1/27/18: Class 46: In-class reading of the Free Education Committee Report

1/27/18: Class 46: In-class reading of the Free Education Committee Report

Hi Projects Class!

We’ll meet at 2pm on Monday in 414 Fdn.

Like last week, we’ll start off with our weekly bulletin, please come prepared with a question or something to share:

• Progress: fill us in on where you or your group are at with a project
• Ask : something specific you need help with & how others can follow up
• Share: something external you read or saw that feels relevant to the class (reading, media, show, piece)
• Update: an observation or development internal to the school you think everyone would benefit knowing about

This week

We’ll be reading the Free Education Committee report together: “Recommended Plan to Return to Full-Tuition Scholarships, January 15, 2018”. If you don’t already have a printed copy, please bring one to class. (Here is a link to the printable version, also attached.)

You don’t need to read the report before class, but if you can take a few moments to poke around the Free Education Committee section of Cooper’s website and re-familiarize yourself with the other documents there (progress updates, financial monitor report, and consent decree) they provide lots of useful background:

https://cooper.edu/about/trustees/fec

We’ll continue our discussion of the FEC report in two weeks time (Feb. 12), when we’ll be joined in class by Paul Nikulin, and have a chance to ask questions directly of an FEC committee member. Paul is also an alumnus (CE'06), President of the Cooper Union Alumni Association, and Alumni Trustee.

After class, Walid has again invited everyone to (optionally) come along with the Foundation Projects class on a visit to/tour of SITU Studio, an architectural and fabrication studio founded by several Cooper alums.

Last week

Bulletin

Stefany Lazar (who has previously been part of the Projects class) presented on Call Your Representatives club, which will gather during club hours (Tuesday 12PM-2PM), with the first meeting on Tues, Jan 30th. If you’re interested, please sign up at the link below, which will also help Stefany get club funding:

https://jac.cooper.edu/club/264

(If you have a link or Ask that’d be useful to circulate in the class emails going forward — just let us know and we can include it here.)

Faye also distributed prints of the old mission made with bleach, and an old/new mission comparison slip:

IMG 6071

IMG 6072

* * *

Cooper Archives: Katie Blumenkrantz

In the first half of class we visited the Cooper Archives for a tour and discussion with Assistant Librarian Katie Blumenkrantz. This is the 4th time that the Projects class has visited the archives, though it was a first visit for many in our current cohort. Katie showed us the closed stacks, which include many books, administrative records, ephemera, and artifacts (like a piece of the transatlantic cable, old Cooper merch, and Abram Hewitt’s quilted coat) — all organized by an idiosyncratic taxonomy that was established when the archive was founded.

Since we first visited in Fall 2016, there have been exciting developments with the archives. In the past year, Katie has taken on a larger role, and interest in the archive (as measured in reference requests) continues to grow rapidly. While funding is still tight, in 2017 some members of the class (including Anton, Kiersten, Eva, Faye, Julian, and Vic) formed the Archive and Exhibition Club, which has already raised hundreds of dollars in additional funds for the archive by putting on an Ivory Tower screening and producing items available for donation. Other projects like Harry’s Peter Cooper comic (available for donation in the NAB lobby) are also now raising money for the archives. Anton spoke about his experience as a student worker in the archives, helping process boxes of items from public affairs, and asked for ideas and help on a project to make a map the archive’s contents.

Katie also spoke about the future: she is currently at work on processing, curating, and mounting an exhibition to coincide with Laura’s inauguration, including selections from the Cooper Family Documents (acquired through donations from alumni and professors in 2015). She also spoke about longer term ambitions to fund more student workers to help process the archive’s vast amounts of unprocessed materials, reprocess parts of the archive which are not currently being properly stored or cataloged, and to build off the Architecture Archive’s initiative to digitally catalog the collection and make it available for online use.

* * *

Cooper Union History Project: Barry Drogin

In the second half of class we were joined by Barry Drogin (EE '83) who, as a student at Cooper, edited The Pioneernewspaper, then went to to publish his independent analysis of Cooper’s finances and politics in The Alumni Pioneer, most actively from 2011-2014. In 2013 he also served as a member of Cooper’s Working Group.

Starting with his “Counter-Narratives”, Barry walked the class through his websites, and spoke frankly about the emotional burnout that he faced after years of attempts at helping were turned down, and his work to investigate and analyze Cooper’s financial and political situation were continuously undermined by the previous administration.

His recent work has focused on the Cooper Union History Project. Barry told the story of how in 1873, Cooper’s trustees had invested $100,000 in bonds of Pompton Township, but did not receive the expected $7,000 per year on the investment, leading to some of Cooper’s earliest financial troubles.

As a broad overview, Barry views Cooper’s “middle 50 years” as a period in which Cooper moved from being a non-college to a college much like the one we know it as today. It was also a period of administrative growth, from just a few staff supporting President Gano Dunn, to an administration large enough to span multiple floors and buildings, like today. In researching this period, Barry has conducted a 5 part oral history interview with Larry Gerckens AR '54.

Barry also spoke about the 70’s at Cooper, a tumultuous time in which Cooper’s faculty and staff became unionized, and Dean of Architecture John Hejduk led a gut renovation of the Foundation Building (leading some to feel “Blinded By The White”).

Recounting recent years, Barry questioned whether he has enough distance to write a history of the last 10 years. He noted that the CUHP website relies mostly on quotations from the Attorney General to describe this period.

Finally, Barry scrolled through several documents he is working on (attached), including one about the Use And Abuse Of Infographics, and questionable quotations from the FEC report. (You can access Barry’s presentation materials on Dropbox.) Asked for his take on Cooper’s future, he spoke about a personal desire for radical change and for Cooper to avoid becoming just another college. Citing Cooper’s Retraining Program for Immigrant Engineers as a model, and noting that Cooper’s Free Reading Room originally predated New York’s Public Libraries, he posed several questions: What is needed in 2018? What is nobody else providing?