The students came by the dozens, hand in hand, carrying signs and singing songs of lamentation. This wasn’t an antiwar protest. It wasn’t a pro-Palestine rally or a No Kings march. There were no speeches about stopping ICE, defunding the police or saving American democracy.
This was basically a farewell to English class.
It was December 2025, and the campus of Montclair State University had become the site of an impromptu funeral. About 100 students gathered outside Dickson Hall to mourn the imminent demise of their beloved College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
A modernization plan floated by Montclair president Jonathan Koppell would kill the college and regroup its 15 independent departments—including English, philosophy, Latino studies, classics, religion and anthropology—into four interdisciplinary schools with tentative names such as the School for Human Narratives and Creative Expressions.
Koppell says the move was a necessary response to an “incredibly complex environment” for higher education. Meeting with the university senate, he cited the need to get ahead of “demographic shifts, technological change, political polarization and external pressures on universities.”
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He downplayed the idea that axing the College of Humanities was a corporate-style cost-cutting play, although he pointed out that 80 percent of Montclair’s budget goes to contractually obligated faculty salaries.
The landscape of higher education “has never been more uncertain,’’ Koppell said to the university senate. “We have bills to pay. I don’t think that makes us corporatist. I think that makes us responsible.”
Humanities departments across the country continue to come under fire from right-wing politicians. They’ve also become favorite targets of cost-cutting administrators.
Last year, the University of Chicago, looking to cut into its multibillion-dollar debt, paused graduate admissions for almost all its humanities programs. In Indiana, the state legislature required all state universities to cut or merge 20 percent of all degree programs, mostly in the social sciences and humanities.
“I study the humanities because it gives me the broadest base to be a great person and a great teacher. Now it seems they just want to beat down the humanities to look futuristic, like they are on the cutting edge. But of what?’’
—Miranda Kawiecki, student at Montclair State University
In June, Inside Higher Ed reported that 14 colleges across the United States had announced layoffs and the elimination of departments, and other cost-cutting moves in advance of the new fiscal year that started July 1, 2026, including New Jersey City University, which announced 151 layoffs, and has since become part of Kean University.
Despite Koppell’s depiction of the challenging higher-education landscape, the 118-year-old Montclair State suffers none of the money or enrollment crises facing many other schools. There’s minimal political pressure from the mostly progressive crowd of lawmakers who dominate Trenton.
What’s more, the English department remains one of Montclair’s most popular; some 300 undergraduates there major in English. That’s more than either Harvard or Rutgers, New Jersey’s largest public university. “I think that’s why we feel so jerked around,’’ says Lee Behlman, a professor of English who has taught at Montclair State for 20 years. “The administration never really justified why they’re doing this. It’s like they have no appreciation for our successes, no appreciation for what we do.’’
At its core, Koppell’s plan cut deeply into the traditional authority of department heads to run their own disciplines without meddling by administrators. The Montclair student body, mostly working class and 40 percent Latino, was stunned at the sweep of Koppell’s blueprint. More than 3,500 signed a petition against the move. Faculty and alumni recoiled, too; surveys showed about 80 percent of the faculty were opposed. The university senate also panned the move, passing a resolution affirming the “crucial day-to-day role” of department chairs.
The students who gathered for the wake of the College of Humanities stood around a mock tombstone inscribed with the names of their old academic departments. Speakers offered eulogies for their departments and said the worth of a college education can’t be measured in terms used by hedge fund managers.
“We are gathered here today, in front of the humble home of CHSS, Dickson Hall, to mourn the death of the social sciences and humanities at the hands of the MSU administration,” said Miranda Kawiecki, a Morris County resident pursuing a double major in English and secondary education. She became a senior this fall.
“I have dreams that cannot be monetized,’’ Kawiecki said, reading from her eulogy. “I have a problem with our society that cannot be solved with an algorithm. I have words to write and say that cannot be generated artificially.”
As Kawiecki spoke, administrators at the edges of the funeral protest handed out pamphlets explaining the changes. Koppell, however, refused to meet a contingent of protestors who marched to his office after the event, citing a previous commitment.
“I really loved this school because it is a place for people like me, people who aren’t wealthy or privileged, but are motivated to work hard,’’ Kawiecki said in a July interview with New Jersey Monthly.
“A lot of us work to pay for own education, and that is why I am especially frustrated they won’t listen to us. I am paying for this. I study the humanities because it gives me the broadest base to be a great person and a great teacher. Now, it seems they just want to beat down the humanities to look futuristic, like they are on the cutting edge. But of what?’’
By all accounts, the critics point out, Montclair State is a success story.
In July 2023, Montclair absorbed the financially struggling Bloomfield College. Earlier this year, the university won a competitive bid to operate the cash-strapped NJ PBS, which encompasses New Jersey’s four licensed public television stations. The new broadcast enterprise will hire 20 full-time staffers and includes an ambitious initiative partnering with 300 local news organizations.
