The Crisis at Cooper Union

The Cooper Union's Main Building
with student protest signs in
the windows, 2013

For most of its history, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was free for all students who attended. Let me say that again, because I recall the first time I learned this and could not believe it. The Cooper Union, established in 1859, charged no tuition to any of the students who attended. This policy of full scholarships resulted directly from directives by its founder, industrialist Peter Cooper, who wanted to create a school along the model of France's École Polytechnique that would be open to qualified students regardless of their race, religion, sex, social status, or family wealth. This was an incredibly progressive vision 170 years ago, and would certainly qualify as such today, especially at time when most public and private institutions grow increasingly unaffordable for a large portion of the US population, leading to campus economic, social and racial-ethnic stratification and segregation. As a result of the zero-tuition policy and its excellent faculty, Cooper Union had long attracted a stellar student body and boasted of one of the highest enrollment yields in the US. Yet one thing I wondered while attending graduate school at the hyper-expensive university next door to Cooper Union was how long it could maintain its tradition of no tuition, particularly in light of New York's increasing gentrification.

It turns out that Cooper Union might have been able to maintain free tuition but for a series of moves, among them prior sales of land holdings in the West Village, and then the decision under the prior president, George Campbell, Jr., to build an admittedly acclaimed, LEED-certified, $175 million new building at 41 Cooper Square to house its engineering and art schools. This starchitect Thom Mayne-designed building was completed in 2009, and Cooper Union reported took out a fixed-rate mortgage loan, with an $81 million pre-payment penalty, to fund it, at a time when the school's revenue was basically nil beyond revenues from its $723 million endowment and annual payments it received from its ownership of the land beneath the Chrysler Building. (It had also apparently borrowed $51 million more, according to economist Felix Salmon, to fund "all the infrastructure needed to charge all those fees in the first place," along with "$8 million in additional fees to do so!) The engineering faculty had voted twice, it turns out, against the new building, and fundraising to support it came in below forecast. Despite a Wall Street Journal article claiming that Cooper Union had weathered the global financial crisis without problems, by 2011 there were rumors of financial straits, and in 2012 the Board of Trustees approved the policy sift to charge tuition for Cooper Union's graduate programs, beginning in September 2013, which augured the eventual levying of fees on undergraduates.

In May 2013, to protest the likelihood of undergraduate tuition, students occupied administrative offices in the Foundation Building for a week, which brought widespread media attention to the crisis underway, and several protesters stayed in new president Jamshed Bharucha's office for 65 days. The Board of Trustees, in conjunction  Bharucha, who had arrived two years before and immediately begun raising the issue of a serious budget deficit, voted to impose undergraduate tuition, up to $19,500 per year, on a sliding scale, for students admitted beginning in the fall of 2014. (Even this tuition, exorbitant in relation to the prior price policy, would make the school one of the least expensive private schools to attend in the US.) This shift spurred an investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman concerning the school's real estate dealings and a lawsuit by an alumni group, the Committee to Save Cooper Union. (I should note that although I have no ties to the Cooper Union, I have supported the Committee to Save Cooper Union advocacy group with small donations, since I think utterly necessary to preserve its unique, progressive vision, tradition and policies.)

Cooper Union's New Academic Building
(Hyperallergic.com)

Under pressure for Schneiderman's investigation, the board voted 13-6 in April 2015 not to renew Bharucha's contract for next year. Two nights ago, five trustees who had supported Bharucha and charging tuition resigned. They were Martin Epstein, real estate honcho and former board chair; Vassar President Catherine Hill; investment banker Monica Vachher; Cooper alumnus and starchitect Daniel Liebeskind; and architect and oil services heir François de Menil. Epstein blasted the rest of the student, faculty and alumni protesters and the board, with Artnet News reporting that he wrote, "I know that there are some in the Cooper Community that will take my resignation as a false victory of some sort....As a donor, I am withdrawing my financial support for the college." For his part, Liebeskind pointed out that "As an alumnus of the school who had joined the Board recently, I expected that in this difficult time of change, there would be a meaningful and open discussion—one which would assure Cooper Union's stability and future....My experience was far from that."

Then yesterday, Bharucha also resigned, and will take up a post next year as Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. In his farewell letter, he argued on behalf of his tenure and the new tuition plan, stating that

The class completing its freshman year was the first to be admitted under the 2013 Financial Sustainability Plan, and the class just admitted will be the second....These two classes uphold Cooper’s unparalleled standard of excellence. With need-based financial aid, we have also been able to increase access to those who can least afford it, as shown by an increase in the proportion of students eligible for Federal Pell Grants.

