Today is the day.
Today is the day that the Cooper Union trustees will hold their final vote on whether to impose tuition on this fall’s incoming class of undergraduates, or to, by adopting some other package of financial reforms, maintain Cooper’s status as the country’s most prominent and well-regarded tuition-free university.
The imposition of tuition at Cooper has been years in coming, and for much of 2013 it appeared all but inevitable. But student activists last summer forced the college to establish a formal working group to consider alternatives, and when that working group brought forward a robust, detailed plan for keeping Cooper free last month, the trustees blinked. Announcing that the proposal needed further review, they deferred final action for another day.
Today is that day.
As for what’s coming, nobody’s offering predictions, at least publicly. One active alumnus posted on Facebook last night that by his reckoning there are nine solid votes against tuition on the board, and five trustees clearly in favor. With twenty-three voting seats on the board, that would mean tuition opponents need to pick up three of the nine unknowns.
I have no sense of how reliable that count is, though, and no concrete inside information from other sources. Tuition opponents have a huge mountain to climb with the trustees — the Cooper Union president still supports tuition, and a minority faction of the working group has drafted its own report breaking with the majority’s recommendations.
But if it’s true that nine members of the board are prepared to vote to keep Cooper free, tuition supporters on the board have another question in front of them: Imposing tuition is one thing. Imposing it over the objections of nearly 40 percent of your institution’s trustees is quite another.
Yesterday Cooper Union trustee Kevin Slavin, an alumnus elected by alumni to the board last year, published a passionate defense of a free Cooper Union. The whole thing should be read by anyone who cares about higher education tuition policy, but I’ll close this post with a brief excerpt:
If you’ve never experienced it, “free” just seems like a lower number on a slider that has “half-price” in the middle. But free is not a number.
If you paid for your education, you’re likely to understand education in transactional terms. In straightforward economic terms, it means that if you charge some money, you can have some stuff. With more money comes more stuff, higher quality stuff.
But “free” is something different than “less.” And free is not less than cheap. It’s something else entirely.
Fingers crossed.
4:45 Update | At 2:38 this afternoon the secretary of the Cooper Union board of trustees sent out an email to the campus community saying that the board meeting was over and that there would be “a communication from the Board … this evening concerning [its] outcome.”
Around the same time, alumni trustee Kevin Slavin posted the following on the Save Cooper Union Facebook page:
Over. Sitting w trustees and staff. Statement coming late tonight – from cooper but with my participation – and apologies I can’t say more now. Have pushed to make sure something is communicated today. Will be later in evening.
I can’t help but notice that neither statement specifically states that the board reached a decision on the tuition question. More when I get it.
5:55 Update | Less than an hour ago Slavin said on Twitter that the board was “working to send out a statement later tonight.” Fifteen minutes ago an editor at Architect magazine tweeted that an unnamed Cooper trustee had told him that “results on the Cooper Union board vote may not be made public until tomorrow.”
Evening Update | The trustees have announced that they voted to impose tuition. Much more tomorrow.
studentactivism.net 
3 comments
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January 10, 2014 at 1:27 pm
ji
Yo, if we’re winning 9-5 and we have to be outvoted 7-2 to lose, then I say Cooper Union remains free. If not, then the students should have stayed in that office over the summer. Cause once they were there, it was no longer about Cooper Union. It was about reclaiming our city from rich people. I hope your source is strong.
January 10, 2014 at 8:54 pm
Ji
JAMSHED WINS.
I bet you the anti-tiution trustees didn’t even get 9 votes on their side. Time for soul searching, Free Cooper Union.
5 Reasons why Jamshed won.
1. Was able to rid his office of us students. NY Times went away, movement was co-opted.
2. Students were never able to get the city involved, let alone its so-called liberal politicians. I bet not one NYC council member even knew what was going on at Cooper Union. To make matters worse, the vast majority of the faculty never threatened to go on strike or anything resembling a major action, besides signing a petition. They sympathized with the students, but their salaries, rightly or wrongly, were to important to put in jeopardy.
3. OWS and Free Cooper Union never coalesced. Once the students left the president’s office, the few OWS allies who had been up there, faded away.
4. Jamshed got Free Cooper Union to negotiate with him, on his terms, got them to trust him. A bully can never be trusted. You have to take a stand and refuse to negotiate with one.
5. At a critical moment when Jamshed threatened arrests and expulsions, some of the students up in his office got scared. And left. That’s when he could sense that the bumpy ride would be okay.
January 10, 2014 at 9:04 pm
Ji
One last issue cause this concerns the author of the website. As a student i attended a meeting held by free cooper union where the journalist who runs this blog was called a fanboy. By one of the most visible student activists that my class has.
That’s when I knew Jamshed could win. We had gotten arrogant. A few journalists ran stories on us (when we took over his office) and we thought we were second coming of Nelson and Winnie Mandela. We got cocky. In a way, we deserved to lose. We isolated ourselves. Didn’t do the hard outreach. Instead got caught up in the NY Times making our heads bigger when they’d write about us during the 7th floor occupations.