A day after our Provost's Office sent out marching orders for an "academic re-envisioning" in the liberal arts parts of The New School in the coming spring (before we even know who's going to be around in the spring!), an article about New School's woes appeared in The New York Times. While we have never quite been the "bastion of the liberal arts" their title suggests ("social research" maybe, definitely "adult education" once upon a time), we do seem to be facing a reckoning. The article quotes faculty, graduate students and the president, but the big picture is revealed in hyperlinked charts I didn't know were public.
Now the curious can see our exposure to the increasingly hostile environment for international students, and how much enrollment has fallen over the past years ... and that much of that has occurred in the liberal arts divisions of the university (the lower table; Lang is orange).
And they can see also how small a part of the university we really are. Just over a fourth of students are seeking liberal arts degrees (though all students take liberal arts classes). But liberal arts claims more than a fourth of the university's small full-time faculty community.
About 90 percent of the [threatened] cuts fall in the liberal arts and social science divisions, where most tenure and tenure-track positions lie. … The restructuring is designed in part to benefit Parsons, the renowned design college that is the economic engine of the university and whose revenues subsidize the New School’s doctoral-level academics. … [although] even at Parsons, which mostly has part-time, adjunct faculty, there is skepticism.
