denzilposada:

Occupation of President’s Office Ends | Cooper Union

"For all you can hold in your cold dead hand is what you have given away." —Joaquin Miller, on the occasion of Peter Cooper’s death, 1883

cuworkinggroup:

Your alumni representatives to the Gural Borkowsky Working Group are Victoria Sobel (A 2013), Robert Tan (Ar ‘81) and Barry Drogin (EE ‘83). For a brief introduction, and for short videos with the representatives visit our endorsement page here.

We started this blog to make an easy way for…

Faces of the administration. From our upcoming Free Cooper Union Disorientation Reader: an introduction to Cooper politics for incoming students.

To the Cooper Union Board of Trustees: We ask you to consider these concerns, and to step in and ensure that the Working Group can begin its work promptly and without uncertainty or prejudice

instagram:

Claes Oldenburg’s Gigantic Everyday Objects

For more photos and videos from Claes Oldenburg’s gigantic sculptures, check out the #claesoldenburg hashtag.

American pop artist Claes Oldenburg

Working closely with his collaborator and wife, Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg brought a playful element to an art world that largely took itself very seriously.

His most notable works take shape as larger-than-life everyday objects, such as spoons, trowels, safety pins and even rubber stamps.

Free Cooper Union is pleased to present the repentance of Jamshed Bharucha.

“Cooper Confessional” depicts Cooper Union’s overpaid and visionless President, Jamshed Bharucha, as he confesses his transgression from a historically merit-based full scholarship model, to an expansionist tuition agenda. Hearing Bharucha’s lament is Peter Cooper, who founded the Cooper Union in 1859 and established the mission of the institution as necessarily providing free education to all admitted students while educating against the evils of debt.

This collaborative work is flanked by an image of the infamous Jamshed the Giant, who insists that must students PAY for years of financial mismanagement and administrative bloat at the Cooper Union, along with the title of the Free Cooper Union Player’s latest drama, Free Cooper: The Musical, which is the sequel to the group’s debut hit The Politics of Destruction.

As Banksy notes, “there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place,” and with that in mind, and with many more plans for direct action, we continue to fight against tuition at Cooper Union and the rising tide of student debt.

nakia:

Sweet #Banksy “The Musical” tag in Cooper Square. #nakianyc #theoutlawroadshow (at The Cooper Union)

Nakia, Top 8 member of Team CeeLo on The Voice, with our Free Cooper/Banksy tag.

Free Cooper Union invites you to participate in a special free education Halloween action, #LevitateCooperUnion: Exorcise Tuition.

Inspired by the anti-Vietnam War action led by Abbie Hoffman, “Levitate the Pentagon,” Free Cooper Union will begin a durational series of cleansing and purification rites to rid the college of tuition and raise it up in the spirit of the landmarked mission of “Free Education to All.” Amidst a climate of justifiable distrust in the administration and board of trustees, the Cooper Union community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni continue to organize against and refute the decision to charge tuition to incoming students beginning Fall 2014.

We invite you to join in the action:

5pm on October 31st, 2013
Cooper Union
Foundation Building (outside)
7 East 7th Street

In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies in the name of free education, in the name of Peter Cooper, in the name of all those fired because they do not comply, in the name of those students around the world indebted because of bad capitalism, in the name of the flowing living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirits to raise the Foundation Building from its destiny and preserve it.

DROP-KICK TUITION. Free Cooper Union Bootcamp every Tuesday and Thursday outside the Foundation Building. Text @FreeCooperUnion to 23559 for upcoming trainings.

#LevitateCooperUnion, Halloween 2013

It was 1967, and sentiment against the Vietnam War was in the air nationwide. The counterculture was flourishing on the heels of the Summer of Love. When activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman got involved, a plan was hatched to exorcise and levitate the Pentagon.

No one claims that the Pentagon actually moved. Maybe there was a mistake in the incantation. But this fabulous spectacle, an absurdist response to the absurdist reality of war in Vietnam, served as a predecessor to many creative actions.

It’s 2013 and students have been saddled with over a trillion dollars in debt, adjuncts make less than welfare, and college expansionism is on the rise — all at the expense of actual education. On April 23rd, 2013, The Cooper Union Board of Trustees and President Jamshed Bharucha voted to charge tuition — for the first time in over 150 years — to the incoming class of 2014. A plan was hatched to exorcise and levitate the Cooper Union.

