This story was updated on Mar. 24, 2026 at 10:37 a.m.

The New School will lay off approximately 15% of its staff and faculty, according to a leaked employee email from March 13 shared with the New School Free Press. 

Laid off full-time faculty and staff will receive notification by June 1, according to the email sent by Richard Kessler, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, and Francisco Pineda, executive vice president for business & operations and chief operating officer.

Staff will be officially laid off on June 12, just 11 days after being notified. Faculty layoffs will follow procedures “consistent with the Full-Time Faculty Handbook.”

The university has refused to publicly share the number of employees who accepted, denied, or were interested in previous voluntary buyout measures.

The additional cuts come after an approximately 7% workforce reduction by the end of the spring through buyouts offered last December to faculty and staff and again in February to Local 1205P and Local 1205C members. However, it is unclear whether the 15% figure accounts for the buyouts offered to Local 1205P and 1205C members in February.

“This reduction will be through a combination of additional voluntary separations from extending the program to the 1205 P and C unions, and involuntary separations (layoffs),” according to an emailed statement from Merrie Snead, associate director of university communications.

Snead’s statement suggests the Local 1205P and 1205C buyouts may be counted within the 15%, not on top of it. The New School Free Press has asked the university to clarify the discrepancy and is awaiting a response.

Snead declined to say how many positions will be affected by the layoffs.

Impending layoffs will not be equal across departments. 

The email said layoffs will vary based on enrollment patterns, areas of growth, and work redistribution under the two-college structure. The goal is to bring student-to-faculty and student-to-staff ratios in line with peer institutions. Some areas will see primarily staff reductions, while others will lose full-time faculty positions tied to program closures. 

This figure comes amid historic and gutting university-wide restructuring efforts led by administrators to stabilize a years-long operating financial deficit. 

The debt was last projected by administrators to be $48 million. Students, faculty, and staff have demonstrated against the announced restructuring efforts four times. The most recent demonstration involved delivering a 10-foot-long anti-restructuring letter to President Joel Towers.

This is not the first time TNS has sought large-scale layoffs to solve a financial crisis. In November of 2020, The New School laid off 122 staff members during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In response, students organized a rally outside of the university. 

During the 2020 layoffs, former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer sent a letter to former New School President Dwight McBride urging him to include unions in layoff decision making and to recommit to social justice and equity in the workplace. He suggested the school do this by including its community and the New School Labor Coalition in the ongoing discussion on the school’s future operations and structure.

A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed a 7% workforce reduction to only the Local 1205 union buyouts. The corrected version attributes the reduction to the original buyouts offered in December in addition to the buyouts offered to Local 1205 union.