In response to Bharucha's departure, the remaining members of the board praised his tenure, writing, "The financial exigencies with which [Bharucha] was confronted upon his arrival were not of his making and he deserves credit for sounding the alarm about the need to take urgent action to ensure Cooper Union’s long-term financial sustainability." Cooper Union's’s current vice president for finance and administration William Mea will become interim president until the board can find a replacement for Bharucha. But who in her right mind would take this job?

Felix Salmon has argued that the blame for Cooper Union's financial and administrative difficulties lies squarely not just with the prior president Campbell and with Bharucha, but also with the various rosters of the enabling Board of Trustees. Why, he has asked, did they greenlight a building for which the institution had not raised sufficient funds? Harvard, where Bharucha heads this fall, has an endowment of $36.4 billion as of last June--and rising, as it is now well along in a $6.5 billion fundraising effort that has already raised about 77% of that total--decided at the peak of the global financial crisis, when its endowment dipped temporarily to about $26 billion in 2009, not to build a new museum of contemporary art along the Charles River. Was it neoliberal hubris and a desire to transform Cooper into a very different kind of school that led Campbell, Bharucha and their board supporters to go the route they did? Does this ethos still exist among the remaining board members, and do they have a viable plan for the future?

Perhaps more importantly, who will possibly step into the breach at this point to lead a school that remains so internally riven? Will the next leader have board support to return Cooper Union's undergraduate program, at least, to full scholarship status? Or have the dice been cast such that there is no turning back, such that what was Cooper Union's unique calling card, will be lost for good? (New York (and nearby New Jersey) do have a wide array of high quality public and private art and engineering institutions, with a major one--Cornell Tech--under development.) And what about Cooper Union's students, who were once guaranteed not only relief from worrying about funding their educations but a unique intellectual freedom, within the school's academic constraints, to construct their educations as they saw fit and then, debt-free, to elect careers that did not depend on them having to pay back massive loans? I ask all these questions not to suggest that institutions should not change and evolve, but to ask, in the tumultuous transformation of  the Cooper Union, what have we, and American higher education more broadly, lost?

Chomsky on the Death of American Universities

(Copyright © Flickr / WorCehT)

In a recent issue of Jacobin magazine, scholar, theorist, critic and activist Noam Chomsky, whose work needs no introduction, offers one of the most succinct and powerful critiques of the direction of contemporary universities and colleges that I have read in quite some time: "The Death of American Universities." Much of what Chomsky says here, which is an edited transcript (prepared by Robin J. Sowards) of remarks Chomsky delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, will be familiar to anyone in higher education, as well as any who have experienced--or closely followed--the travails of students and parents, contingent and permanent faculty, and institutions struggling to deal with budgetary cuts and economically unsustainable cost inflation, narrowing educational goals, the imposition of market-based ideologies, the effects of technological shifts, and various forms of anti-intellectualism, some of very long standing as the late Richard Hofstadter, Susan Jacoby, and others have argued persuasively, that have taken root in our contemporary society.

Perhaps the only area he does not touch upon is athletics, a subject he has commented on in the past. But in every other area what he says applies to every institution in the US, including the richest and most elite--think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, etc.--though in some areas, such as renewing a focus on the arts and humanities, feeling the pinch of federal and state cuts, and trustees who are more concerned with how the football team does rather than whether students are receiving the highest quality education for the complex world in which we live, a world which they will help to shape and transform, these institutions are still somewhat insulated. 

But even Chomsky's former home base, MIT, is not immune to the critiques he lodges or challenges he describes (the MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the major incubators of high-level business thinking in the US), and as he always does, he makes sure to broaden his discussion to larger issues in the society, noting how the "precariat" is not just an issue for higher education, but central to contemporary asset-based globalized capitalism. You might quibble with some of his assertions, but in general, I think he gets things very right, and I wish more than anything that upper-level university administrators and leaders, legislators and other public officials, college and university trustees, and members of the media would read this piece without blinders or prejudice, whether they ultimately disagree or not. I see up close what he'd talking about; getting those in positions of power to acknowledge and address what's going on is another matter. 

Here are a few quotes, but do read the entire article.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. 

At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more.

and

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “the time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. 

At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy” — namely, that there’s too much democracy.

and

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. 

