November 18, 2025

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing with deep dismay over yesterday’s announcement of austerity measures made without meaningful, representative consultation with faculty, staff, or students. These measures force us to pay for years of financial mismanagement of the university (according to our Economics colleagues’ analysis of the data compiled by the Finance Summer Working Group).

TNS continues to feel the vicious-cycle effects of the austerity measures implemented in 2020. Our departments are already stretched thin due to staff layoffs and the non-replacement of faculty who retired, experienced “voluntary separation,” or secured employment elsewhere. These deficits continue to negatively impact student experience and retention. Then, as now, we saw a pause on employer retirement contributions, which effectively means a pay cut and lost compound growth for all eligible employees. This severe cut is coming at a moment when our health care premiums are rising.

There are other paths; this week, NSSR faculty passed a motion asking the university to cap salaries at $200,000 per year for 18 months instead of cutting our retirement benefits, a resolution that we fully endorse.

In the spirit of the “One Faculty” and “Student Faculty Solidarity” movements that guided us during the Part-Time Faculty (PTF) strike in 2022, we also express concern for and solidarity with our PTF and Student colleagues. We recognize that PTF are among the most precarious workers at the university, and we are alarmed by the reduction of courses across various departments and new threats of termination (“involuntary separation”). Too often we are divided by division and by rank. We refuse efforts to delink our interests and our struggles.

Further, it is neither necessary nor prudent to pause admissions to PhD programs at TNS. Colleagues in the Economics Department produced an analysis demonstrating that, even modeled conservatively, these cuts will lose far more money than they save. Many of the NSSR master’s programs are desirable because they are a pathway to a PhD here. Master’s students have responded to the freeze with an impending tuition strike: this loss of PhD admissions means the loss of tuition dollars even before any “savings” from the pause begins. Earlier this month, a member of the Board offered to give enough money to fund 22 PhD students for the next academic year; the President rejected that financial support. This rejection causes us to worry that the pause is indefinite and that the goal is not to “protect” existing PhD programs but rather to wind them down. The Lang Faculty Council voted overwhelmingly in favor of a motion to condemn this pause. The attack on spaces of critical inquiry and training are ideologically linked to the attack on labor formations across TNS. To both, we say “no.”

We see a pause on PhD admissions as an attack on students, compounded by the impending layoffs of Student Health Services staff. Outsourcing Student Health Services to Mount Sinai will mean that students will not have access to services on campus, and faculty will not have the ability to walk students over to medical assistance in the event of a crisis. This cut is a dangerous move in a moment when our students continue to report high levels of depression, anxiety, and other mental health concerns.

The university's cycles of austerity and consolidation, including the loss of the School of Public Engagement (SPE) as a division, betray a pattern where we are all being asked to work more for less, and at the expense of students and workers. We must stand together. We urge you to attend the rally against cuts, layoffs, and pauses to PhD admissions on November 21 at noon in front of the University Center, sponsored by SENS, Local 7902, SHENS, The New School Student Senate, and the Academic Student Workers Union.

It’s easy to feel defeated right now. We are not defeated. We are getting organized.

Join us. Sign your New School Full Time Faculty unionization card here, and stay tuned for an announcement of an upcoming assembly co-sponsored by AAUP-TNS and the FTF Union.

AAUP-TNS Leadership Council

The New School Full-Time Faculty Union