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Fighting For a Fair Risk-Free Austerity Budget Since November 2011May 22, 2013, 1am |
New Anti-Tuition Alumni Trustee: "Oh shit."Upon learning that he had been elected as an alumni trustee through a write-in campaign organized by Friends of Cooper Union, the first response of Kevin Slavin, A '95, was, "Oh shit." The plight of alumni trustees has been frought since charging tuition was put "on the table" by current President Jamshed Bharucha. John Huddy AR '85 resigned when he discovered he didn't hold the same anti-tuition positions as the alumni he represented. The Alumni Council replaced him with Lee Skolnick AR '79, although the Council neglected to ask Mr. Skolnick his views on tuition, and he has remained reclusive throughout the crisis. The Alumni Council erred again by nominating Kathryn McGraw Berry AR '80 without asking her views on tuition. An alumna wrote to her and asked; it was her response, posted on the Save Cooper Union Facebook page, which led to outrage and the write-in campaign for Mr. Slavin. According to the CUAA, 1288 valid paper and electronic ballots were counted. Sean Cusack reports that this is double the normal number of ballots received in a CUAA election. In addition to Slavin, Free Cooper Union endorsed 12 candidates for the alumni council: Nicholas Agneta AR '80, Rachel Appel A '13, Xenia Diente A '99, Jason Paul Guzman A '00, Sangamithra Iyer CE '99, Kelly O'Keefe A '82, Julian LaVerdiere A '93, Edmundo Majchrzyk A '09, Annabel Roberts-McMichael A '10, Karina Tipton CE '99, Curtis Wayne AR '75, and Karen Sandler BSE '97. All twelve candidates were elected, as well, according to the results posted on the CUAA website. Kevin was in the audience at the May 21, 2013, Alumni Council meeting where his election was formally (and unanimously) accepted by the Alumni Council. He said, "I want to thank everyone who gave me America's crappiest job."
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New President Salary: "Oh shit."On May 11, 2013, The Alumni Pioneer printed a story claiming that current president Jamshed Bharucha earned $340K, median for a college president. We had written to TC Westcott on May 6 to confirm the story, but she didn't reply until May 14. We are dismayed to report that Bharucha's total compensation package is closer to $650K. The confusion arose from proper interpretation of Schedule J, Part II of fiscal year 2012 Form 990; Column B reports Bharucha's compensation from his W-2, which is for 6 months of employment (calendar year 2011), whereas Columns C and D, including the free housing, are for 12 months of employment (fiscal year 2012). The confusion was compounded by Cooper reporting $0 in base compensation for Campbell, summing his final six months of salary, expense account, and golden parachute into "other reportable compensation." The six months of free housing in fiscal year 2011 are clearly not included in Campbell's Column D. The trustees have been widely criticized for placing former president Campbell into the top ten college presidents in compensation in 2009, one of three years when Campbell received performance bonuses of $175K. The community is even more outraged that Bharucha's compensation, without a bonus, is only slightly lower than Campbell's compensation with the bonus, as shown below:
1998, Iselin $205,047 Iselin did not get free housing, although White and Lacy before him did. |
Free 154 Years: "Oh shit."For two years the administration has been putting out press releases claiming that The Cooper Union became free in 1902, but that fairy tale is dying as media outlet after media outlet have been publishing that Cooper is charging tuition for the first time in 154 years. Even the students had bought this bullshit story, inundating the 2012 Wreath Laying Ceremony with "110 YEARS FREE" balloons. Sangamithra Iyer CE '99 takes full credit for first reporting on the "amateur class". The Cooper Union library has made available the early trustee reports that Ms. Iyer consulted for her essay, which are available here. In the early years, the "amateurs" were the equivalent of "auditors," attending some drawing classes but not receiving certificates. The existence of these auditors flits in and out and was restricted to women in the day art school, not men in the night art school (the architecture school) or men and women in the night science school (the engineering school). Susan Carter, who became Principal of the Free Art School for Women in 1872, eventually set up rules for the regular degree-seeking women and the auditors. Dean Alan Wolf has quoted out of context Ms. Carter's rules and attributed them to Peter Cooper. During Ms. Carter's tenure at Cooper, the amateurs were pushed out of the full-time morning school and given their own class in the afternoon, the earliest example of a continuing education program. The afternoon classes ceased in 1887; the return of continuing education classes at The Cooper Union hasn't been researched yet, but dates back to at least the 1970's. In 2004, the college first introduced a continuing education certificate program; current Continuing Education propaganda claims that continuing education at Cooper dates back to 1859. The Cooper librarians have researched the history of lab, material, and studio fees, and of the student fee, which first appeared in 1962. In its early years, Cooper sold textbooks to students at cost, and many art students were paid for in-class work, such as coloring lithographs. |
40% Alumni Giving: "Oh shit."In a telephone interview with Democracy Now!, Chair Mark Epstein repeats his "blame the alumni" campaign by claiming that "Traditionally, only 20 percent of our alumni, who have gotten 100 percent scholarships, give back to the school on a regular basis." The Alumni Pioneer has published a new analysis, Michael Borkowsky and Alumni Giving, which reproduces several versions of the trustee "low alumni giving rate" mantra, and provides the actual numbers and history. From the 1970's until 2000, The Cooper Union was one of eight schools cited by CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, for the high level of alumni giving to colleges, between 35 and 40%. With the kick-off of the 2000 Capital Campaign, although Phonathon giving increased every year, the percentage of alumni giving to the Annual Fund decreased and the amount collected in the Annual Fund remained flat, whereas enormous amounts, quadruple the amounts collected in the Annual Fund, were collected in the Capital Campaign, primarily into the Building Fund, as shown below.