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them — that’s freedom and democracy. We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”

Fiction As An Aid to Thinking, or: Jacobs on Ambiguity

It has been a while since I've posted on current cognitive and brain science research that underlines the importance and power of imaginative writing, particularly fictional narratives, but then I came across Tom Jacobs' article last month in Pacific Standard, "Want to Learn How to Think? Read More," and realized I ought to write a little here about the work Jacobs discusses, and some of its implications. I should start by pointing that Jacobs' title misleads; he is writing not so much about learning how to think as about the distinctive ways researchers have found that reading certain kinds of texts, particularly fictional ones, shape and affect our thinking.

In his Pacific Standard article he focuses on recent findings by three psychologists at the University of Toronto, led by Maja Djikic, Senior Research Scholar and Director of the Self-Development Laboratory at Toronto's Rotman School of Management, who, in a paper they co-published earlier this year in The Creativity Research Journal, "Opening the Closed Mind: The Effect of Exposure to Literature on the Need for Closure," discovered that people reading works of fiction, as opposed to works of nonfiction, tended when tested afterward to show more capacity for ambiguity as opposed to a need for order and cognitive closure.

In the experiment, Djikic and colleagues had 100 Toronto undergraduates read one of either 8 short stories, by major fiction writers including Wallace Stegner and Jean Stafford, or one of 8 short nonfiction pieces by major nonfiction writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Stephen Jay Gould.  Afterwards the study participants completed a survey measuring their "need for certainty and stability," based on questions such as "I don't like situations that are uncertain," and what Djikic and her co-researchers found was that the students reading the works of fiction scored "significantly" lower than those reading the nonfiction.

What the researchers also registered was that among self-described frequent readers of fiction or nonfiction, the effect was "particularly pronounced." They posited that this might be an effect of fiction's not requiring a reader to come to a definite conclusion (though we often do, or wrestle with one), and a result of the imaginative simulation of thinking styles--and I would add, behavior, spatial experiences, perceptions, etc.--of characters of all kinds. Jacobs quotes the paper, which says:

One can think along and even feel along with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character. This double release—of thinking through events without concerns for urgency and permanence, and thinking in ways that are different than one’s own—may produce effects of opening the mind.

I would add, as I have before in prior entries on this topic, that global and local effects of works of fiction work on our minds in various ways. Not only in terms of simulative thinking, but also in the ways that characterization, voice and plot, to pick three key elements, generate cognitive embodiment and mirroring effects. I would also point out that drilling down to the granular level, language itself is crucial here. Specific words and their effects, perceived through the ascending matrices of phonemic arrangement up through syntactic effects to the level of paragraphs, on up to the movement of the narrative itself, work, often unconsciously, in and on our minds.

Jacobs ends by gesturing, as so many articles of this type do, by putting the empirical in service of the instrumental, particularly government and corporate educational policy. He cites Djikic and her colleagues appeal, in their paper, for a rethinking of the current approach of diminished funding for and support of the arts and humanities, which is occurring at every educational level across the US. Additionally, at a moment when there are discussions about the "crisis" in the humanities (which is to say, discussions about alleged shrinking enrollments and majors, as well as decreased funding), and at a moment where science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) study, in the service of the domestic and global careers and economies, dominate, the findings of Djikic and her colleagues, offer an important counterpoint.

Moreover, like similar studies I have posted about before, these findings should remind us that literature, especially imaginative writing and especially fiction, poetry and drama, are anything but frivolous and unworthy of our attention, that we still do not fully understand how they work, even after centuries of exploring them, and that counter to what someone like Lee Siegel says, they are very much worth not just enjoying as entertainment, but examining in a variety of ways within academe. They are among the oldest and demonstrably powerful creative technologies that human beings have created, and we should not forget this.

NY Times Roundtable on Affirmative Action in Brazil

The favela of Vidigal, in Rio de Janeiro
(Photo: www.midiaindependente.org)

These days I'm trying to limit hyperlinks to the New York Times, which has now limited non-subscribers to only 10 monthly views (come on, NY Times!). If anyone had questions whether it was a newspaper geared towards people of means and their supporters, this pretty much answers it. (And I hope to post a short review of Chris Lehmann's nonfiction survey Rich People Things, which indicts the Times, very soon.) There are some simple ways around this, but I'm not going to post them, and not everyone will easily figure them out, so....

Anyways, the Times recently dedicated one of its roundtable discussions ostensibly to the topics of race (a constant tripwire for its writers, who seem incapable of mentioning the word "racism") and identity (and identification) in Brazil, titling it "Brazil's Racial Identity Challenge," though it focused on affirmative action in Brazilian universities, which is only one of the many race-related issues Brazil and most societies in the Americas, including the United States, face, an insight I would have thought would be clear as crystal given the recent Trayvon Martin murder and the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision, just the other day, to authorize strip searches of all admittees to prisons' general populations, a ruling that derived from a case originally arising out of an African-American man, Albert Florence, who police arrested and strip-searched in New Jersey because of racial profiling.

