When a group of prominent American intellectuals banded together to create the New School for Social research in 1919, the world had just witnessed its first total war. Besides killing millions of people, the war had a chilling effect on major democratic institutions in Europe and the United States. In the States, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 were used to suppress free speech and punish antiwar organizers and socialists like Eugene V. Debs. The Palmer Raids of 1919–20 followed soon after: a time during which the State Department aggressively surveilled, arrested, and deported immigrants accused of seditious activity (i.e., those with socialist, anarchist, and communist leanings). This, the nation’s first Red Scare, was the backdrop for the founding of the New School for Social Research, an institution of social inquiry and free speech in a country that increasingly viewed these values as a threat to power.

The New School’s mission: to “secure from the various institutions of the country a small corps of selected specialists in the several branches of social science, relieve them from administrative responsibilities, grant them self-government, and set them free to investigate, publish and teach. Make them responsible for the correct and impartial use of their several specialities [sic] in interpreting the issues of current life in the classroom.” Importantly, the New School pledged to “eliminate presidents and deans and the usual administration retinue and cut the overhead expenses to the minimum.”

This founding mandate, in the form of a tidy screenshot, has been making the rounds among New School faculty and staff of late, as the university’s executive leadership has begun enforcing austerity measures. This is the trouble with treating trained humanities scholars as pesky employees: they tend to keep the historical receipts. So far, the university’s austerity measures have included freezing retirement benefits, pausing PhD admissions, merging or discontinuing academic programs (mostly in the humanities), and separating a considerable share of full-time faculty (“voluntarily” for now, but involuntarily soon, from what we’ve been told).