 The administration has never released the true rate of alumni giving during the last decade, nor have the trustees apologized for their continued slander of Cooper Union alumni. |
Bharucha Calls for Healing, but Epstein Threatens ExtinctionDespite a sit-in calling for his resignation, President Bharucha has issued a public letter calling for healing and praising other actions including painting the architecture lobby black and a Why Cooper? protest at City Hall. In addition to the sit-in, Bharucha has allowed windows of the Foundation Building to be festooned with art works related to the protest, and black streamers to be hung from the building. Board Chair Epstein, however, has not been so conciliatory. He has authored a letter claiming that the sit-in "has created a poisonous and dangerous atmosphere that can potentially destroy the school forever... hasten[ing] it towards its extinction." According to reliable sources, Epstein attributed these words to an alumnus who, being read them by Epstein, said he disagreed with them and asked his name be removed from them. Many in the Cooper Union Community have tried to avoid a "nuclear option," not wanting to, in an unattributed but popular phrase from the 60's, burn down the village in order to save it. Epstein claims that this "nuclear option" is now on the table. Certainly, a great divide has opened between the Board and administration and the rest of the Cooper Union Community. The students involved in the sit-in have already been threatened with dismissal, as have non-tenured faculty members voting no confidence in the President. Friends of Cooper Union has posted an on-line petition voting no confidence in both Bharucha and Epstein. The New York Times has published a financial story placing blame for the financial crisis squarely on the Board, and a financial blogger for Reuters has been publishing stories criticizing both the President and the Board. The number of reporters and publications jumping on the trustees increases every day, too rapid for The Alumni Pioneer to list and count them all. The sit-in has been on-going since May 8, 2013. |
JOINT STATEMENT FROM THE LEADERSHIP OF CUFCT, CUOP, AND U@CU:The faculty and staff unions at The Cooper Union deeply regret the Board of Trustees' vote to end the 154 year tradition of free education at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Peter Cooper possessed a powerful vision of social harmony for his beloved city. He wanted men and women of all races and religions to have the opportunity to gain an independence of mind and action. His "union" was to pay back the debt he believed he owed to the working classes of the city that had given him his wealth. For over one hundred years Cooper graduates have made a difference. Now Peter Cooper’s charitable purpose is to be reduced to platitudes about educational "excellence" and to the bottom line of administrative expense.
Lawrence Mesich
Maren Stange
Richard Stock
Peter Buckley |
Cooper Undergraduate Education: Eighty Thousand Dollars
Not Including Room, Board, and TextbooksApril 23, 2013: A week after a second secret Board of Trustees meeting, Chair Mark Epstein announced at noon that The Cooper Union would reduce the full-tuition scholarship to 50% starting with the Class of 2018 (entering in September 2014). For students who qualify for Pell Grants and TAP funds, the announcement effectively shifts the Board-created budget crisis over to the government. Students from middle and upper class families will have to come up with approximately $80 thousand in funds or loans, assuming that such students choose to both apply and attend the college. The $20M per year that the Board expects to collect, ramping up from $5M in 2014, will need to offset an expected drop in alumni giving, which averaged $6M per year in the last decade (more in the years prior to the crash of 2008).
