The New School finds itself a few painful steps into what may be a protracted journey through uncertainty - and not because we're special. Much of American higher ed is facing economic crises staggering enough to provoke identity crises.
Indeed our leadership hired a consulting firm to avail itself of a broader view to guide the sequence of hiring freezes, pay cuts, furloughs, layoffs and early retirements we've already endured; next on the agenda is restructuring. It's not clear how the "Liberal Arts" space currently occupied by three different divisions with dramatically different cultures - the graduate faculty of social and political science, the schools of public engagement and Lang - will be reconfigured, or even how the decision will be made (a faculty-staff taskforce has been convened but given an impossibly short time to come up with recommendations). Perhaps the changes will all be under the hood and we'll continue to offer the degrees and curricula we've been offering, just in an administratively "leaner" way, but enough has already been destabilized that everything has a question mark over it.
LREL, my little fiefdom, might continue or might be absorbed into something else; in any case, its curriculum might in the not too distant future look quite different from this year's pleasing array...