For immediate release: Cooper Board suspends student trustee election

On Monday November 11th, 2013, Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees announced that they are suspending the election of a student representative to the Board. Despite widespread sentiment that the nomination criteria outlined by the Board had already reneged on the Board’s July negotiation with students occupying the President’s Office, the Joint Student Council (JSC) agreed in good faith to the board’s terms and eligibility requirements for the representative. The board is now seeking to start the process over, delaying the seating of a representative until the March 2014 Board meeting. If a representative is not seated by December 2013, as was originally scheduled, students will not have input on the the plans to be presented by the Working Group generating tuition alternatives; the current candidates will have too few semesters remaining to be eligible, and Board-community relations will be further strained.

Free Cooper Union has been advocating for board reform — including public minutes, voting student and faculty members, and mechanisms for the removal of trustees — since December 2012, when a set of demands were issued in conjunction with a week-long lock-in of the college’s clocktower. At the June 2013 Board meeting, trustees approved a motion affirming the Board’s intention to have student representation. Despite precedent at other colleges for one year terms, election of multiple students, and voting rights, Cooper’s Board prescribed a single, non-voting, two-year term for the student representative to the Board, and has repeatedly delayed the seating.

Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees in concert with Jamshed Bharucha’s administration have violated three major points of the negotiation made between the board and students occupying Bharucha’s office. Students will be at the December Board meeting, one way or another.

Related coverage:
11/11/13:
Cooper Union Trustees Renege on Promise to Seat Student Trustee
by Angus Johnston, StudentActivism.net

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Free Cooper Union presents #TwoWeeksOfLeaks

Free Cooper Union has received a collection of anonymously leaked confidential documents pertaining to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and the Administration of Jamshed Bharucha. For the next two weeks we will be releasing one document per day to our press contacts. Bharucha and the college’s trustees have claimed to run a transparent and accountable administration, yet the community has unilaterally been barred from participation in decision-making and access to financial and organizational information. On November 11th, the Board prematurely cancelled the election of a student representative because the process adopted by students was too democratic. Transparency without accountability means nothing, and Cooper’s Board has demonstrated that they are accountable to no one.

In addition to documents queued for release in the next two weeks, Free Cooper Union is calling for additional leaks pertaining to the mismanagement perpetrated by Cooper Union’s past and present Board and Administration. Information may be emailed to cooperunionsos@gmail.com or sent to our voicemail at 917-746-5634.

In celebration of open flows of information, on November 24th from 6 to 9pm, students will be performing a second reading of the Board transcript leaked this summer by the Village Voice at e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York.

Today’s leak is titled, “The Dream Scenario, Trustee Reinvention Committee, February 12, 2013.” Key elements of the Board’s “Dream” include:

• A mention of what the Board has termed a “50% tuition scholarship,” several months before the announcement of $19,500 tuition in April of 2013.
• A plan to “Phase out the current fine arts program” and “Launch a new School of Design.”
• Plans to launch a Computer Science major, precipitating the hire of the new Dean of the School of Engineering, computer scientist Teresa Dahlberg in July of 2013.
• A desire to be an industry leader in MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses).

slavin:

From a series of leaked Cooper Union documents, here are (unverified) instructions to the administrative assistants for George Campbell, former President of Cooper Union. (If you’re just joining us, Cooper Union provided tuition-free education for over 150 years, which ended in 2013.)

• “Hotels: Dr. Campbell likes to stay at nice hotels when on College business: Ritz Carleton is his favorite, especially while in LA (he always stays at the Ritz Marina Del Rey when in the LA area — make sure to book the executive level suite, ocean view room).”

• “Cars: Dr. Campbell prefers to drive a luxury SUV during the winter and a luxury Cadillac in the summer/spring or in warm climates. If a luxury car isn’t available, order a convertible. He likes to have a car on almost all of his trips as he prefers to drive to different venues.”

All of which would be fine with me, in principle, if old George had been bringing in the correlating cash for the endowment. 

But instead, he presided over the slide into the extinction of Cooper Union’s principles and finances (while stating otherwise in the press, and capturing $668K in compensation in 2009, including a cash bonus of $175K, all of it approved by the Board of Trustees.)

And after gutting Cooper Union from the suites of the Ritz Marina Del Ray, where do you go from there? To the inexplicable 20% bonuses of Con Edison, of course. 

