AAUP Stands in Solidarity with New School Workers Amidst Corporate Takeover of the University.

AAUP President Todd Wolfson released the following statement:

The AAUP condemns the catastrophic faculty and staff layoffs enacted at the New School. A multimillion-dollar deficit-driven by years of corporate consultant overreach, poor executive decision-making, real estate debacles, and ever-bloating executive salary costs-is now being weaponized against faculty, staff, students, and the historic intellectual life of this university.

This week, Provost Richard Kessler proudly told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the faculty layoffs were "data-driven." What he described was not academic stewardship for the common good. It was the language of corporate takeover: "reconstituting" colleges, "work-force action," "significant data," and faculty being "re-homed" as if learning, research, and scholarship are inventory on a balance sheet.

Kessler is not speaking as a steward of knowledge and creativity. He is speaking as a corporate actor focused on top-down control. His attempt to divide the university is a classic corporate austerity maneuver: Label some parts of the university "growing," others "in deficit," and pit faculty, students, and programs against one another while treating education as a revenue stream rather than a public good.

These forced separations are a profound betrayal of the institution's founding legacy as a sanctuary for critical social thought for scholars fleeing fascism. Today, President Joel Towers and Provost Richard Kessler are actively dismantling this historic intellectual community.

Faculty, students, and workers were all cut out of any meaningful consultation on these cuts. Instead, executives and consultants made closed-door decisions, then invoked undisclosed "data" to justify layoffs, program cuts, and the obliteration of tenure and shared governance. "Data" without transparency is not accountability. This is a top-down austerity takeover.

By systematically wiping out core humanities and social theory programs, slashing tenure-track lines, and forcing precarious contingent labor onto the remaining workforce, this administration is directly destroying the job security and academic freedom required for critical scholarship.

The AAUP stands in solidarity with the impacted faculty and staff, the New School AAUP chapter, and all campus unions, students, and workers resisting this corporate takeover of the university.