The announcement was accompanied by orchestrated exclusives in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, a posting on the Cooper website, and e-mail blasts from the Board as well as from the five elected Alumni Trustees, all dated April 23, 2013, although the decision had been made a week earlier. When he steps down, Chair Epstein will be replaced by Vice Chair François de Menil, one of the wealthiest students to attend the college for free.
By coincidence, Friends of Cooper Union started a write-in campaign on the same day to elect Kevin Slavin to the Board. An initial e-mail blast endorsed the publisher of The Alumni Pioneer, Barry Drogin, but Mr. Slavin volunteered to run and Mr. Drogin and FOCU have endorsed Mr. Slavin. Aside from making the most well-received speech at the First Community Summit in December 2011 in The Great Hall, Mr. Slavin was involved in the Money on the Table website campaign, which raised nearly a half million dollars from nearly six hundred pledges with the caveat that Cooper remain completely tuition free.
In addition to postings on social media and in alumni blogs, coverage of the announcement has been extensive. NY1 interviewed President Bharucha, who is actually quoted saying "in Peter Cooper's time, when he was the first president, he welcomed the mixing up, if you like, or the union of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and those who could afford it were charged at that time." (In fact, the trustees agonized over the decision to allow those with means to continue attending classes in the incorporated School of Design for Women, limiting their number before pushing them into a separate "amateur" class that was eventually stopped. Similarly, throughout Peter Cooper's lifetime they took steps to keep those with means from attending the free night classes, although they noted that they were more than willing to pay to do so.) Felix Salmon of Reuters has written another piece calling the trustees to task for their financial mismanagement of the college.
Meanwhile, according to The Villager, Bharucha and Cooper have opened up a quagmire by agreeing to become an anchor tenant for the old CHARAS Building. Councilmember Rosie Mendez has already vowed to protest the agreement, a replay of the St. Marks Bookshop horror of two years ago.
The remainder of the Alumni Pioneer website will be updated to reflect this breaking news. The Office of Public Affairs did not inform The Alumni Pioneer prior to the announcement, nor did it inform The Alumni Pioneer directly of the announcement.
Previous Posting
After their last two meetings were streamed live on the Internet by student activists, the Board of Trustees moved their March 6, 2013, meeting to an undisclosed location, to be followed by an e-mail to the Cooper Union Community that merely repeated what had already been announced in April 2012 - that incoming undergraduate students in September 2013 (the class of 2018) would receive full-tuition scholarships for the duration of their undergraduate education at Cooper.
The e-mail didn't say that a reduction in the full-tuition scholarship by 25% had been approved by the Board, nor did it say that it had been rejected. Similarly, the President submitted a FY 2014 budget for approval at the meeting. The announcement did not say whether that budget had been approved, nor did it say whether the budget had been rejected and further cuts in operating expenses - demanded by the entire Cooper Union Community - were required.
Based on a February 17, 2013 interview with the Chairman of the Board of Trustees and responses to questions at a March 1 Public Forum (transcribed in tweets by Sean Cusack), the media and the community had all but expected implementation of the 25% reduction in the scholarship - although all of the stakeholders had united against implementing the change. Sean had already sent an open letter to the board with a personal plea to attach a ten-year "sunset clause" to the Board's expected tuition decision.
As proven again and again, the media and much of the community has continued to be diverted by administration communications and accept outrageous administration lies, which have shifted subtly in response to repeated Alumni Pioneer publications and videos. For example, the Board now admits that half of the time, Cooper had an operating deficit - begging the question of whether deficits have exceeded surpluses, and giving a lie to the "decades of deficit spending" and "structural deficit" narratives. Similarly, the Board now says that alumni giving has been low "not in total value, but in numbers." But the fairy tale that Cooper became tuition-free in 1902 with a $300,000 gift from Andrew Carnegie continues to ooze from the mouths of the Board, the Cooper press office, and in countless media outlets (challenged only by The Villager, a local newspaper), and the persistent lie about Cooper's endowment, published four times in The New York Times, continues its viral truthiness, most recently spreading throughout the Internet in a free college story written by Christina Couch for Bankrate.com. Stories about the fake hiring freeze and the presidential promise to reduce the size of the administration have also disappeared into the ether of the media's short attention span. TC Westcott similarly lied to the Public Forum audience by claiming that the cost of the administration had been reduced from 48% of the budget to 46%, without mentioning that those percentages did not include the cost of employee benefits, heavily weighted to the administrative side.