Enrollment at Montclair actually increased by 5.4 percent in the four years before restructuring and now stands at a robust 23,000 students.
“Montclair really is a special environment, maybe because so many students are from working-class families, and they really appreciate the value of what we do here,” says former English department chairman Jonathan Greenberg, who specializes in 20th-century literature.
When Koppell and his aides first started talking about restructuring in 2024, faculty members say, most were eager to contribute ideas and work for change that made sense. After all, polls show more and more Americans are questioning the basic value of a college degree in an era of economic anxiety. In today’s lean, AI-driven workplace, many graduates can’t find entry-level work.
So professors spent months in planning committees drafting plans and meeting with the administration, submitting hundreds of pages of detailed proposals. They discussed merging underperforming departments, such as anthropology, into bigger programs.
“But in the end, it really didn’t matter,” says Adam Rzepka, a Montclair State associate English professor who teaches Renaissance literature, drama, critical theory and culture. “The administration pretty much ignored us and did what they wanted to do.”
Rzepka says the kneecapping of academic department heads is, at bottom, a play to expand administrative control. Koppell and his fellow campus executives, he argues, have essentially been captured by managerial consultants and educational-technology companies, such as Instructure and Coursea, which push for-profit digital learning platforms and online curricula.
He points to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which shows that the number of senior administrators at Montclair grew by 83 percent from 2015 to 2023. During the same time, he says, the number of faculty members grew just 1.8 percent. Montclair disputes those numbers and provides figures it says show the growth of instructional versus non-instructional employees has been roughly equivalent.
In a scathing post in Academe Blog, a publication of the American Association of University Professors, Rzepka charted the faculty’s frustration with Montclair’s new direction. The school, he wrote, is crafting a dystopian future where administrators set out vague goals in Orwellian language.
Rzepka quoted from an October 2025 administration bulletin announcing Koppell’s plan. “Born-old buzzwords fell…like a grey snow: ‘synergy,’ ‘multipliers,’ ‘mindset,’ ‘vision’ (as a verb), ‘agility,’ ‘impactfulness,’ students as ‘clients,’ ‘entrepreneurship,’ branding,’ ‘futureproofing….’
“Because so many of these keywords for epochal change in higher education come directly from the corporate world…from its stock of cringe euphemisms for austerity,’’ Rzepka wrote, “they sound unhinged in a room full of professional sociologists, linguists, literary scholars, historians and poets.’’
Rzepka does acknowledge that change is inevitable, especially in a testy, Trumpian era, when politicians attack expertise and a growing segment of Americans question the ballooning cost of college education. But he says Montclair’s approach is straight from the corporate austerity playbook.
“Everyone agrees that higher education needs to adapt in some ways to a changing world,” Rzepka says. “But we shouldn’t adapt by eroding our core values. We should adapt by centering them.’’
A spokesperson for Montclair disputes the idea that restructuring robs professors of their leading role in choosing curricula and pushes back on suggestions that faculty input was ignored.
Spokesman Andrew Mees points out that, because of faculty feedback, the administration decided to keep all existing departments and majors. He says there will be no cuts to faculty or staff, no changes to transcripts or diplomas, and no change to student advising paths.
The names of the four new thematic schools, which debuted fall semester, have also changed from the original suggestions floated by administrators, Mees notes.
Now, there will be a much plainer-sounding School of Psychology, a School of Linguistics, a School of Social Work and Child Advocacy, and an Interdisciplinary School for Social Transformation (ISST). “Grouping administrative tasks into four collaborative hubs will significantly reduce clerical friction for department chairs and make it easier for faculty to collaborate on interdisciplinary work,’’ Mees says.
“We completely reject the idea that this reorganization is modeled on corporate control or a commercial profit motive. The foundational questions driving this alignment are purely academic,’’ he adds. “We are doing this now, from a position of strength, before external pressures force us to make reactive changes.’’
Jazmin Perez, who graduated in August, grew up in Hackensack, where her favorite pastime was exploring the stacks at the Johnson Free Library. When she first came to Montclair to study education, Perez admits, she felt a twinge of regret.
“It’s not a glamorous, name destination. It was what I could afford,’’ she says. “But I came to love the place. It’s got great teachers and real sense of community.’’
Perez says she found herself among a tightknit cadre of teachers and fellow students who lived to talk about books, to read and to write. The faculty brought in literary stars like Junot Diaz to meet with students. She found herself fighting the administration to save beloved haunts like the old classics book room and the L. Howard Fox Theater, both of which were targeted for new programs such as AI learning.
Like other students at Montclair, Perez fears the restructuring is a step on a slippery slope that can only lead to permanent losses for the humanities.
“I get that the administration wants to embrace change, but to most of us they’re just trying to pull things apart for the sake of change. For what? To buff up their resumes?’’ Perez says.
“But in actuality, it seems like they’re killing what we love.’
