Bold white letters jump from a bright red background branding The New School University Center. Glass cuts into the sides of the imposing 13-story building, creating transparent tunnels of activity like a see-through ant farm. Looking through those windows before the pandemic, you’ll see students bustling between classes or gathering on the stairwell to study or catch up. Looking through those windows, you may presume The New School is a collaborative and communal space, distinguished from the competitive capitalists who typically occupy Fifth Avenue.
However, members of the New School community say the way the university has handled recent financial strains shines a light on the paradox of the institution’s public claim of grassroots insight and its internal top-down decision making. Critics say The New School is not dedicated to the mission of social justice touted publicly but operates like any other corporation. It’s more concerned with keeping money and power at the top of the administration, than making community-informed decisions.
The Lay-Offs
One-hundred and twenty two people holding staff positions at The New School were fired on Friday, October 2. The justification, according to the university, was to cut $5 million from the projected deficit of $130 million for the fiscal year 2021.
President Dwight A. McBride told The New School Free Press on October 16 that the lay-off decisions were one of many in a process of “reimagining” The New School’s financial future, conversations that began in late March.
“The kinds of decisions that have to be made when you are laying off staff or reducing your staff, those have to be handled at the highest level possible,” President McBride said, adding that the lay-offs were decided by himself, the President’s Leadership Team (PTL), and the deans of each school.
Over the summer, 250 staffers were furloughed, and 68 of the furloughs were extended through fall. Additionally, retirement fund contributions were temporarily halted through the year for all full-time faculty and non-union staff members.
Students were cut off from access to furloughed staff like librarians and student health workers in the middle of a pandemic, such as Sabrina Picou, reporter with the Free Press.
“This was a problem for me because as someone with a chronic condition, I relied on my consistent relationship with my nurse practitioner at TNS,” Picou wrote in an opinion article for the Free Press.
The New School hired the third party management advising firm Huron Consulting to analyze the finances of The New School and offer solutions. President McBride said they had to partner with Huron but that the firm did not make any of the final decisions.
Tokumbo Shobowale, Executive Vice President of Business Operations at The New School, refused to reveal how much the university paid for this consultation or when exactly Huron was hired, citing confidentiality around contracts. In the same interview, Shobowale told the Free Press that Huron was “working with us over the course of the summer.”
While the decisions rest on the shoulders of the President, his leadership team, and the deans, President McBride went on to say that Huron provided analysis and information on how the university compares to other universities that could not happen internally. Huron has been involved in many financial crises in upper education and is known to recommend consolidating and centralizing power in efforts to be more cost effective.
Huron has a track record of leading to drastic changes in the workforce of the institutions they are involved in. An article on the firm’s website about how universities should respond to the pandemic calls for a re-evaluation of “sacred cows,” or programs which are traditionally thought of as untouchable and integral to the core mission.
The New School similarly re-evaluated the value of staffers to decide who to lay-off. President McBride said they do not hire anyone unless they are needed and doing critical work for the institution.
“None of this was a judgement on people’s performance, it was about what we could afford,”President McBride told the Free Press. He continued that the decisions were difficult so algorithms were used to make the work more approachable. He did not comment on what was included in those rubrics but said they were “only a part of a planning exercise.”
The University Planning website on the institution’s restructuring does not mention Huron Consulting, but states the decisions are made by high administrators informed by communication with staff, faculty, and student senates and the Budget Advisory Council.
Staff senator Henry Drobbin, Senior Secretary for the NSSR Politics department, said that he felt excluded from a process that he described as being carried out like a Wall Street meeting and not by the community of a social justice-driven university.
“They’re an administration that is run by a Board of Trustees who are mostly corporate figures, who have hired corporate administration to make corporate decisions and see workers not as assets but as liabilities,” Drobbin said.
These recent actions have sparked backlash from many in the community of staff, students, faculty, and New School unions who say they have not been consulted and that these decisions were made and rushed from the top down. Nelson Nuñez is the recording secretary and organizer for the Teamsters Local 1205, a union representing New School clerical, administrative, technical, library and professional staff, and member of The New School Labor Coalition (NSLC).
“There has been no transparency whatsoever. They have kept everyone out of the loop, have had close door meetings, have not involved anyone in the process, have dictated what their decisions are from above,” said Nuñez.