In completely unrelated news, the publisher of The Alumni Pioneer celebrated the bar mitzvah of his youngest son, joined by several members of the Cooper Union Community.
Inspired Writing
Sangamithra Iyer n+1 | Litia Perta The Brooklyn Rail |
It came by e-mail: On February 20, 2013, at 1:30pm, Claire McCarthy told the world that "generating revenue through tuition from academic programs" was the only course for any institution of higher education that was "sustainable." If her words end up as the announcement of the death of free higher education in America in the 21st Century, then, whether she wrote those words herself or whether they were given to her by Mark Epstein, Jamshed Bharucha, or Diana Pearson, they will nevertheless forever remain attributed to her.
The words, of course, make no sense - The Cooper Union provided free higher education in America for over 150 years - so her proclamation of what is and is not "sustainable" - not what will provide survival until 2018, or until the Great Recession ends, or until austerity is once again embraced, or until the next benefactor can be found, no, what is "sustainable" - will remain for all time as the reason why the Board of Trustees destroyed The Cooper Union and free education in America in the 21st century.
Unless, of course, the Board of Trustees veers away from the lies they have been telling and rejects Claire McCarthy's proclamation.
The Problems - trustee not trusty
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Both Real Estate and Finance
Real Estate
Outsourcing and Manufacturing
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Investment Banking & Finance
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Advertising, Marketing, and Media
Architecture and Transportation
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The Solutions - click for PDF
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As The Cooper Union Board of Trustees considers charging tuition for graduate programs and reducing the full-tuition scholarship for undergraduate programs by 24%, The Alumni Pioneer, using the immortal technique of a parody video, makes one last effort to keep the college from the point of no return. Also available as PDF. "Cooper has a serious cluster fuck." - Felipe Coronel (Immortal Technique), January 1, 2013 Is Peter Cooper History?Hewitt Was First To GoPeter Cooper was once beloved by many in New York City and New York State. On their various websites1,2 and now in press releases, the college, still named after the man who saved up his entire life to found it, is writing him out of it. On the eve of a historic vote to alter the mission of the institution, The Alumni Pioneer provides The Real Cooper, the history of the first 25 - if not 50 or 100 - years of The Cooper Union, as told by The New York Herald and other authenticated sources from before the turn of the nineteenth century. (A shorter version, focusing just on The Cooper Union, can be found here.) Abram Hewitt, the former mayor and Peter Cooper son-in-law who was its first Chair of the Board of Trustees, remaining in the position for over forty years until his death in 1903 at the age of 81, has already been deleted from the college (he graces The Alumni Pioneer masthead). The Hewitt Building, funded by Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan in his honor after his death, was destroyed 100 years later in 2003, replaced with a Thom Mayne building called the New Academic Building (or NAB), with so many donor names plastered at its entrance, in its halls, and on its floors, it should be called the Name Building (Mayne even carved his initial, a lower case "t," into its ugly facade). Search the college's website for Hewitt's name, you may find one tiny scholarship left. Peter Cooper has lasted a little longer, just over 150 years, but his erasure from history on the Internet was almost complete. He lived on in pesky archives still posted by the Cooper Union Library, the first college entity to come under attack by the Expense Reduction Task Force. President Bharucha, acting on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees, claimed that the legal mission statement of the college was the "Deed of Trust" (Charter), not the Letter to the Trustees, which declares that The Cooper Union be "open and free to all." The day after Jamshed Bharucha, who likes to be called Jamshed and is often referred to as JB, announced to The New York Times that the scholarship policy would be altered only as a "last resort," he distributed an e-mail letter to the "Cooper Union Community" proposing a "reinvention strategy" in which "access" would alter the scholarship policy! A week later, the words "I blame the alumni" emanated from the lips of Board Chair Mark Epstein, an Alumnus of the Year and former Alumni Association president, who openly complains about alumni who "still won't give to the school because of [the sale of] Green Camp." Fed false narratives about "decades of deficit spending" and a "structural deficit," at a Joint Student Council meeting on November 8, 2011, the engineering students voted that the school should charge tuition if it must to stay alive, and the art students voted that if it did, it should change its name. Will they both get their wishes?
You can't make this up - the Alumni Office is advertisizing Founder's Day using the tagline, "Imagine The World Without Cooper." Perfect punctuation mark to the story above.
