This is a post I’ll be adding a lot of updates to, I suspect.
As of this evening, five members of the Cooper Union board of trustees have resigned. They did not go quietly.
From the letter of resignation of Mark Epstein, the former chair of the board:
As a Trustee, I am hereby resigning from the Board, effective immediately. During my term as Chairman we were able to put the school on a path to sustainability. It was going to be a difficult path with some hurdles to get over. We were on our way, but have now gotten so far off of that path due to the actions (or inactions) of the Board that I no longer want to participate. I know that there are some in the Cooper Community that will take my resignation as a false victory of some sort. I am not resigning due to any pressure from that group, rather that I no longer want to associate with them.
As a donor, I am withdrawing my financial support for the college. Although I respect the rights of those of the faculty, alumni, and students, to act as they see fit, I no longer want to support them.
If the schools fail in the future, it will not be due to the change in the scholarship policy (a major part of the sustainability plan) as some will claim. It will be due to the organized opposition to it.
This is … extraordinary.
“I no longer want to participate.” “Some will take my resignation as a false victory.” “I no longer want to associate with them.” “I am withdrawing my financial support.” “If the schools fail, it will not be due to [the imposition of tuition] as some will claim. It will be due to the organized opposition to it.”
On the internet, we call that a flounce.
The context for this resignation — and those of the other four trustees who left today — is the ongoing struggle over the future of Cooper Union. A series of deeply questionable financial decisions led the trustees to impose tuition at Cooper for the first time not long ago, leading to massive student and alumni protests and an investigation of institutional mismanagement by the state’s Attorney General. This spring the trustees offered to depose widely-despised Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha in hopes of resolving the AG’s probe.
The trustees who resigned today were supporters of Bharucha and nemeses of the student and alumni activists.
Daniel Libeskind was another of the trustees who quit today. Here’s a quote from his resignation letter:
I do not support the leadership and direction of this Board. I believe that decisions being taken are not in the best interest of Cooper Union.
So here’s the thing about Daniel Libeskind, a prominent celebrity architect — two months ago he went to the Wall Street Journal to complain at length about the state of the Cooper trustees. Trustee deliberations and actions were supposed to be held mostly in confidence, but Libeskind ignored that mandate while excoriating others for sharing much more minor tidbits.
Cooper Union was tuition-free for well over a century. That changed a mere seventeen months ago. Among the trustees who resigned today were some of the staunchest supporters of charging tuition. I’m not saying that these resignations mean that the tuition policy is about to be reversed — honestly, I’m not saying that. But that policy has carried an air of inevitability and inexorability since well before it was formally implemented, and now … well, let’s just say it’s hard to know what’s inevitable now.
“I am withdrawing my financial support from the college.” I mean, it’s one thing to stop donating. It’s quite another to announce that you’re going to stop donating, and to do so in your resignation letter.
The word that keeps coming to my mind is petulant.
As I write this, it’s almost 11:30 pm. Word of the trustees’ resignation hit Twitter at 6:35 pm — nearly five hours ago. But there’s not a single word about the story at any news outlet, or (as far as I can tell) at any of the other blogs that have been covering this story.
Oh, and one more thing. Mark Epstein, who today said that he is “withdrawing [his] financial support from Cooper Union” because he doesn’t support the policies of the majority of the CU trustees, said this in 2011:
“If [alumni] are that pissed off about Cooper Union and don’t want to give back, then I suggest they give back their degrees. You I mean, how do you answer a question like this: why don’t people give back to a school that gave them a free education worth now a hundred-some-odd thousand dollars? To me it’s baffling, it truly is.”
And yes, Epstein is a Cooper Union grad.
It’s baffling. It truly is.
Update | I’ve fleshed out this post with more context and more links, but there’s still nothing in the media about this extraordinary story. I expect the next shoe will drop with a bang, though — I’ll keep you posted here and on Twitter when it does.
Second Update | Brian Boucher at Artnet has a thorough story up on the resignations, adding the detail that the Cooper trustees have a meeting scheduled for today.
Third Update | News coverage of yesterday’s resignations has been trickling in all day, and I’ll have more to say about that soon. But first, here’s the other shoe: Jamshed Bharucha just announced his resignation as president of Cooper, effective as of the end of this month. The resignation letter says he will take up a position as a visiting scholar at Harvard in the fall. A statement from the Cooper Union trustees says that vice president for finance and administration William Mea will serve as interim president until a new president is chosen, and that the search committee for Bharucha’s replacement “will include representation from the faculty, students and alumni.”
Mea served in various administrative roles at three different universities before joining Cooper Union last September.
Fourth Update | The Wall Street Journal has the most thorough story on yesterday’s resignations to appear so far, and the only one to include an interview with one of the outgoing trustees. In that piece, Mark Epstein says that the board’s efforts earlier this year to nudge Bharucha out were “a terrible move,” and that “Jamshed was the right person to lead the school going forward.”
The WSJ story also includes a quote from a representative of the Attorney General, who says that while their investigation of Cooper is “still ongoing,” the AG office is “pleased that recent discussions with members of the board and school community have been both cooperative and productive.”
