Six months after news broke that the New School was offering voluntary retirement and severance packages to large number of faculty and staff, the New York university has handed out layoff notices to around 15 percent of its employees.
The layoffs, first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education on Tuesday, affect 19 full-time faculty members, 10 of whom were tenured, with dozens more taking the early retirement or buyout offers. As part of the restructuring, the school will go from four colleges to two, has discontinued over a dozen academic programs, and paused most doctoral admissions. 30 faculty members were “re-homed” from discontinued programs to other departments. As previously reported in December by the New School Free Press, among those programs to be discontinued are its masters in Arts Management and Entreprenuership, while its liberal arts programs at the School of Public Engagement and at the Eugene Lang College will be merged.
In a statement to the Chronicle, the New School chapter of the American Association of University Professors called the layoffs “a major gutting of our full-time faculty body” and said that some layoffs appeared “to be politically motivated and retaliatory.”
In an interview with ARTnews, Provost Richard Kessler denied those claims. “There are people who are in shock, there are people who are angry, there are people who are upset—and of course they would be all of those things,” Kessler said. “And so there are people who are searching for ulterior motives, who are looking for reasons that are beyond what we’ve expressed. And we’ve expressed significant reasons, including a university that had been running a $50 million [annual] deficit and $160 million accumulated deficit that it could not continue. We have 20 percent fewer students than we had at our peak in 2021, and we just don’t have the resources to continue a workforce that’s 20 percent larger than what we need.” (The school’s annual deficit has been previously reported as $48 million.)
Since December, the university has framed the restructuring and staff reductions as a painful but necessary move to address a significant budget deficit as it faces declining enrollment and threats from the Trump Administration. Kessler said much the same Thursday, telling ARTnews that the school is disproprotionately affected by attacks and restrictions on international students, which made up 40 percent of the student body in 2023, according to a New York Times analysis. That placed it with the fifth highest percentage among four-year colleges and universities in the US.
“At any given moment, will the federal government decide no immigrants can come in, no students can come in from any country? There’s an X factor to this,” said Kessler. “We’ve been living through a political and global situation where things are occurring that we never imagined would occur.”
As per whether the restructuring and cuts will actually close the university’s budget deficit, Kessler siad he is “super confident,” adding that the restructuring will make the school “more nimble,” “more dynamic,” and better able to respond to shifting enrollment patterns, citing investment in high-performing programs like the College of Performing Arts.
Among the school’s graduates are many important figures 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 New School’s AAUP chapter has claimed that among the professors laid off this week were several who never recieved a buyout offer or were from programs set for closure, and thus catching them off guard. Kessler said that the school has repeatedly communicated with faculty, staff, and students over the issues, and the steps the university planned to take. When voluntary separation packages were offered late last year, he added, he and other university officials conveyed that “involuntary separation packages”—i.e. layoffs—were likely to follow in 2026.
In December, students, faculty, and staff protested the cuts outside the school, demanding that the school rescind voluntary separation package agreements, institute a $200,000 salary cap, call a meeting between the board and students, faculty, and staff.
In a statement, ACT-UAW Local 7902, the union for part-time faculty at the school, said it did not recieve the voluntary separation emails, but has experienced program closures and course cancellations.
“We were also asked to voluntarily give up our 10% retirement contributions for up to 18 months, in line with the involuntary cessation of retirement benefits forced upon full-time faculty and staff,” the union’s Annie Lee Larson told ARTnews in an email.
