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?

White on Precious + College for Fewer + CC Reading + AAWW Awards

I haven't seen Precious yet. I'm torn; on the one hand I feel I ought to see it, and on the other hand...I recall Sapphire's extremely disturbing book, Push, which it took every fiber inside me to get through. (And yet the other night Mariah Carey told Larry King she read it twice. Really? Okay.) I had some issues with the novel, but on the whole I felt the author was telling a story that she felt needed to be told, even if it often felt gut-gnawingly wrenched from deep inside (if not her, then someone else.) The book and film, I recognize, are different. Entertainment titans Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey have gotten behind it, and the kudos from cinetomanes has been strong and sustained. A filmmaker I admire tremendously went to see it last week and tweeted his praise. Yet not everyone is agog over it. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane and New York Magazine's David Edelstein weren't sold. And there's always Armond White, in the New York Press, to challenge the cheering chorus. His review is titled "Pride and Precious," and it is an erupting volcano of critical vehemence. Brotha ain't playing:

SHAME ON TYLER PERRY and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade. Perry and Winfrey naively treat Precious’ exhibition of ghetto tragedy and female disempowerment as if it were raw truth. It helps contrast and highlight their achievements as black American paradigms—self-respect be damned.

And he continues:

Winfrey, Perry and Daniels make an unholy triumvirate.They come together at some intersection of race exploitation and opportunism. These two media titans—plus one shrewd pathology pimp—use Precious to rework Booker T. Washington’s early 20th-century manifesto Up From Slavery into extreme drama for the new millennium: Up From Incest, Child Abuse,Teenage Pregnancy, Poverty and AIDS. Regardless of its narrative details about class and gender, Precious is an orgy of prurience. All the terrible, depressing (not uplifting) things that happen to 16 year-old Precious recall that memorable All About Eve line, “Everything but the bloodhounds nipping at her rear-end.”

It starts with the opening scene of Precious’ Cinderella fantasy. Tarted up in a boa and gown, walking a red carpet light years away from her tenement reality, Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) sighs, “I wish I had a light-skinned boyfriend with nice hair.” Her ideal smacks of selfhatred—the colorism issue that Daniels exacerbates without exploring. He casts light-skinned actors as kind (schoolteacher Paula Patton, social worker Mariah Carey, nurse Lenny Kravitz and an actual Down syndrome child as Precious’ first-born) and dark-skinned actors as terrors. Sidibe herself is presented as an animal-like stereotype—she’s so obese her face seems bloated into a permanent pout.This is not the breakthrough Todd Solondz achieved in Palindromes where plus-size black actress Sharon Wilkins artfully represented the immensity of an outcast’s misunderstood humanity. Instead, Sidibe’s fancy-dressed daydream looks laughable; poorly photographed, its primary effect is pathetic.

It never lets up. In fact, the final paragraph includes a description that verges on being gratuitously cruel, even as it underlines a critique White has made more than once about other films that appear to traffic in the same toxic brew as this one.

So who knows, I may go see it. Or not. It would be great, however, to see some films and non-"reality" TV shows about middle and working-class and poor people, black, white, latino, asian-american, all races and ethnicities, that did not hinge on stereotypes, pathologies, criminal activity, and the like. Does anyone in Hollywood or New York or elsewhere in the US remember how to make those films anymore? (Or get financing to do so....)

Ishmael Reed mentions Precious in one of his harsh critiques...

UPDATE: Oh my! Reed goes even further, in "The Selling of Precious."

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The United States has shed millions of manufacturing jobs over the last 30 years. Under conservative and neoliberal economic policies, union membership and influence have ebbed dramatically since their heyday half a century ago. Low-skill jobs, in the construction and service sectors, which abounded a decade ago, have evaporated with the national and global economic collapse. Leaders on the right and left are still urging people to "go back to school" for retraining, for jobs that might not be there, in an economic environment that has already seen dramatic structural transformation, and for which college-level study, and the social, political, economic, and cultural capital, and accreditation it brings, have become increasingly necessary. And financially out of reach of more and more students.

So the Chronicle of Higher Education last week asked: Are Too Many Students Going to College?

I thought the question was, How Will Most Students Who Want to Go to College But Aren't Rich Going to Afford to Do So? (When I was a freshman, my total tuition, with room, board and facilities fees, was about $13,150. When I graduated four years later, it was around $16,145. Though I have paid off my student loans, it seemed impossibly exorbitant, especially compared to state universities, like my home one, where a year's tuition was around $3,300-$5,000 over the same period. This upcoming year my undergraduate institution's tuition, with room, board, and facilities fees, will be $48,868. Insane, even if students whose parents earn under a certain amount can essentially attend for almost nothing. My former home state's flagship public university's costs, for 2008-9? $20,600!)

In case you haven't seen it, how people with and without high school educations and college degrees are faring in the current economic environment.

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Also taking place tomorrow, a Cave Canem event:

Angela Jackson & Patricia Spears Jones will be reading at Poets House!

Chicago-based poet Angela Jackson and New York City’s Patricia Spears Jones will read from their work and talk about their literary coming of age in the cities they call home. The Cave Canem Writers Foundation joins Poets House and Northwestern University Press in celebrating the launch of Angela Jackson's new and extraordinary novel Where I Must Go.

Thursday, November 12, 2009
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Poets House
10 River Terrace
New York, NY

Catch it if you're available!

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This weekend the Asian American Writers Workshop will host PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival, in New York City. Events begin on Friday, November 13, with a cocktail party and gala dinner that will include special guest and Booker Prize-winner Michael Ondaatje, and the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award legendary Alfre A. Knopf Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Sonny Mehta

A full slate of readings, and the AAWW's 12th Annual Literary Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday, November 14, at the Powerhouse Arena in D.U.M.B.O., Brooklyn, at 37 Main Street.

This year's Asian American Writers Workshop Award winners and finalists:

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Fiction is Jhumpa Lahiri for her short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. The two finalists are Amitav Ghosh for Sea of Poppies and Ed Park for Personal Days.

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Poetry is Sesshu Foster for his collection World Ball Notebook. The two finalists are Monica Ferrell for Beasts for the Chase and Jeffrey Yang for An Aquarium.

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Nonfiction is Leslie T. Chang for her book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. The two finalists are Kao Kalia Yang for The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir and Kavitha Rajagopalan for Muslims of The Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West.

Congratulations to the winners and finalists!