BY MADHAV TR AND LEXI ALLISON
What is happening at the New School is happening to higher education across the United States. The story is a familiar one of an administration determining the course of a university’s future without consulting the people involved in making a university run, including students, faculty, and staff. The only people they do consult are those whose main job is to amplify and reiterate the administration’s desires, buttressed by what passes for economic analysis. The board of trustees is constituted by the characteristic practice of rich people appointing other rich people, with the consequence that members are neither attached to the institution nor competent to run a university.
The New School has been affected by wider changes in US higher education. The first change is the general decline in university enrollments, which has been worse for TNS than for its peer institutions (see table below) for reasons such as demographic change, immigration enforcement, the declining marginal returns to a college degree, and exploding costs of attendance. The second change is the willingness and desire of college administrations to make cuts at a time when a right-wing government is in power, ensuring an antilabor and anti-education atmosphere.
The university is in a financial crisis of its own making, linked to bad decisions about real estate and debt financing. Decisions to build the University Center on 14th Street and to rent a massively expensive dormitory from a board member have tipped the college into the red. By 2025, the university carried approximately $990 million in combined bond and lease obligations, paying over $30 million in annual interest alone (see figure 1).
By treating a temporary postpandemic enrollment surge as permanent—investing heavily in consultants and construction rather than teaching or student support and allowing prolonged labor disputes to erode confidence in the institution—the university engineered the conditions for the 13.6 percent enrollment decline between 2021 and 2024 that it now portrays as an unforeseeable crisis.
The stopgap solutions have been, as they typically are for private universities dependent on tuition revenue, to increase sticker-price tuition, to reduce or hold flat full-time faculty salaries, and to increase the number of adjunct appointments (around 80 percent of New School’s faculty members are part time). TNS simultaneously increased upper-management salaries, further cutting instructional value (see figure 2).
Such solutions have never worked elsewhere, and they did not work here. The New School posted an operating deficit of $23.7 million in 2025, yet interest payments alone amounted to $30.2 million, meaning that debt service exceeded the size of the annual deficit itself. A $5.2 million bond was due on July 1, 2026. The only solution the administration can see remains the classic one: Fire the workers. This has resulted in mass layoffs, from administrative staff employees and part-time faculty members to, now, shockingly, tenured full professors. These include Jeremy Varon, a distinguished historian (and head of the New School’s AAUP chapter), and Sanjay Reddy (a development economist and noted critic of the administration), among many others.
What does this mean for academic tenure? One can only be appalled by what appears to be a significant departure from long-standing norms governing tenure in American higher education. The dismissal of tenured faculty members outside the context of clear program closures or a formally declared financial exigency raises fundamental questions about the meaning of tenure itself. The idea of academic tenure is (or was, at least) to protect scholars from capricious changes in opinion. The slow disintegration of these norms threatens academic freedom and contributes to a broader shift toward more contingent, precarious, and more easily managed academic labor.
The economic rationale offered for these dismissals does not hold up. The university’s difficulties are the result of years of financial mismanagement, unsustainable debt burdens, declining enrollment, and strategic choices made at the highest levels of the institution. Eliminating faculty and staff positions may reduce expenditures in the short term, but it does not address the underlying causes of the crisis and will only exacerbate the institution’s problems with student enrollment and retention.
What can we do for the New School? There is really no such thing as shared governance in the contemporary American private university, where faculty, students, and staff have no meaningful say in how a 501(c)(3) organization is run. Can we appeal to the board of trustees? Do they care? They certainly are under no obligation to. There are cases (like Antioch Collee or Cooper Union) where concerned alumni assume responsibility for the institution, others where the institution goes under (as Hampshire College has this year), and unfortunately each university must find its individual solution to the collective problem.
Although in some ways the New School is unlike any other, in other ways it is a microcosm of the collapse of American academia. What is a university for? Who is it for? Can members of the university community decide that for themselves? The future of the New School is a matter of concern not only for those who study and work there but for all who value the role of universities as places of independent thought and critical inquiry. That future, however, does not look very bright.
Madhav TR is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research and a member of UAW Local 7902. Lexi Allison is a graduate student in the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research.
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