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Around 80 Students, staff, alumni, and faculty picketed in front of the University Center today to protest downsizing, salary cuts, and the restructuring of the university.

Last week the Board of Trustees approved administration’s plan to reduce costs as the school expects another multimillion dollar deficit. Administration will be pausing PhD admissions, cutting academic programs, pausing university contributions to employee retirement programs, and incentivizing retirement and voluntary resignations. President Joel Towers warned in a university-wide email that layoffs are likely.

Towers said in his message the plan enables the university to put in motion a series of necessary steps to align the school’s finances with its mission in the spirit of its founding. 

This sentiment is not shared by faculty at either Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts or The New School for Social Research (NSSR).

“I’m deeply concerned about even the short-term survival of the social sciences and the liberal arts … within the larger constellation of The New School,” Jeremy Varon, a professor of history, said. “I don’t trust the administration to make constructive decisions, and we’re at a moment of great jeopardy.”

Protesters marched in a circle in front of the University Center for around an hour, holding signs that read things like ‘Towers is a Wanker’ and ‘Health Care not Wealth Care.’ Directly in front of the UC, taped to one of the glass windows looking out onto 5th Ave, was a sign that read ‘Solidarity, Together we Fight, together we win!’ The sign was signed by the New School Part-Time Faculty Union, Academic Student Workers, New Student Workers Union, and the Student Health Employees at TNS Union. Protesters wore blue pins, buttons, and stickers that displayed UAW in large block letters, which stands for the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America. 

The university has not announced publicly which particular programs are being cut, but students say they have heard rumors their major is next on the chopping block. 

International affairs graduate student, Julia Hoffman-Douglas said her entire program may be cut, as well as the Environmental Protection and Sustainability Management program. 

 “It’s an awful thing … I don’t know what The New School stands for if it doesn’t stand for environmental protection and sustainability and management and international affairs,” she said. “My program is needed. We critique the international system. It is necessary … We have to be able to critique our own government and governments all throughout the world.”

As protesters marched they chanted call and responses such as ‘Who’s got the power? We have the power. What kind of power? Union Power.’ Protesters also expressed their dissatisfaction with the administration with signs that read ‘Towers is a Wanker’ and ‘No to Joel, No to Austerity.’

“I had hope for the future of this program, but I have just no confidence in this president to be able to deliver what we need with actual student input. None of these plans have student input,” Hoffman-Douglas said.

Varon said he was feeling “demoralized by the rapidly descending austerity decided unilaterally by administration leadership, but inspired at the spark of resistance we see at this labor action today.”

Sanjay Reddy, a professor of economics at TNS was among those on the picket line. He said he believes that many of the proposed restructuring plans are counterproductive and may cost the university more in the long-run. “They seem to be so intent to hobble the academic core of the institution that one almost smells a certain anti-intellectualism and anti-academicism,” Reddy said. “We’re cutting muscle with fat, and we’re cutting so much muscle that we may not have much of an organism left.” He said teachers, “will leave if they’re forced, forced into a regime of salary reduction, firing, elimination of programs, key programs, in many instances, increases in teaching loads.”

“When you lose good quality faculty, you lose the reputation of an institution, and you lose what students come to the institution for — they don’t come to the institution for its name,” Reddy said. “They don’t come to the institution for its real estate … and they definitely don’t come to the institution for its administrators.”