What we learned at a Faculty Senate meeting this morning was made known to the world later in the day. Nineteen beloved faculty colleagues are being let go. (The article doesn't mention that sixty-eight staff members are as well.) Almost all of the faculty, along with another forty-odd who have accepted various "voluntary separation" offers, are from the liberal arts divisions of The New School.
Liberal arts enrollments are indeed an ongoing challenge, for us as in other universities, but more than a few of us think university leadership is taking the opportunity of budget-forced "work-force alignment" to fundamentally to turn the ship away from the "social research" which has long defined us. Hidden within the article is the reality that many liberal arts departments are being devastated.
A university without a history department is a different animal.
