We write as the Board of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, and as friends of The New School for Social Research, to oppose, in the strongest terms, the proposed cuts to its graduate programs in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. We call on university leadership to restore the PhD program in Philosophy, recommit to the historical mission this institution was founded to serve, and safeguard its standing as a leading global center for open inquiry and critical engagement with the challenges of our time.
The International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs was established in 2016 through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and seeks to document, connect, and foster new forms of critical theorizing across the globe. We represent an active network of over 500 programs, projects, centers, and institutes across nearly every region of the world. Two projects the ICCTP Board is currently engaged in are devoted to studying and countering the global intensification of authoritarian and neo-fascist tendencies: “Emergencies of Authoritarianism” (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation) and “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times” (funded by the Mellon Foundation).
The New School for Social Research was not created to be an ordinary university. It was founded in 1919 by scholars who believed that free inquiry was inseparable from democratic life—including faculty self-governance within the university itself. In the 1930s, it became a refuge for the “University in Exile,” offering sanctuary to philosophers and social scientists fleeing fascism in Europe. Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and many thinkers after them built here a tradition in which philosophy was doubly central: central to an understanding of the world grounded in reality and committed to its transformation, and central to the university’s own mission. Both are foundational to the capacity of a free society to examine its own assumptions, contest power relations, and engage in democratic self-transformation. The New School is rightly known around the world for this heritage of combining academic excellence with a commitment to dissent and transformation. To gut the Philosophy PhD program and other humanities programs at this institution is not simply a budget decision. It is a repudiation of the very reason the New School exists, and of the reputation it has earned.
We understand the university faces real financial pressure, stemming from declining enrollment and a structural deficit whose sources are complex and contested, and we do not dismiss the difficulty of the choices leadership must make. But the pattern we have seen is profoundly worrying: pausing PhD admissions, merging humanities units, laying off faculty—including tenured and well-respected professors critical of the administration—and dismissing alternative proposals from faculty and donors that would sustain these programs without mass cuts. Together, these decisions suggest that the core of the university is being reshaped at the cost of students and faculty, without the transparency or shared governance that a university committed to critical inquiry and democratic participation ought to model.
We are deeply concerned for our cherished and respected colleagues, with whom we have collaborated for decades; for the students we have taught and whose theses we co-supervise; and, above all, for the unique institution they call their home and to which we feel a strong commitment.
The case for philosophy, and for the humanities more broadly, is not a nostalgic one. At a moment of rising authoritarianism and fascism, economic immiseration, war and genocidal violence, climate catastrophe, and a widespread sense of a foreclosed future, critical inquiry is under attack precisely when humanity needs it most. Graduate education in this living tradition, at this particular institution, has shaped scholars, educators, and public intellectuals who carry the capacities and knowledge they acquire into universities, journalism, cultural, social and political institutions, and civic life more broadly, far beyond the New School—both within the United States and across the world. To diminish the humanities and social sciences at the New School, and to eliminate the PhD program in philosophy and other core disciplines, is to foreclose that work at precisely the moment it may be most needed. It also poses a serious risk to the New School’s global reputation as a place of critical inquiry—a reputation built by precisely the disciplines and programs now threatened with disappearance. No amount of corporate jargon or PR campaigning will compensate for that loss.
We therefore ask the university’s leadership to:
- Restore the PhD program in Philosophy, along with a clear commitment to its continuation.
- Seriously explore alternative proposals to drastic cuts.
- Engage faculty, students, and alumni in real shared governance over the future of the NSSR.
- Reaffirm, in concrete institutional terms, the New School’s founding commitment to academic freedom, critical inquiry, and democratic education as a public good central to intellectual and social life—including a commitment to tenure and to the centrality of the humanities and social sciences in the New School’s identity and mission.
The New School has survived existential crises before without abandoning the mission that gave it its name. We strongly believe it must not abandon that mission now. We ask the university’s leadership to choose, once more, to be the institution it was founded to be – not out of nostalgic attachment but because we live in a world that needs, perhaps more than ever, the institutional infrastructure for free critical inquiry for which the New School for Social Research has become globally recognized.