The roundtable featured 8 social scientists, authors and artists, 4 of them Brazilian, and two of them (at least) Afro-Brazilians. Unsurprisingly they didn't agree on all points, and the commentary was far too brief to address the complexity of topic of affirmative action, but all of them offered insightful comments. The comparisons to the US, particularly by the Brazilians, I thought, were especially worth thinking about.

Here are snippets from four of the commentators:

Melissa Nobles, MIT professor of political science and author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics

However, the [affirmative action university] quotas are working, although not without complications. Some whites have claimed to be black in order to gain entry, but these cases are relatively few. Of much greater importance is the fact that Brazil’s public universities now have sizable black, brown and poor student populations. And as some affirmative action supporters point out, the police seem to have little trouble determining who is black.

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo

Symbolically those policies are important in showing that being black (preto or pardo) in Brazil today is no longer a source of shame but rather one of pride. Descent from Africa is openly assumed and socially recognized. The policies also demonstrate that publicly financed universities must care for the quality of the education they offer without degrading the fairness of their admission when it becomes biased by class, race or color.

Marcelo Paixão, Professor of Economics and Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Brazil could use U.S.-style affirmative action as a good practice to increase social conditions of the Afrodescendant population and other minority groups. But the U.S. and Brazil have different histories. We can't simply adopt the U.S. approach. Instead we need to understand how Americans fight against racism and disseminate racial diversity in different areas of social life.

Yvonne Maggie, a professor in the department of cultural anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; author of Guerra de Orixá and Medo do Feitiço; co-editor of Raça Como Retórica; and blogger at A Vida Como Ela Parece Ser (Life As It Seems to Be).

A Brazilian system based on group identities similar to American affirmative action would have to render separate that which is conjoined. For this to come about we would first have to establish potentially harmful policies delimiting distinct "racial" identities. This is precisely what has been happening in the last 10 years in Brazil since the first law was passed to create racial quotas for access to university. Since then, public school programs have sought to strengthen identities through courses that attempt to establish who is "black" and who is not, and, in many cases, courts have adjudicated on whether people who self-proclaim to be "black," as defined by law, are speaking the truth or lying.

I'm curious to know what Brazilians think about this discussion, so if any Brazilian readers come across this blogpost, please do post some thoughts, but thoughts from any readers are welcome.

September It Is + Abolishing Tenure? + Warburg Institute Woes

Now that Labor Day is upon us I'm finally returning from my little blog hiatus. As I mentioned back at the beginning of August, I had a number of blog-post stubs from July that I needed to finish, but I ended up devoting my energies to other things for most of this month, so I ended up reconstituting most of them into the photo spreads that precede today's entry.  Out of necessity my focus has turned to the upcoming school year, which begins in a few weeks. I have two courses, a graduate fiction workshop and an undergraduate African-American literature class, both of which I'm excited about, and several graduate and undergraduate advisees that I've been working with. Things are humming along.  I'm not, however, looking forward to the seasonal, geographical uprooting.  But such is life. On to the rest of this post....

+++

Continuing on the higher educational theme, I've seen several different articles and blogposts over the past year on the topic of academic tenure and its possible tweaking or abolition, and have been meaning at the very least to point to them on here, but then I came across Christopher Shea's essay in today's New York Times, which revisits the issue in a brief discussion of two books.  One is Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It (Times Books, 2010), by Queens College emeritus professor Andrew Hacker and journalist Claudia Dreifus, the other Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010) by Mark C. Taylor, a professor of religion at Columbia University.

I admit not to having read either of these two books, though I have followed Andrew Hacker's work for years, and have often found his arguments on higher education illuminating and persuasive, and I did read Mark Taylor's previous, above-linked New York Times piece, that Shea cites, "End the University As We Know It." I thought it unnecessarily outrageous.  In both cases, I will take Shea's word about the arguments of each book, which in Hacker's and Dreifus's case range from getting universities out of the research business altogether and focusing on teaching, to Taylor's push for greater cooperation with business and use of "efficiency-enhancing technologies" (the Internet?). Nothing that new in either case, really. Both, it appears, also believe that tenure, as it's currently constituted, ought to be abolished, and Shea points out that rather than coming from conservative critics, in the cases of Hacker and Taylor, both are ideologically on the left.