On May 20, 2024 The New School Board of Trustees announced that Joel Towers, University Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design and the former Executive Dean
of Parsons School of Design, was appointed as the tenth President of the university. President-elect Towers will begin in this role on August 1, 2024.
President-elect Towers is currently a University Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design at Parsons School of Design in The School of Constructed Environments. He is also the Co-Director of The Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New
School. His work focuses on sustainability, resilience, and the development of policy and design-based solutions to climate change and the construction of healthy environments.
In 2009 President-elect Towers was appointed Executive Dean of Parsons School of Design, serving as head of the college for a decade. Under his leadership, Parsons completed major curricular reforms, launched new graduate and undergraduate programs, and
built an integrated 26,000 sq. ft. cross-disciplinary Making Center facility. With the intent to expand the school’s reach and research capabilities, he supported multiple industry leading design and research labs and expanded the ranks of full-time
faculty. Today the school is one of the most internationally diverse in the United States with nearly half of the undergraduate student body coming from other countries. Under Towers’ leadership, Parsons consistently ranked as the top school for Art
and Design in the United States, a position it continues to hold today.
President-elect Towers joined Parsons in 2004 as a member of the full-time faculty and the first Director of Sustainable Design and Urban Ecology. In 2006 he was named Associate Provost for Environmental Studies and founded The New School’s Tishman Environment
and Design Center which fosters the integration of bold design, policy, and social justice approaches to environmental issues to advance just and sustainable outcomes in collaboration with communities. From 2007-2009 he was the founding Dean of The
School of Design Strategies and Associate Dean of Parsons. In 2019 Towers was appointed by Mayor de Blasio to co-chair of The New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC). Climate change presents urgent, immediate, and long-term challenges to New
York City. To confront these challenges and build a more resilient and equitable future for all New Yorkers, the NPCC was created by local law in 2012 to regularly assess the current state of the science on climate change and provide actionable policy-relevant
recommendations for adaptation and mitigation to the Mayor and City Council. The panel recently completed its most recent report, NPCC4.
President-elect Towers received a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation.
Prior to joining The New School, he worked with William McDonough Architects, where he directed projects including The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability that helped codify that firm’s environmental thinking. In 1992, he co-founded
Sislian Rothstein and Towers Architects (SR+T). Over 18 years, SR+T completed award winning projects and was a testing ground for the integration of research, scholarship and creative practice.