7/9/18: Season 3 🤩 🎬

7/9/18: Season 3 🤩 🎬

Hey Projects people,

Hope you’ve been having a great summer!

We set up a listserv to stay connected. Visit the link below and drop your email to join:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/projectsthecooperunion/join

Once you sign up, you’ll continue getting class updates, and you can also send messages to the entire group by emailing projectsthecooperunion@googlegroups.com

All colleges make use of the quiet summer to subtly set big plans and small changes into motion, and Cooper is no exception.

Some things on our radar: new cross-institutional partnerships, all kinds of new policies, a drastically expanding fundraising and development department, a still-impending humanities program revamp, admissions restructuring, growing dataification and focus on institutional research methodologies, encroaching culture of philanthropy, still-developing cross-school fab-lab plans, more new art faculty hires in the coming year, new engineering dean, changing of the security firm (again), new systems for tracking campus assets and maintenance, turning over of some board members and administrators, and an influx of new consultants working on enterprise risk management, restructuring the IT department, and seemingly everything else.

All of this, of course, interacts with some of our previously-identified elephants in the room: search processes and hires, a presidential transition, free education committee, diversity task force, accreditation, community planning collaborative, strategic planning, credit hours, mission rewrite, administrative restructuring, and new great hall programming.

3 years into Projects, we’ve held 60 classes meetings. This semester we have about 10 new people joining us, and some of you already confirmed to be returning.

If we haven’t heard from you yet and you’d like to keep coming by class on Monday afternoons (especially if you’ve recently graduated), let us know. If you can’t attend and want to stay involved by email or otherwise, we’d still love to hear from you.

One of our big questions to discuss amongst returning people is how we can continue to steward all these threads, projects, and tracks for one another as they grow and change. We know it might take a different type of support than it has in the past, be it motivational, material, or workshopping beyond class presentations. We want to hear where you’re at!

We’ve been meeting sporadically over the summer to plan some logistics for the fall and work on our own respective projects. Soon we’d like to start getting together with whoever’s around, too.

If you want to jump on a video chat, we’ll be online on Monday July 16 at 7pm. We’ll send a reminder link next week. And if that date doesn’t work, let us know and we’ll find a time soon.