Fifth Update | The WSJ story has been updated with news of Bharucha’s resignation, and with a quote from Teresa Dahlberg, the Cooper Union chief academic officer, who resigned last month after two years on the job. “The Cooper Union Board of Trustees has been dysfunctional, with various factions supporting contrary goals,” she said. “Until board leadership is able to unite the board, no person serving as president will be able to unite the community.”
The eagerness of those who wound up on the losing side of this struggle to salt the earth behind them as they leave Cooper Union is remarkable and ugly.
studentactivism.net 
10 comments
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June 10, 2015 at 12:04 am
Terry Gotham
#OneStruggle
June 10, 2015 at 10:21 am
Five Cooper Union Trustees Resign—artnet News
[…] is … extraordinary," CUNY professor and historian Angus Johnston wrote in a June 9 blog entry, where he called the group resignation a […]
June 10, 2015 at 11:11 am
Five Members of Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees Resign | ARTnews
[…] and whose tenure has been highly maligned. On Tuesday, Angus Johnson on the blog Student Activism described the five trustees who resigned as “some of the staunchest supporters of charging […]
June 11, 2015 at 7:15 am
BR
How does imposing tuition for the first time “increase” socio-economic access? (what Bharucha claims he was accomplishing in his e-mail, per the WSJ article)
June 11, 2015 at 7:20 am
Cooper Union President Resigns - artnet News
[…] vocal departure of the board members was accompanied by open letters that have been published on blogs and in the […]
June 11, 2015 at 4:13 pm
Thursday Links | Gerry Canavan
[…] * Now Cooper Union’s president is out, too. […]
June 12, 2015 at 3:11 pm
BS
If they put the right person in charge of fundraising/the foundation decades ago, there wouldn’t be a need to charge tuition. It is common knowledge that fewer than a quarter of the alumni give. A real shame for an institution that gave so much for so long.
June 15, 2015 at 2:59 pm
Carol Isaak
We need to see a real plan going forward… not like failed Near Eastern governments who, under fire, left, but the opposition had no real plan for the future… “Get rid of the bastards,” is just a beginning. What is the proposed end?
June 21, 2015 at 2:18 am
Baruch Skeer
“It is common knowledge that fewer than a quarter of the alumni give.” No, sir, it is common knowledge that, in any single year, fewer than a quarter of the alumni give. It is also common knowledge that alumni give 54% of the time, or slightly over once every two years, on average. The distribution of frequency of giving is flat, from never to always (with never and always being extremely rare). Since the statistic only concerns alumni who give to the annual fund in any single year, it doesn’t include donors to the endowment, alumni who come back to teach, those who perform volunteer work but do not make financial contributions, and young alumni whose parents donate. The pertinent statistic is really how many alumni have never donated to the college, which might be at 20%, especially without taking the parents of young alumni into account, but is probably lower. We do know that, in a particular 3 year period, 70% of alumni donated to the annual fund. The myth of the “regular” donor and a large alumni base that never gives is a lie. Due to an enormous range of circumstances, there are years that 75% of the alumni do not give (including miscounting of Cooper couples and donations that double up and appear in a single academic tax year when they show up on an individual’s tax returns as separate tax years). The slander against Cooper alumni is slander, and the alumni association is demanding access to the donor database so it can perform a proper analysis of alumni giving that does not support the “Blame the Alumni” narrative spread by the resigned former Chair of the Board of Trustees. The Cooper alumni are excellent stewards of Peter Cooper’s legacy, and the failure of the now-deposed administration to cut non-academic expenses has led to a steady decline of trust that Cooper donations will actually go to legitimate academic uses. Since most of the academic expenses are already covered by revenue from restricted endowment funds, the understanding, recently, that donations will merely go to administrative bloat and a horribly large debt service are well-known and discourage increases in pouring money down a black hole of overpaid administrators, useless consultants, and a trust-busting bank loan that should never have been allowed and was falsely acquired by lies to the AG and the court.
June 21, 2015 at 2:34 am
Baruch Skeer
The Cooper Union community has provided two real plans – “The Way Forward” in April 2012, and the “Working Group Report” in December 2013. The trustees rejected the first because it only addressed survival to an enormous bump up in rent revenue in 2018, and then rejected the second because it was told (falsely) that it was the long-range plan they had originally demanded but did not address the short-term problem of getting to the bump up in 2018.
A not-for-profit corporation belongs to its stakeholders, and both plans required shared sacrifices from all of the stakeholders. A segment of the Board of Trustees, many of whom resigned going back to 2008, the last bunch of which has resigned in June 2015, had an ideological bias against giving merit scholarships to children of the middle class, a bias that conveniently covered up their own failures of duties as trustees. The Attorney General has been investigating these failures for a year, and we hope some of the more egregious examples will end in prosecutions and financial restitution. The trustees preferred to cover up their mistakes by putting the entire burden on one segment of the stakeholders, the students, who would end up with student loan debt, because students do not have upwards of $80K on hand (nor do all of their parents). This immediately caused an enrollment situation where the best students who could get full-tuition scholarships elsewhere applied to other colleges, and the quality of the applicants to the college dropped dramatically in a single year, as would be expected. As the quality of the student body was the college’s most precious resource, the trustee policy started a death spiral for the college which the new and remaining trustees will now have to dig the college out of. These remaining trustees are not an “opposition with no real plan for the future.” They are now a majority backed by a significant majority of the other stakeholders of the institution.