Train Entering Station NYC on Oct 30, 2022   

I mean the question literally.  The New School (TNS, by which I’ll mean all its colleges) has advantages most private colleges would die for. Why is it now trying to push out 40% of its faculty and most experienced staff, mainly on the academic, non-arts side? How did it develop a $48 million deficit for the current year, or around 10% of operating expenditures? President Joel Towers has announced these things but does not explain them.  His administration has  published a closure list with no academic reasoning about the choices.

 

I’ve read all the documents I can access. My sense is that senior managers have made important financial errors over a number of years, and yet the underlying problem is poor academic planning. 2025’s Summer Working Groups notwithstanding, senior management have not yet constructed a multi-year collaborative academic planning process involving all faculty and frontline staff. 

 

Selling The Catalyst, UCSB on April 12, 2014   

2025 saw a shift in the hard right’s measure for the success of its decades-long attacks on universities: it moved from discrediting to subjugating the university system. It used decades-old methods in which culture wars and budget wars work together. These were now yoked under Trump II with federal coercion campaigns that extorted changes in core institutional policy through the unlawful withholding of federal funds.

 

University boards and presidents have not formulated common aims much less a joint strategy to fight the most powerful attack in higher education’s modern history, one already more destructive than McCarthyism. They have followed the mantra of corporate America: shut up, suck up, and try not to stand up.  I’ve noted that all the fighting has come from faculty groups and some professional associations.