A Bang, and Then a Whimper: Some Thoughts On the Death of Cooper Union

Angus Johnston:

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.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 22, 2014 12:23 AM
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