The University Student Senate has been reaching out for a response about The New School’s executive decisions since summer but have never received a response, according to NSSR student senator Weiouqing Chen.
The NSLC formed in July as the unions grew concerned about how the university was handling the pandemic. The coalition represents five of the eight unions at The New School as well as the Association of University Professors (AAUP). According to the coalition’s Facebook page, those unions include Part-time Faculty (ACT-UAW), Academic Student Workers (SENS-UAW), Part-time Jazz Faculty (AFM Local 802), Student Health Service Employees (SHENS-UAW), and Teamsters Local 1205, but does not include the unions for maintenance, security, and engineers.
The NSLC has been pushing back on The New School’s decision making. The coalition organized an October 6 virtual “teach in” to demand transparency and the reversal of the lay-offs. The event was attended by more than 300 community members, with testimonials from the laid-off staff. The NSLC also organized a petition for New School workers with 1,663 signatures as of November 5 calling to be included in the decisions of the university and for the administration to meet with the unions collectively.
“We want to be at the room where it happens. We want a seat at the table,” said Nuñez, adding that he wants The New School to adhere to their contract by meeting with the unions before any decisions are made.
A collective bargaining agreement is a legal contract between an employer and a union representing the employees. These contracts are why unionized staff at The New School were protected from the retirement fund contribution freeze. The Local 1205 Union Contract with The New School states decisions which affect its members’ job status must be discussed with the union before being finalized. Other New School union contracts stipulate similar procedures.
New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, an elected official tasked with monitoring the city’s financial health, sent a letter to President McBride on October 14. In the letter, Stringer asked the President to reinstate the 122 employees and to recommit to social-justice and equity in the workplace by including its community and the NSLC.
President McBride questions how The New School can address a coalition of unions with different, but similar, contracts that outline specific protocols for arbitration. He claimed the university consulted a legal team about meeting with the coalition, but has yet to address the NSLC.
“It’s a challenge when you have a group that creates itself in this moment and then asks to be recognized,” said President McBride.
President McBride has been critical of the benefit of unions in higher education in the past. In an interview with The Emory Wheel during his position as Provost of Emory University, McBride said “I don’t think unions, for graduate students and at universities in general, are a good thing.”
When asked by The Free Press, President McBride said he stood by that statement but that it was“different institutional types, different context.” He said, “I am proud to lead a university that has a long and distinguished relationship with labor unions and today we can be proud of our productive relationships.”
Others have been critical of the New School as well. Dr. Richard Bernstien, who has taught and administered at NSSR since 1989, told The 12th Street Journal: “This is an institution that prides itself on self-determination, on having a voice. We have labor unions, and they asked to have a voice but didn’t.”
The University Student Senate aligned their support with the staff, labor unions, and NSLC and approved a resolution on October 3 declaring that the administrative restructuring of the university was “not in good faith” calling for a recension of the lay-offs and organized another petition with more than 500 signatures as of October 9.
“The New School is seen from the outside and claims to be such a collaborative space that’s supposed to work for the people, and has historically been a place of refuge for people who were escaping discrimination in the broader sense; and this is such a contradiction of that,” said Lang student senator Noor Lima Boudakian.
Even in direct meetings with higher administration, Student Senate members feel they did not have the opportunity to get answers regarding the restructuring of the university. The USS met with President McBride and other high administrators about the future of the university on September 23 but, according to Chen, the designated question and answer period never happened. Instead, the administration spoke about each other’s friendships and excitement for the school year.
“They didn’t want us to raise questions,” said Chen.
Nuñez said he hopes the administration will be transparent, rescind the lay-offs, and sit with the labor coalition so that they can address the budget issues together.
“We have again been left out of the process,” said Nuñez.
But President McBride said such decisions are not for students to make. “That’s not the role for students,” McBride told the Free Press. “It’s not what we would ask students to do —to decide who is going to be laid off in an organization in a moment of exigency. It’s not a role for faculty… That’s our job.”
One-Hundred And Thirty Million
The university first announced a predicted cumulative loss of $130 million in revenue due to the coronavirus pandemic in an April email to the university. This number was based on a 25-50 percent reduction in the university budget, a budget highly dependent on enrollment, according to another university-wide email in August.
“We had estimates in April because we had to. We knew it was big and we didn’t want to sit on our hands and let it happen to us so we made some very early estimates at that point but it was just that– just estimates, and I was in a very uncomfortable position with trustees,” said Vice-President of Business Operations Shobowale.
