New School Declares War On Its Faculty

By Arthur Schwartz

Paul Kottman, a tenured New School professor sued the university in September, claiming that his layoff ─ and the termination of other tenured faculty ─ illegally dismantled academic tenure. His lawyer is Richard Emery, one of the country’s leading First Amendment lawyers.

The New School laid off 19 full-time faculty members in June — including nine with tenure — citing severe financial deficits and shrinking enrollment. Kottman’s lawsuit argues that the university failed to meet the strict handbook conditions required to dismiss tenured staff and neglected the mandatory “look around” process to find him another departmental post. The suit seeks Kottman’s reinstatement, back pay, and compensatory damages, arguing that using financial restructuring to bypass tenure threatens academic protections industry-wide.

The layoffs at the New School sparked months of escalating campus demonstrations, union actions, and public pushback. Critics argue that the administration used a $60 million budget deficit to disproportionately target vocal critics and gut the university’s progressive foundations.

In March 2026, ahead of the formal layoff announcements, over 100 students, faculty, and staff marched across the 5th Avenue entrance and delivered a 10-foot-long letter signed by over 1,600 community members to university President Joel Towers, demanding an end to “unilateral restructuring.” The New School Full-Time Faculty Union (FTF) collaborated with UAW Local 7902 (representing part-time faculty and student workers) to organize rolling pickets and rallies against what they termed “extreme austerity measures.”

Protesters have been particularly vocal about how the cuts dismantle the social sciences and humanities. Faculty leaders pointed out that while arts divisions function heavily on part-time adjuncts, gutting full-time research professors eliminates the unique intellectual culture that defined the university since its 1919 founding.

A central point of public and faculty outrage is the allegation that the university used the financial crisis as an excuse to silence dissent. Beyond Kottman, the layoff of tenured economics professor Sanjay Reddy drew intense pushback. Reddy had spent years being publicly and bluntly critical of how the administration managed its finances.

There has been a global academic backlash. High-profile global academics — including Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz — authored open letters of protest to pressure the university to reinstate the terminated faculty.

The university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a blistering statement accusing leadership of deploying “severe and reckless austerity” that completely hollows out academic freedom.

In this era of the Trump Administration cracking down on universities because of their curriculum – as part of its effort to undermine the First Amendment ─ it is disappointing that the New School, created out of our community’s iconoclastic heritage, has stooped this low. Judith Friedlander, a former New School dean and the author of a history of the institution, described the restructuring as a frontal attack on the university’s progressive, social research core. “It no longer represents what this institution stood for and was about,” she said.

---

What’s Left of The New School?

By Jeremy Varon

These are excerpts from a recent piece in Dissent magazine (reprinted with permission).

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 New School is an increasingly common story across all of higher education.

NYC’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 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…. 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… 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 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…

The saga is a chilling case of neoliberal austerity, pocked with disaster capitalism, descending on academia… What’s happening to the New School is an increasingly common story across all of higher education…

The New School’s financial woes are real enough, though their causes and scope are matters of dispute… University leadership, claiming a 20% enrollment drop from a peak in 2021, cites the loss of tuition revenue as its grand alibi.… Whatever the source of the troubles, faculty, staff, and students have paid the price….

The New School’s own restructuring has been particularly odious… Separate purges last winter and spring significantly shrunk the full-time faculty. Often shy of Medicare age, senior professors have meager chances of academic re-employment… 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.

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… 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 Ph.D. and further years of rigorous evaluation… The ability to speak, write, and teach… without fear of being fired for one’s views has been a vital guarantor of academic freedom.

Yet tenure at the New School ultimately offered no protection at all. …[P]er the faculty handbook, that they could fire anyone part of a…program…designated as “discontinued.” “Financial exigency” could trigger this discontinuance. … 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…

The New School’s attack on tenure — indeed, its entire “workforce realignment” — brazenly accelerates the long-standing objectification 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% of faculty nationwide were part-time or contingent, up from 44% in 1987…

Already, social research has been devalued at the New School. Last year, it froze Ph.D. admissions for nearly the entire graduate social science division… 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…it can get on the cheap from part-time instructors….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…

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… the banning of whole subject matters from classrooms to accord with (some) 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 [alleged] 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 capitulated…[and] accepted the dismantling, alteration, or intrusive federal oversight of programs, curricula, hiring decisions, and disciplinary processes. A principled few have pushed back….

[M]ost universities, including the New School, have chosen quiescent silence. Fears of government reprisals or donor pushback for speaking out are real. …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…

Absent Trump, higher education would still face serious financial and cultural challenges. But budgetary concerns are too easily an excuse for silence, which only encourages government efforts to defund universities. The prevailing sense among institutional leaders 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… During that time, it made no statement nor sponsored any dialogue about how the institution might meet the current authoritarian 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.