   
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Clueless Students Obscure Friends of Cooper Union MessageDirty Tricks Campaign Seems to be WorkingOn December 3, 2012, Cooper Union Student Action to Save Our School (C.U.$.O.$.) grabbed the media spotlight, putting the "Cooper 11" and The Cooper Union at the center of Occupy Student Debt and the free education movement. Their three demands, however, merely served to obscure the fact that there are alternatives to charging tuition to undergraduates and to graduates at the college. One of their demands, that JB step down as president, actually kept members of Cooper's three unions (full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and staff) from showing solidarity with the occupiers, so Cooper employees affirmed the college's mission statement instead. As it was, the media decided that stories about pizza and The Last Supper were more important than any serious consideration of how to save free education at The Cooper Union. The C.U.$.O.$. website even repeated the "Since 1902" narrative invented by the administration, and the occupation overwhelmed any coverage of the Great Hall event occuring 8 floors below. Friends of Cooper Union (FOCU), in concurrence with Alumni Pioneer (AP) analyses, has stated on their website that the Revenue Task Force acceptance of only $4M in annual budget cuts, and the emphasis on revenue generation, isn't the only way out of the fiscal crisis. FOCU proposes a 10-point plan, starting with 4 austerity measures: immediate cuts, long-range cuts, termination of all consultants who are not cash-positive, and a true hiring freeze. The 5th point is to use the 4 austerity measures to recalculate the needed revenue generation needed. Points 6 and 7 involve short-range and long-range planning, points 8 and 10 are for a bridge capital campaign and a new long-range capital campaign, and point 9 is to strengthen the role of the alumni with FOCU's help. FOCU rejects the "hybrid" framework, standing against graduate tuition and against even a partial reduction in the full-tuition scholarship for undergraduate students. Over 3,000 people signed FOCU's on-line no-tuition petition, and nearly a 1,000 people have endorsed "The Way Forward," the FOCU consensus document. An FAQ created in response to AP's Student's Guide to the Cooper Union Financial Crisis was met by FOCU with a FUQ!, and by AP with an AQAF. AP produced a simple spreadsheet proving that there were several scenarios that would get the college to 2018, the year that a $20M net bump up in Chrysler Building rent will arrive. Due to "extortion," in the words of the faculty union president, full-time faculty were forced to adopt a policy of Responsibility Centered Management and present their recommendations to the Board of Trustees (BoT) on December 5, 2012. An additional BoT meeting is said to be held in January 2013. Trustee Daniel Okrent, head of a secret - oops, not secret any more! - "SWAT Team" devoted to attacking the administration's on-line enemies, will have The New York Times announce the BoT decision soon. The SWAT Team leaked a draft of the Undergraduate Tuition Committee report to both C.U.$.O.$. and AP, and has waged a war on Cooper Union's Wikipedia page. C.U.$.O.$, led by Casey Gollan and Joe Riley (among others), AP, published by Barry Drogin, and FOCU, founded by Henry Chapman, are the last entities in the Cooper Union Community to remain against the "hybrid framework." C.U.$.O.$. invited FOCU to address the public in The Great Hall on December 3, 2012, and recommended that the media visit AP as a resource, but direct communications and planning between the three entities has been sparse. These three entities constitute the heart, brain, and soul of the Cooper Union free education movement. Join or Die! Pearson Molds Propaganda Campaign
1. reinvention: build graduate program, sabotage undergraduate program Although Ms. Pearson's on-line profile lives on at Dartmouth and its blogs, her career since coming to New York City first in August 2010 is a mystery. Pearson Strategies (not to be confused with Pearson Education) has no website, and her only official link to Cooper is through her listing as "staff" at every Expense Reduction Task Force meeting. The Cooper Union confirmed that Ms. Pearson has been paid directly by the college as a consultant, simultaneous to the hiring freeze announcement. Ms. Pearson refused to comment for this article. Referred to by one source as "the Karl Rove of the Bharucha administration," what is clear is that psychologist Bharucha has been using Ms. Pearson's advice in the media campaign that started with the Halloween Massacre and the announcement of the "reinvention strategy," led to a media blackout, the suppression of information about the Community Summit and other Friends of Cooper Union events, changes in the history section of the Cooper website (which no longer mentions Peter Cooper's oft-quoted "free as air and water" phrase, but instead now states, "He made his school free for the working classes"), the insistent use of "access" in all Cooper Union communications, and, eventually, the announcement of the "hybrid framework." Although ostensibly attributed to Lawrence Cacciatore, Secretary to the Board of Trustees, Pearson's hand can be detected in the pre-emptive "Board Report" released on September 20. Pearson was at Dartmouth when its Board of Trustees attempted to dilute the influence of its alumni, resulting in a lawsuit. Coverage of the governance crisis dominated the Dartmouth website to such an extent that the Board of Trustees created a new website to bury the story. Bharucha left Dartmouth in 2002 for Tufts, prior to the Ivy League fiasco, although a key theme was an attempt to transition Dartmouth from an undergraduate institution to a graduate research institution, similar to Bharucha's unpopular "Reinvention Strategy" for Cooper and a similar money-generating goal at Tufts. LinkedIn links may only be visible to readers with LinkedIn connections to The Cooper Union.
