Cooper Union, as it has existed for the last century and a half, is dead.
“As we work together to find new ways to get The Cooper Union onto stable financial ground,” the board chair wrote in a statement released after yesterday’s unprecedented vote to impose tuition, “we will also work together to develop a contemporary mission for the institution.”
Got that? The old mission has been retired, but the college still exists, so a new mission must be found.
“Despite the changes, our admissions will continue to be based strictly on merit,” the statement said. And that will certainly be true, in a narrow sense, for now. But applications have already begun to fall — early admissions requests dropped by a third this year. The imposition of tuition will degrade the applicant pool, and it will change it. The students who apply, and the accepted students who choose to attend, will become both richer and less talented.
How did this happen? There’s a lot we don’t know. Despite the statement’s promises of inclusiveness and transparency there was no specific discussion of the board’s process in the statement — not even a vote count, much less a list of who voted which way. The Cooper Union board of trustees are not, in this sense, accountable to the Cooper Union community. One wonders how the process would have differed if individual trustees had known from the start that they would be voting and defending their votes in public.
The one trustee who did vote in public was Alumni Trustee Kevin Slavin. He published an essay laying out his intentions on Thursday, and a Facebook post discussing the meeting and the vote last night.
“By now you know that the Cooper Union that was around for 150 years is really over. No way round it.” That’s how he began last night’s post. The trustees voted to impose tuition, and the vote, he said four or five times in different ways, wasn’t close. “The consensus was a very broad one,” he said. “Broader than you think.” The crisis in Cooper Union was a deep and old one, he said, and the alternative to tuition offered by the Working Group plan was not sufficient. He went into the meeting hoping to prevent a murder, he said, but when he arrived he found a corpse.
The delay between the vote and the announcement of the vote, he explained — seven or eight hours of delay, if I’m remembering right — came in part because he wanted to be sure that the statement, “if it was going to say something terrible, that it try to acknowledge the terribleness as respectfully as possible.” But there are limits to what a murderer can say to the family of the person he has just killed.
Felix Salmon summed up Cooper Union’s new dilemma well last night. “Something which is romantic and beautiful when it’s free,” he wrote, “becomes simply shabby if you start trying to charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for it.” As the country’s most celebrated free university, Cooper Union was a unique and astonishing institution. This fall, with the imposition of tuition, “it becomes a second-choice college in the most expensive part of the most expensive city in the world.”
There are plenty of second-choice colleges on this planet, but there was only one Cooper Union.
And now there’s one fewer.
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January 11, 2014 at 12:00 pm
Kevin T. Keith (@KTKeith)
This is heartbreaking, and infuriating in light of the irresponsibility and blindness that created this situation.
But I’d take issue with the claim that this makes CU a “second-choice college”.
Cooper Union is not only an unique educational institution, it is a vital and powerful foundation-stone of America’s intellectual history. The role it has played as a venue for, and in ways an inspiration for, some of the most important minds and voices in our history was intimately connected with its role as a college as well. And that shouldn’t change now, even if the application pool has been skewed in ways that shut out some important talent, and the relationship between the students and the school has now been commercialized.
If CU was a first-choice college when it was free, and is a second-choice one when charging tuition, then, by implication, it was only a first-choice college because it was free. I don’t think that’s true, and I’m sorry to hear it said by an alumnus. Yes, there will be some students who, now comparing CU to similarly expensive schools, will downgrade it on their list, and the commercialized nature of the school may also make it less attractive. But its main pedagogical and intellectual roles continue, and there is no reason it cannot continue to provide an outlet for thinkers and activists today. Its students certainly seem more than qualified to take up the torch. That ought to make it a first-choice school still – even if some students for whom it is their first choice now can’t afford to attend.
January 11, 2014 at 12:09 pm
Angus Johnston
Kevin, I’d encourage you to read Kevin Slavin’s piece from earlier this week on why tuition poses an existential threat to Cooper Union’s identity. I can’t do it justice with a few quotes:
View at Medium.com
More broadly, I’d analogize the situation to a cooperative shop suddenly announcing that it’s going to be henceforth run as a business intended to provide profit to a small ownership group. The physical shop will still exist, but its reason for existing will change. Some workers will leave, some customers will leave, and even those who remain will have a different relationship to the institution. They’ll expect different things from it, give different things to it, demand different things of it.
As Slavin says, “free is not less than cheap. It’s something else entirely.”
January 11, 2014 at 12:13 pm
Ji
This is not heartbreaking. This is expected. As a student here the last three years I went to every forum the trustees and the president held on their new policies. You could tell that these guys would never change their minds. Never. Our shining moment was taking over the president’s office. The NY Times was all over us, our cause was getting juice. Then we were threatened with expulsions and arrests and a plurality of the kids up there with us decided to leave and negotiate with these greedy bums. After posting images on fbook with the caption, tuition over mydead body, they decided to work with these trustees. Checkmate. We lose.
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