 2025, town hall with NSSR students and faculty, the Vice-President for Business Operations, Francisco Pineda, stated that he was aware of such a proposal, but was personally against it. According to the public tax information about TNS from 2024, the total compensation for the position of Vice-President for Business Operations was more than $450,000 annually while the New School’s President earns nearly a $1 million a year. Instead of capping salaries, senior administration has announced that the highest salary-earners would be receiving a pay cut of 5-10% for up to 18 months, meaning that their actual pay reduction could range from a 5% cut for one month to 10% for 18 months.
One of the central arguments put forth by the administration to justify their decisions has been the claim that there is a “structural financial deficit” problem whereby some schools within TNS consistently run surpluses and others run deficits. Senior administrators argue that this makes certain radical actions “necessary.” Critics object by citing a recent history of financial mismanagement at the school. Recently, to address some short-term financial difficulties, the university sold a presidential townhouse for around $10 million, which was half of what it was originally listed for. But in 2024, they bought another condo for the president for around $5 million. The school was also highly criticized for the construction of its recently built University Center Building on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue, a project that the school financed with debt that is now contributing to the deficit through interest payments. The school’s dorms, among the most expensive in the country, contribute $13 million to the deficit with one building, 301 Residence Hall, losing $10 million on its own. Previous budgets were based on the presumption that the school would get rid of the lease for that building, which has still not happened. In the NSSR town hall meeting, in response to audience questions regarding ties between a member of the Board of Trustees and the real estate firms that owns that building, Pineda said that the claims were baseless and instead told the person asking the question that their question was merely motivated by “their own political agenda.”
Based on this history of mismanagement, some argue that it is the administration instead that is ideologically motivated. Some TNS professors interviewed by Gothamist said that the university is “using the financial crisis as an excuse for an ideological overhaul that prioritizes professional training programs over the humanities,” by specifically targeting “departments and divisions long known as hotbeds of leftist dissent.” In meetings with members of the university community, Towers, Kessler and Pineda repeatedly emphasized their claim that the cost-cutting measures were necessary to address the deficits of the different schools and colleges across the New School, especially the NSSR. Despite opposition from members of the community who argued that there are no graduate liberal arts and social science education programs in the country that generate a surplus, they reiterated their expectation for NSSR to come to a balanced budget in the next few years.
The history of The New School is intimately connected with a strong commitment to academic freedom, which critics argue is at stake in this current situation. Founded in the early 20th century by a group of academics who had to leave Columbia University due to their disapproval of the US joining World War I, the university expanded a few decades later as it welcomed European scholars who were fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s. In the vision of the founders, the school would be a place where scholars would be “relieve[d] from administrative responsibilities,” allowed to self-govern, and have the freedom to “investigate, publish, and teach.”. The current administration wants to do the opposite by reducing the number of faculty, increasing teaching loads, and reducing research leaves. The role of faculty as researchers, in addition to just teachers, will be diminished under the recent changes whereby faculty will be expected to teach five courses a year instead of three and be allowed to go on research leave every five years instead of every three years. Instrumentalizing “restructuring” and financial difficulties, the administration is also threatening to close down programs and departments in order to be able to fire tenured faculty. A professor from Michigan State University told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the process ongoing at TNS, as well as other institutions across the country, shows that tenure is no longer providing the security to scholars that it used to in the past.
Restructuring not only undermines the academic freedom of faculty but also graduate students. In addition to uncertainties about whether their programs will be discontinued or not, PhD students also have to worry about whether their advisors will take voluntary separation or retirement offers, or if they will be laid off in the coming months. Even though senior administration has tried to repeatedly assure existing students that they will be able to complete the programs they were admitted to, it is highly unclear what will happen to PhD students if they can no longer find advisors or faculty members for their dissertation committees. The school seems to be of the opinion that whichever faculty ends up remaining in each program can take over the advising work of existing students, which is, of course, not how graduate education works as professors are not interchangeable in that way. It is worth noting that neither the current President nor the Provost themselves have PhDs.
Judith Friedlander, Former NSSR Dean and historian of The New School, recently wrote a letter to President Towers and the Board of Trustees calling for a reevaluation of the current path taken to get rid of a significant number of full time faculty. In the letter, Friedlander states that TNS has passed through similar situations of financial strain in the past, such as in the 1960s, where the first impulse was similarly to try to get rid of the Graduate Faculty. She reminds the readers that it was specifically because such paths were not taken that the school bounced back years later and was able to save a bankrupt Parsons School of Design in the 1970s and integrate it into The New School.
A series of reactions, both inside and outside, have been voiced against the administration. On November 21, 2025, the unions of the student workers, part-time faculty and health workers at the Student Health Center picketed The New School and issued a public statement in front of the University Center on 5th Avenue demanding a reversal of the austerity measures and informing the university community about the restructuring. On December 10, 2025, hundreds of students, faculty, and staff picketed to protest the austerity measures in front of the Alvin Johnson Building/Kaplan Hall, where senior administrators were set to meet members of the Board of Trustees for a cocktail party. On December 15, 2025, then-NYC Comptroller Brad Lander criticized the way in which austerity measures were being implemented at The New School, calling for administrators to instead “engage collaboratively and in good faith with its workers.” A petition to demand a stop to the austerity measures has received more than 1100 signatures as of December 16, 2025.
Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW), based at The New School, is deeply concerned about the detrimental impacts of the school’s restructuring process on academic freedom at the institution. We call on the TNS administration to reverse measures that have been decided on hastily that threaten to diminish the academic freedom of faculty and students at the school by cutting departments, programs, resources for research, and more. We further call on the administration to include the broader university community in decision-making processes and allow them to voice their concerns and demands. We invite the global community to join our call.
