One of 19 professors laid off by the New School in June as part of a reorganization to address its financial difficulties is suing the university, arguing that his tenure and accomplishments should have protected him.
Filed on Thursday in Manhattan State Supreme Court, the lawsuit makes the case that what is at stake extends beyond the New School, a small, unconventional university founded in 1919 as a progressive alternative to traditional institutions. If a university can fire any tenured professor simply because it says it is reorganizing, the suit argues, who does tenure really protect?
“The New School has once again placed itself at the cutting edge of a new age in higher education: the dismantling of tenure,” the suit says.
The professor behind the lawsuit, Paul Kottman, has been tenured at the downtown Manhattan university since 2010. He is a professor of comparative literature, teaching courses on philosophy and Shakespeare, among other subjects, and chairs the university’s master’s program in liberal studies. He received six months’ notice in June.
Professor Kottman, 55, decided to sue, he said in an interview, “because it’s an injustice to me personally.” But he also wanted to make a broader point.
“If tenure does not protect faculty members from arbitrary termination,” he said, “then tenure, and the free speech and open inquiry that tenure protects, becomes meaningless.”
A New School spokesman, Will Wilbur, said Thursday that the layoffs had been done “transparently and in partnership with academic departments, and in accordance with New School rules and regulations.” He declined to comment on the specifics of the litigation.
Richard Kessler, the university’s provost, said in a July interview that the New School felt that it was permitted to lay off tenured employees because it was being restructured in response to enrollment declines and persistent deficits. Ten of the 19 professors had tenure.
“We had 20 percent fewer students, but it’s not equal across all of the schools and all of the programs,” he said at the time. “We wanted to be able to do a thoughtful calibration of how you can bring the expenses in line with the revenue and the smaller number of students.”
Professor Kottman said that the New School had provided no explanation for his removal other than an email stating that there was no longer an “institutional need” for his services. Other tenured professors let go in June, including Sanjay Reddy, a development economist who was a public critic of the university’s administration, also said they had not been told why they were chosen.
Though some majors, including history, were discontinued as part of the reorganization, the economics major was not. Professor Reddy was the only full-time economics professor laid off. The program that Professor Kottman chairs in liberal studies was also spared. He was asked to lead it until his last day, he said.
Hundreds of professors around the world have signed open letters asking for more transparency about the layoffs. “The total amount saved by the terminations is very modest and financial necessity does not therefore explain the number or pattern of firings,” Professor Reddy said.
The reorganization, which took effect in July, consolidated the New School’s four colleges into two. The Parsons School of Design and the College of Performing Arts are now a single, arts-focused college. The New School for Social Research, a graduate school, and the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, an undergraduate school, merged. (The university’s website, however, still lists all four as separate colleges.)
The cuts were focused on the university’s social sciences and humanities divisions because they had seen larger declines in enrollment, the administration said. They also have more tenured faculty members and are more expensive to run; the arts and design divisions save money by employing mostly part-time adjuncts.
The university’s faculty handbook states that tenured faculty may be let go if there are “serious financial considerations or curricular change(s)” that require the university “to discontinue an academic department/program or college/school.”
Professor Kottman’s lawsuit disputes that those conditions were met, arguing that the departments and programs he worked in were not actually discontinued. It also claims that the university did not engage in the required “look around” process to try to acquire Professor Kottman a post with a different department before laying him off.
Ths suit, which was filed as a special Article 78 proceeding under New York State law, is seeking Professor Kottman’s reinstatement, along with damages, including back pay. Other professors said they were also considering legal action.
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