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Outside a New School board of trustees meeting and cocktail party on Wednesday, hundreds of students, faculty, professors, and alumni protested the administration gutting programs and cutting faculty.

New School community members held signs, marched, and chanted for an hour at 4 p.m. Protesters received papers at the beginning of the picket with chants such as, “They say cut that / We say fight back” and a parody of “Deck the Halls” that read, “’Tis the season for cost cutting.”

New School administrators have been rolling out extensive cuts meant to relieve a $48 million budget deficit. Among many cost-saving efforts, they’ve offered packages to entice professors to quit, cut and paused programs, and paused PhD admissions — all of which have faced scrutiny from staff and students who say the cuts are antithetical to the university’s core values.

“We know that a lot of the trustees don’t know that there’s unrest at The New School. Don’t know that students and faculty are upset, and we’re out here to show them,” philosophy doctoral student at the New School for Social Research Matthew Zavislan said.

The New School’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) stated in an Instagram post that faculty were picketing in favor of suspending restructuring measures, rescinding “all voluntary separation package agreements,” capping all salaries over $200,000, and calling “on the board of trustees to hold a public meeting” with the entire university community.

“What’s sort of ironic about their communications is that it’s ‘voluntary separation,’” sociology professor Rachel Sherman said, “but every communication says, like, ‘P.S., if you don’t take the voluntary separation, we’ll be giving you involuntary separation.’” 

The sociology program she teaches at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts was indefinitely paused in the short term. Sociology at NSSR, where she also teaches, was not.

At the rally, The New School’s AAUP were joined by other groups like the part-time faculty union, Student Employees at The New School (SENS-UAW), Student Health Employees at The New School (SHENS-UAW), and The New School (non-academic) Student Workers Union (NewSWU), all of which are affiliated with ACT-UAW Local 7902. 

Picketers held signs depicting Joel Towers opening an empty wallet, or with the sentence “not my president” repeating behind him. 

Zavislan said cutting the PhD programs ignores all students who attend TNS with the intent of getting a master’s or a PhD.

“It means that we are losing people who are already part of our intellectual communities, who are already our friends, and the people who are the absolute top of our class,” Zavislan said. “We have spent hundreds of hours, tons of effort, tons of money … now we have to have the frank conversation [about going] elsewhere.”

Second-year historical studies student at NSSR Kayvon Atherton said they feared that the administration did not have a strong plan to revive paused and discontinued programs such as history or anthropology. 

Sherman also spoke about the university’s restructuring methods. “It’s clear that they want to use this economic crisis as cover for massive restructuring that diminishes the importance … of critical thinking and the liberal arts,” Sherman said.

After the protest had ended, attendees of the meeting began trickling out of the building. Among them was a student trustee, Imre Szijarto. He said he tried to voice his concerns about the restructuring during the meeting.

Szijarto said they don’t think restructuring is working, but a lot of administrators and trustees believe that it is. “My impression is that [leadership and the board of trustees] live in some kind of a bubble, an isolated bubble, and they don’t really take the perspectives of faculty and students into account when they’re making these decisions,” Szijarto said. 

When asked his thoughts on the protest, university president Joel Towers told the New School Free Press, “I wasn’t able to hear them; I was in a meeting.”