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Required Reading
The Lost Decade New York Times/Chronicle of Higher Education | HEPI, HECA, and CPI Center for College Affordability and Productivity | Responsibility Centered Management NEA Higher Education Journal | Ignore Reformers and Reinforce Relationships Inside Higher Ed |
Just in case you think The Alumni Pioneer is written by a bunch of disgruntled alumni hanging on desperately to the "cherished aspect" of free education at The Cooper Union, we highly recommend you "get educated" by reading what others think.
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Favorite Abraham Lincoln Quote #1: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. |
Favorite Abraham Lincoln Quote #2: Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it. |
Original Analyses, Research, and Reporting (click here for abstracts)
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Past
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Inauguration 10/18
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Halloween 10/31
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Open Forum 11/8
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WNYC 11/23 |
Summit 12/5 |
Address 12/13
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Summary 12/16
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Summit II 4/26
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Future
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 - click on pic for second draft (2/21/12) of infographics by Matt Arnold AR '82 depicting Real Estate, Investments, Revenues, Annual Giving, Expenses, and Staff Changes02-15-2013 A Tale of Two Coopers - Before the March 1, 2013 Face-Off 12-02-2012 RCM@CU - Bringing Responsibility Centered Management to the Non-Academic Units 09-08-2012 Actual Questions Asked Frequently - Latest response to "the new transparency" 08-29-2012 Endow a President - Financing the other half of the budget 05-06-2012 See the Whole Board (rev 2) - Bharucha's Pre-emptive Surrender 04-08-2012 Envisioning Austerity - layoffs and program reductions 02-04-2012 A Fiduciary Timeline (rev 2) - Cooper's march to bankruptcy 01-31-2012 The Deadline (rev 1) - would a five-year plan be sufficient? 01-28-2012 Counter-Narratives to the Administration Narrative (rev 5) - a baker's dozen 01-28-2012 Scenarios for End Times (rev 4) - don't say you weren't warned 01-27-2012 Hide the Salami (rev 1) - Board Statement and Summary 01-23-2012 Don't Worry, Be HEPI - how to portray an increase as a reduction 01-15-2012 Becoming the Story - administrators who draw attention to themselves 01-15-2012 The New Colossus - on reinventing The Cooper Union 01-12-2012 Further questions the Office of Public Relations refused to answer 12-28-2011 Summary of the Summary - of the December 5 Summit 12-10-2011 Urtak Poll - what you think 12-10-2011 (spreadsheet) 12-09-2011 My Fantasy Presidential Address - if it were only so 12-09-2011 Selected Community Summit Slides - the short version 12-07-2011 Great Hall Financial presentation (silent, PDF, video1,2,3) - socko multi-media show 12-02-2011 Questions the Office of Public Relations refused to answer - past, present, and future 11-28-2011 Cooper Voices - eloquence, passion, and moving anecdotes 11-27-2011 Do You Want Deficit With That? (rev 2) - inside the financial statements 11-27-2011 (spreadsheet) 11-27-2011 The Real Bharucha - what you'd rather not know 11-24-2011 Fee vs. Tuition (rev 3) - why words matter 11-20-2011 The Halloween Massacre (rev 5) - the opening salvo 11-19-2011 Cooper Payroll - The Monkey on Their Back (rev 2) - non-academic bloat 11-19-2011 (spreadsheet) 11-18-2011 Questions answered by Chair Epstein - all 6 AP questions asked and answered 11-17-2011 Trustees Mainly Board Junkies - just another not-for-profit to them 11-17-2011 (spreadsheet.) 11-14-2011 Cooper's Strategy through 2007 - Alum Pres observes Board before the crash We make mistakes, and we're continuously trying to make this better. If you read or see something that you know is wrong or that you think could be better, don't write us off - write to the Publisher. |
