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THE GUTTING OF HIGHER EDUCATION – WHAT’S LEFT OF THE NEW SCHOOL?
 
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Jeremy Varon
August 27, 2026
Dissent Magazine
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_ 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. _

Columbia University faculty members gather in Manhattan to protest
the university’s concessions to President Donald Trump’s
administration on March 24, 2025., Photo: Barry Williams / New York
Daily News // The Nation

 

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
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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
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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”
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in New York City protesting these measures. From that effort was born
an unprecedented, citywide coalition [[link removed]]
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_
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the higher ed press
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and even prominent European media
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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
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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
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from COVID-era declines.) These critics have noted
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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 xxxxxx 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
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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
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and detailed analyses
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 [[link removed]] 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
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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
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which now vets thousands of syllabi to purge targeted content about
race, gender, and sexuality. Some have capitulated, like Columbia
University
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and the University of Virginia
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To win back federal funds or quell investigations, they and other
marquee schools have accepted
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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
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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
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In Florida, a Trump appointee blasted the state’s anti-DEI law
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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
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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
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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.]_

 

_Dissent_ [[link removed]]_ is a
magazine of politics and ideas published in print three times a year.
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* higher education
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* Colleges
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* universities
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* Education
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* Tenured professors
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* New School
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* neoliberal austerity
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* disaster capitalism
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* Humanities
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* Social Sciences
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* American Association of University Professors
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* AAUP
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