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Over three hundred students, faculty, and staff at The New School rallied, picketed, and chanted through the rain on Wednesday at a rally in response to a recent announcement that the administration is targeting 40% of full-time faculty with “voluntary separation packages.” 169 full-time faculty and all non-unionized staff with over four years of service were given until December 15 to respond to the buyout offer.
Students and faculty are standing in opposition to what they see as a manufactured crisis resulting from New School administration’s financial mismanagement. Wednesday’s demonstration was organized by The New School chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-TNS), UAW Local 7902, and the New School University Student Senate.
“What is happening at The New School is part of a larger pattern we see across the country, of mobilizing a financial crisis to ideological ends,” said Ujju Aggarwal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning. “To advance that project, the administration has pitted faculty against one another. What we demonstrated Wednesday is that despite these efforts, we are united as students, staff, and faculty. Our labor makes The New School run—and the community we have built is the strength of our resistance.”
This targeted “separation” offers come on the heels of recent announcements about the merging, indefinite discontinuance, or closure of over thirty programs— the majority of which focused on social sciences or humanities. Faculty see proposed cuts as particularly egregious given the administration’s recent rejection of millions of dollars in donor funding, and purchase of a $5.1 million luxury apartment for the president’s use in late 2024. A motion passed by the University Faculty Senate on November 25, 2025 expresses alarm that the President and Provost have circumvented principles of shared governance in making these decisions.
Last month, AAUP-TNS and the New School’s organizing committee for a Full-Time Faculty Union issued a joint statement expressing deep concern over decisions made without meaningful shared governance. The statement highlighted alternative approaches proposed by faculty and raised alarms over cuts to retirement benefits, reductions in course offerings, the pause on PhD admissions, and the outsourcing of Student Health Services.
“We have given the administration every opportunity to involve us in plans to build a sustainable future for this community,” said Matthew Zavistan, a PhD student in philosophy. “But when Joel Towers, Richard Kessler, and Fran Pineda ignore our concerns, when they refuse to understand the communities they are destroying, organizing and resisting become our only option.”
Many faculty believe the administration is acting in a reckless way that does not factor in basic realities of how academic programs are delivered. They worry that these cuts will make The New School a less attractive destination for students. “At a time when critical thinking and social justice is under attack across the country, now is the moment to stand up for funding programs that foster these skills, not gut them in the way that New School administration is shamelessly doing,” said Heather Davis, Associate Professor and Director of Culture and Media.
The rapidly evolving situation at The New School takes place alongside the Trump-accelerated crises for universities and colleges. Yet according to impacted faculty, the root of the problem at The New School reflects a pattern of mismanagement mobilized towards planned destruction—part of a dangerous ideological project carried out by New School President Joel Towers and Provost Richard Kessler.
“This is one of the most invasive and aggressive forms of restructuring,” said Raha Rafii, a part-time lecturer in The New School’s Lang College of Liberal Arts, one of the schools targeted with terminations. “They want to make an example out of us.”
The coalition of faculty and student groups who organized Wednesday’s rally are committed to defending The New School’s founding mission as a haven for critical thought, social justice, and anti-fascist scholarship by any means necessary. The group demands that the administration rescind all “voluntary separation package agreements” and call on the Board of Trustees to hold a public meeting with the entire university community before moving forward with any “realignment measures.”