Everything started with The Halloween Massacre. Then came Counter-Narratives to the Administration Narrative, followed by Questions answered by Chair Epstein. By this time, The Alumni Pioneer was born. The first version of Scenarios for End Times followed next, then Fee vs. Tuition, along with Cooper's Strategy through 2007, written by Don Toman, former Alumni Association President. Finally, the first analyses, Cooper Payroll - The Monkey on Their Back (and its spreadsheet) and Trustees Mainly Board Junkies (and its spreadsheet), were published. The Thanksgiving break was a major time for The Alumni Pioneer, with the initial publication of Do You Want Deficit With That? (and its spreadsheet). At the end of the long weekend, The Real Bharucha was published. Within a week the two had garnered over 400 downloads each. On Monday we changed tack with the inspiring Cooper Voices and published questions the Office of Public Relations refused to answer when, given three days to respond, well, the Office of Public Relations refused to respond to our questions. We posted The Deadline on the morning of the Great Hall Financial presentation on December 5, 2011. (Silent and PDF versions were posted two days later, and Selected Community Summit Slides two days after that). Dr. Bharucha enjoyed reading our publisher's Fantasy Presidential Address, but laughed it off. We took a snapshot of the Urtak Poll. The Board stayed on schedule and published their December 16 report on the financial crisis. This led the Cooper Union Community to the 2006 cy pres petition to the NYS Supreme Court. The false optimism of the fantasy presidential address has been replaced with the stark realities of the administration's Fiduciary Timeline and an attempt to analyze the Board Statement and Summary while they continue to play Hide the Salami. Just before the holiday break, the Gang of Six posted their summary of the Community Summit and announced a second set of breakout sessions, so we published a Summary of the Summary for those with really short attention spans - although we certainly encourage our readers to read the original summary, read the full transcripts, and watch the videos, if you are so inclined. Over that break we didn't sit still: we created a a new set of questions that the Office of Public Relations also refused to answer, we wrote about administrators who, through their actions, end up Becoming the Story, and we created a song and slideshow based on Bharucha's "reinvention strategy" called The New Colossus. We explain the Higher Education Price Index in Don't Worry, Be HEPI, and created some fantastic infographics in time for the third Breakout Session. We've changed our masthead slogan twice: now it's "Fighting For a Fair Risk-Free Austerity Budget Since November 2011." Prior to publication of "The Way Forward," we called for layoffs and program reductions in Envisioning Austerity. We all know what happened on April 24, 2012 - the pre-emptive surrender called the "hybrid framework" is analyzed in See the Whole Board. And to wrap up the first academic year of the crisis, we offer Endow a President and RCM@CU, our slightly tongue-in-cheek guides to how the New Philanthropy and Responsibility Centered Management can actually benefit The Cooper Union. Finally, prior to a March 1, 2013, stand-off, The Alumni Pioneer offers A Tale of Two Coopers. If this is too much, check out the lighter fare on Page 2 and a serial webcomic, Peter Cooper & The Demons of Debt. We've even added a couple of interactive games to amuse you. |
Ten One Action Item for the Cooper Union Community:
Remove Jamshed Bharucha
The June 2012 Deadline Has Passed: Watch Out! Here It Comes!
We are forced to conclude that the administrative action items demanded below will never be realized while Jamshed Bharucha is in office - that the "new transparency" is a sham. The demands are:
More criticism of Bharucha from Casey Gollan A'13 of the Cooper 11.
Other Resources and LinksSince site statistics indicate that readers are wandering all over the Not Nice Music website trying to figure out who the hell Barry Drogin is, here's a Cooper-focused page about the Publisher of The Alumni Pioneer. |
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All content posted in Cassandra's Curse, including this page, are copyrighted, but there are links to non-copyrighted files under the Original Analyses, Research, and Reporting section. If you are new to the site, all attempts are being made to make the presentation of material as efficient as possible. If you have already visited the site, you should check back periodically (pun intended) as content is updated (sometimes twice daily) and the website is improved on a regular basis. Remember to hit REFRESH on your browser!
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Cassandra's Curse Copyright © 1993, 1996, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013 by Barry Drogin - All rights reserved