- 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 Changes

10-19-2018 The Elephant in the Room - Transcriptions of 2018 commencement speeches
03-06-2018 A Modest Proposal - Return Cooper to Free in Five Years
12-11-2016 At Cooper Union 2016: CUAA Edition - The (Academic) Year in Review (9/2015-9/2016): Progress, but Slow or Delayed
02-20-2016 Solutions (rev 1) - alternatives to tuition (with added Driscoll Plan)
10-13-2015 Fact-Checking the Findings of Fact - Corrections to the Attorney General's Cross-Petition
09-17-2015 Testing Out New Narratives - Interim President William Mea steps up to the plate
06-20-2015 Counter Narratives to the Administration Narrative Part II (rev 1) - A guide for the media against all of the persistent and final lies spread at the end of the 4-year reign of terror
03-21-2015 Good Faith Reliance - Blow-by-blow response to the President's "The State of Cooper Union"
12-06-2014 "Ivory Tower" Errata - Minor corrections and clarifications to the Andrew Rossi CNN documentary
11-22-2014 CUAA Secedes from Union (rev 1) - Council fed up with censorship

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. See the revisions listed above? It happens.

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 offered Endow a President, our slightly tongue-in-cheek guide to how the New Philanthropy can actually benefit The Cooper Union.

The second year of the crisis, TC Westcott responded to our Student's Guide to the Cooper Union Financial Crisis with her FAQ, so we created a list of Actual Questions Asked Frequently. We had just written a critique of Responsibility Centered Management when the first lock-in on December 3, 2012, made everything get very busy. For the general public, we published our New York Magazine-style article for non-Cooper folk. We responded to clueless engineering students with Yes, Alexander, There Is A Santa Claus and discovered historical documents that revealed some inconvenient truths about The Real Cooper. The clueless engineering students took offense on-line, so we set up a Facebook Policy that we occasionally ease up on when the offending parties take a break to attend to classes and exams. In response to the constant refrain to offer alternatives to tuition, we posted a summary of Solutions from The Alumni Pioneer and Friends of Cooper Union.

Over winter break, we decided to go musical again with The Education of Mark Epstein (also available as a PDF). Prior to a March 1, 2013, stand-off, The Alumni Pioneer offered A Tale of Two Coopers.

We thought it would be over, but then came the tuition announcement and the May 8, 2013 sit-in. Mike Bokowsky kicked off that March 1 event, and was the first trustee to visit the sit-in, so we looked in our archives and published "the Borkowsky letter" and a critique of the 20% alumni giving lie in Michael Borkowsky and Alumni Giving. This has been followed by a more in-depth statistical analysis based on the FY 2009 Donor Report, The "Regular Contributor" and Other Myths. The tuition announcement, horrible as it is, is a distraction from the total abandonment of the merit scholarships, as described in Drinking the Kool-Aid and Coffee, Donut, and a Dorm.

In response to more false narratives posted on the Cooper Union website, The Alumni Pioneer has created two YouTube videos, Ask Mr. Misinformation and The Politics of Distraction, as well as The Real Narrative. Also, selection of a new Chairman of the Board of Trustees was scheduled for September 2013.

Our Publisher was elected to serve on the Working Group and signed a Confidentiality Agreement that shut him up for a few months (except for monthly reports to the Cooper Union Community published on the CU Alumni website). After the trustees voted to reject the Working Group Plan, our publisher wrote this port-mortem, Exit Through the Gift Shop.

The Attorney General, with a Cross-Petition that includes a cy pres petition and a Consent Decree, ended the toxic environment on campus on September 14, 2015, but the Chair won't be forced to resign until December 2016 and an interim president has attempted his first sales pitch. It is analyzed in Testing Out New Narratives. As to the Attorney General, his Findings of Fact in the Cross-Petition are fact-checked. A year later, progress, slow or delayed, was summarized in this CUAA edition of At Cooper Union. Two years later, after the FEC and Financial Monitor reports were released, based on community feedback and prior to the Board of Trustee vote, this modest proposal to return Cooper to free in five years was posted. After the first "paying" class graduated in 2018, this transcription of commencement speeches facing the "elephant in the room" was posted.

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.