As part of a radical “restructuring” to address a $48 million deficit, New York’s New School for Social Research is offering voluntary severance programs to a large group of faculty and staff. A December 3 email laying out the terms of the offer, which ARTnews has reviewed, went to 169 members of faculty and staff, including some forty percent of full-time faculty. The letter named a December 15 deadline to decide on whether to accept the offer.

According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the school has indicated that layoffs will ensue if insufficient numbers of employees opt for the voluntary severance. Speaking recently to Gothamist, AAUP called the school’s latest move the “largest attempted firing of faculty currently taking place in the nation.”

The school faces declining enrollment. It also has come under threat from the Trump administration as one of 60 universities to be warned by the Department of Education in March that they would be placed under investigation if they failed to protect Jewish students on campus after students organized a pro-Palestinian encampment and faculty pitched tents in solidarit...