The New School is planning for additional budget decreases in the spring 2021 semester and beyond, as the impact of first year enrollment rates last for upwards of four years, according to a document released on October 16 by The New School.
This semester, new enrollment is down 15 percent overall, with degree-seeking enrollment down 10 percent. These numbers are much better than the predicted reductions in April, according to Shobowale.
The New School highly depends on tuition to generate revenue. According to the university’s website, 73 percent of its operational earnings come from net tuition. Unlike many institutions which rely on financial support from their alumni, gifts and contributions only make up a tiny percentage of revenue.
According to pie charts on The New School University Budget Website, for the Fiscal Year 2019, Net Tuition makes up 73 percent while gifts and donations make up three percent of Operating Revenue. Faculty, Staff, and Student salaries and benefits make up 61 percent and space related costs make up 24 percent of expenses.
Discussions about the financial impact of the pandemic began in late March, before President McBride took office, and were meant to address the developing short-term cash problem, according to the President.
Those early decisions included the staff furloughs and stopping retirement fund contributions. Additionally, the Board of Trustees approved in April closing nearly all campus buildings, instituting a university-wide hiring freeze, halting capital projects deemed unessential to operation, and reduced the salaries of workers making over $70 thousand, including cutting the pay of the president and provost by 15 percent until the end of the 2021 fiscal year.
The totality of these early measures saved about $47 million for the fiscal year 2021. Additionally, the layoffs are anticipated to save only $5 million while union agreements with some part-time faculty saves $18 million for the fiscal year 2021. The totality of these measures cut the projected deficit from $130 million to $60 million.
To cover the remaining deficit, the Board of Trustees borrowed $30 million in April. In October, the board also approved drawing down the university endowment by up to $80 million, approximately a quarter of its total funds. By comparison, Princeton University announced in May in a letter to their students that spending even over six percent of their endowment was “not sustainable.”
President McBride has claimed the financial state of The New School is not sustainable and that it has been worsened by the market impact of the pandemic. But in recent years The New School appears to have been somewhat financially successful. Prior to this year, the university has seen a trending increase in enrollment and therefore tuition since 2011 according to official data from The Almanac and Trends. According to annual financial reports revenue has exceeded expenditure in most recent years, meaning more money is made then spent.
Despite the positive financials, the university is in debt. The New School borrowed around $300 million to build the University Center on Fifth Avenue, a building slowly sinking into the ground as interest builds on the loan. As of the 2020 fiscal year financial statement, The New School owed $595,443 million to the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York.
Many involved in The New School community noted that there were additional measures that could have been taken to save money and jobs. Teamsters 1205 representative Nuñez argues the upper administration did not utilize the economics department to come up with financial solutions, instead, Nunez says, The New School “hired anti-union consultant to chop the heads off the workers who make the university function, at the same time saving the necks of their bloated upper administration.”
The issue with the top-heavy or disproportionately paid executive administration has been ongoing. Sanjay Reddy, an economics professor at the university, analyzed The New School’s public data and compiled a presentation on The New School’s finances and found the average salary of executive leadership at The New School is over $400,000.
A 2017 Free Press article reported that former New School President David Van Zandt was paid $1.15 million for the fiscal year 2015, more than the President of Harvard University. Professor Reddy did the math to find the salary of former President Van Zandt for each million of the university expenses was $2,589. By comparison, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin only made $248 in salary for each million in institutional expenses.
Additionally the President doesn’t pay for housing but lives in a townhouse on 21 West 11th street. The townhouse was bought by The New School and its assessed value in 2020 by Zillow is around eight million dollars. Professor Reddy believes selling the building could have been an option to close the budget gap as it is worth more money than what is saved by the lay-offs.
The New School Labor Coalition, backed by the University Student Senate, and many New School community members call for the administration to accept pay-caps for non-academic workers and to make titles and salaries of all New School employees publicly available.
Furthermore, Reddy argued in an opinion article for the Free Press that the financial strains of The New School are short-term problems being used to create an “atmosphere of emergency” and to justify the “austerity politics” of the university.
Student Senator Chen voiced her agreement with the article and said that the university is conflating the problem of liquidity, or availability of cash, with that of solvency, or ability to survive in the long run.
