The last few months have been a nightmare for students, faculty, and staff at The New School. The university’s top administrators are vandalizing this unique institution and destroying the lives of the people who work and study here. Senseless austerity measures — including, but not limited to, the destruction of academic programs and the removal of faculty and staff from their jobs — are forcing our community to pay for years of financial mismanagement and administrative overspending.  Full-time faculty have been informed that mass layoffs will occur by June 1. 

It is time for full-time faculty to take control of this situation by signing our union authorization cards and obtaining the same representation and protections that nine other labor groups have achieved at The New School. We are eager to become the tenth group of employees to link arms in organized solidarity on this campus as we fight to protect our jobs, our colleagues, and our students.

Many faculty agree that we need to reshape our approaches and offerings to better support student needs and cross-university collaboration. Certainly, there is a form of restructuring that would allow practitioners with overlapping practices to join forces for a stronger and more diverse academic experience. As universities face unprecedented challenges and attacks from all sides, we understand how difficult it is to navigate an institution like ours through such choppy waters — but the solution is not to ignore faculty input and fire us. To do so is to destroy The New School and all it stands for.

Right now, university management basically can — and is — doing whatever it wants, scaring us out of our positions or simply terminating our jobs via a cruel, thoughtless, and unilateral process. The Faculty Handbook is an internal, non-binding document that can change at any time. A union contract is enforceable by federal law. If we unionize, we will be better positioned to protect our careers.

A union would give full-time faculty the legally protected right to bargain collectively and negotiate the terms of our employment and the conditions under which we work. For example, citing its financial crisis, the university has stopped contributing to full-time faculty retirement funds (again). This amounts to up to a 10% pay cut (plus missed compound gains) for most full-time faculty, according to an analysis by a colleague in the economics department. This happened despite the fact that the university’s summer working groups came up with alternative retirement funding “levers” that could be pulled instead. But our part-time faculty comrades — who are, of course, terribly affected by the administration’s reckless behavior — continue to receive employer retirement contributions because they are protected by their union contract.

Currently, full-time faculty only enjoy an advisory role regarding issues that affect us and our students, and the university does not treat us as equal partners in its decisions. In fact, it goes out of its way to keep us in the dark. Various proposals submitted by faculty bodies in recent years and months have gone mostly unheeded, despite President Towers’ claims, and the university is demonstrating its disregard for faculty input. 

For instance, a New School for Social Research faculty task force put forth a proposal that would increase the college’s revenue by at least $4.1 million per year by the end of the third year while improving, not diminishing, the faculty and student experience. This included a prudent recommendation to restructure the graduate program and more deeply collaborate with other parts of the university. Instead, the university elected to freeze most of our PhD programs, a decision that a conservative estimate projects will cost the university six million dollars over four years. 

President Towers made this decision despite million-dollar offers from trustees to keep the programs afloat. 

A union would provide us with protections against attempts by management to increase our teaching and service loads. With union representation, we would have the power to negotiate our eligibility for course releases and the frequencies of our sabbaticals.  A union contract could establish due process procedures to challenge arbitrary and capricious actions taken by management against any member of the faculty — or against our academic freedom.

Indeed, unionization can have far-reaching positive effects. Research suggests that faculty unionization makes institutions more efficient and effective, with lower budgets, higher graduation rates, and a higher number of degrees and completions. That would be good for everyone!

The New School’s founding values of social justice and progressive idealism are not a branding campaign. They are the essence of who we are, how we operate, and how we should treat each other. We, the full-time faculty at The New School, are committed to fighting for those values. 

Read our FAQ. Sign your union card. Follow our Instagram account. Do not lose heart. It is absolutely not too late for us to fight back against these bad decisions. As many of us teach in our classrooms, when workers unite, anything is possible!