“I think we have a problem with liquidy and not a problem with solvency, and so we could have used a one time solution to face the crisis,” said Chen, suggesting solutions like drawing more on the endowment or selling a building.
The Climate Assessment Report
The New School was founded in 1919, on the tail end of a world war and a pandemic, to directly and honestly face social justice issues and “lead in emancipating thought from the narrow trammels of lay boards of trustees,” according to its proposal.
“A lot of students come here because they presuppose that the university should be a very progressive and a very social justice oriented university,” said Chen. “But the way they make decisions, the way they shun those emerging leaders of local and global communities away from making a very, very local decision at the heart of the university seems very, very ironic.”
Surveys conducted by The New School in late June were meant to inform the decisions of the university’s future. Both the faculty and staff survey and the student survey reported that the most common reason to attend The New School is because of its seeming commitment to social justice and progressive values. However, both surveys also list “progress in equity, inclusion, and social justice” at the top of what they would change about the university.
The divide between the upper administration and the rest of its community members existed well before the economic strains of the pandemic and was diagnosed in the Executive Summary from the Climate Assessment in 2019. The assessment found the culture of the senior administration was “more corporate in orientation, operation, and affiliation,” as opposed to the rest of the community which is “more collegial, communal, and grassroots.”
The Climate Assessment summary complies both quantitative and qualitative research from a university task force appointed by the former President and managed by the Office of Social Justice to investigate The New School’s mission statement for equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice (EDISJ). It makes several recommendations, including creating “a self-sustaining plan to collect and widely share meaningful data that can be used to inform policies, practices, and assessment of progress towards becoming a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive University.”
President McBride says the university plans to address these diagnoses, however the recent “reimagining work” is not meant to fix those cultural differences, but only the university’s financial concerns. The upper administration makes a distinction between finances and a strategic planning process evaluating the school’s commitment to EDISJ.
“I think we are trying to differentiate between the context, the values of the institution–the critical areas in which we will invest– and the financial decisions are basically a foundation underneath that,” said Shobowale.
A Liberal Arts task force was created in the fall to address the issues of EDISJ within the Climate Assessment report and to advance the university’s liberal arts education and research, but not to handle the deficit.
However, this distinction seems unclear even to the Task Force itself, which on October 14 released a statement to the President asking for clarification of their purpose. The task force claimed the layoffs affected the work and community they were told to address. They asked for greater transparency and clarity on their mission as well as an extension of their November deadline in order to produce meaningful plans with proper community consultation.
According to a statement released October 16, the Liberal Arts task force was given an extended deadline, but not an explanation of their purpose.
“All of those diagnoses were the problem the university have especially the higher administration. They are the same problems that showed in the Climate Assessment. So these problems are— they’ve been long standing, right, and supposedly, right, the restructuring or reimaging somehow, right, are an attempt at fixing all of those problems but none of them are being fixed,” said Chen.
President McBride is very hopeful that there will be no more large-scale lay-offs in the future and he is excited to focus on the strategic planning process.
“This has been like a sword hanging over my head. I know it’s been hanging over the community’s head. People knew we were going to have to have reductions in staff,” said President McBride.
When classes do resume in person, the faces of the 122 staff members will no longer be seen on campus. The roles they oversaw will be redistributed throughout the remaining work force.
A laid-off library worker said that the lay-offs were a “very classist” way to deal with the financial impacts. The worker requested anonymity claiming there is a non-disparagement agreement in the severance package and do not want to lose benefits. According to the worker, the university was “saving pennies” by getting rid of low-wage staffers. There are many high-paid administrators that “it’s not even clear what it is that they do, but, some way somehow, they’re always considered essential enough to always be safe through these things,” the worker said.
A job at The New School doesn’t just mean a reliable income but also benefits like health insurance. “I’m now in a position where there’s a lot of different medical things that I’m trying to rush and take care of now, because I don’t know how much I’m not going to have coverage for much longer,” the worker said. They remarked they were luckier than others laid-off because they are not the head of a household.
“It’s not just 122 people. These are families, so exponentially you are talking about hundreds of people being impacted. These are people with kids, with spouses, with partners who are also caretakers for their parents who are also being impacted by this. The exponential impact of that is going to be felt all around the city unfortunately because of this short-sighted decision,” said Nuñez.
Laid-off staff members in need of financial support can submit the following form: TNS Community Mutual Aid Request & Inquiry Form.