I’ll be the Alumni Trustee at Cooper Union shortly. One of the challenges before me will be to explain to anyone why they should help partner with, fund, or endow the culture of luxury SUVs and Ritz hotels, at the very same time it was on its way to ending 150 years of free tuition.

It’s not a rhetorical question: if you have an idea on what would inspire trust for such an institution, feel free to drop me a line.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

@FreeCooperUnion #TwoWeeksOfLeaks, Day 3

Today’s document is an Org Chart of Cooper Union’s administration. Dated earlier this year, these charts already fail to depict all the administrative restructuring that has happened since the Fall semester began. Since the announcement of tuition in April — and despite the demand for an administrative hiring freeze — new administrators and consultants are being hired continually with no community input. Promotions, too, are being fast-tracked to reward complicit and obedient admins. These new hires and promotions comprise a group of administrators with no stake in The Cooper Union except their own salaries; their positions exist to reinforce an expansionist tuition-based model.

Haunting the chart are the ghosts of Vice President of Finance and Administration T.C. Westcott and Dean of Students Linda Lemiesz, who Bharucha abruptly fired two weeks before the start of the semester. Westcott and Lemiesz served as administrative liaisons during the the Lock-In and Occupation and were known to be advocates for students’ rights. Pending their severances, both have been placed under strict non-disclosure agreements about the terms of their departures. When directly asked in public forums about the firings, Bharucha has declined to comment.

In the aftermath of these firings, Bharucha has moved from having two Vice Presidents to FIVE.

• The VP of Finance and Administration role is being filled (at great cost) by Huron Consulting, until Bharucha can find an accountant corrupt enough to corroborate the Board’s wishful thinking on tuition. Rumor has it that this position will be split from one Vice Presidency into two separate ones: VP of Finance and VP of Operations.

• VP of Student Affairs (well, for now they are calling it “Interim Leadership” though it’s listed, curiously, as second-in-command) is being filled by Steve Baker, who was first hired in 1966 as…a physical education teacher. Baker has already promoted former Director of Residence Life Chris Chamberlain to Dean of Student Affairs.

• VP of Development, Derek Wittner, was hired in 2010. And everyone knows how great development is going.

• VP of Communications, Justin Harmon, was hired just last week to help market the new Cooper Union, and replace the Public Affairs department gutted by Bharucha in the wake of untamed student activism.

In addition to the top ranks, newly appointed Dean of the School of Engineering Teresa Dahlberg — the self-proclaimed “best thing to happen to the School of Engineering in ten years — has already accepted the additional role of “Chief Academic Officer” of The Cooper Union. It’s not clear what this entails besides more agency over the institution as a whole. This promotion comes just days after Dahlberg stormed out of a student Q&A session (which she herself had called for!) because she was being asked too many questions about tuition.

Former Interim Dean of Engineering Alan Wolf has fallen back into his role as a much-maligned professor in the School of Engineering, but received a different kind of promotion: from Campus Safety Coordinator to Director of Health and Safety. As his first initiative, he is slated to announce a newly hired Director of Public Safety, whose job requirements include, “Ensuring that security officers are inspected (uniforms, grooming, firearms, batons and other equipment) on a daily basis.” With the job listing already disappeared from the website (Google cache), we can only assume that these armed guards are on their way to Cooper.

In admissions there are a slew of new hires who have been promoted almost instantaneously to Assistant Directors of Blahblahblah in order to place them outside of Cooper’s three employee unions. What do these administrators do? Everything from secret recruiting trips to China (not a joke), to cutesy posts on the new @Cooper_Admiss Instagram and Twitter accounts, to slowly eroding the faculty’s central role in the admissions process. All with a smile!

It doesn’t take an MBA to see that Cooper’s convoluted, bureaucratic, and ever-expanding administrative structure is a major part of what’s driving the college into the ground. What do you do when there’s an Assistant Director delegated to handle any question or problem you may have, but not a single one of them cares enough — or has the agency — to do anything except what they’re told? In the spirit of throwing money at problems, these positions serve as a way for the board to proclaim that the community has access to decision-makers, when really they’re all expensive pawns.

Alumni remind us of the days when the college used to be run by a handful of people working out of one room. How did we get to floors and floors of cubicles at a nearby office block? Free Cooper Union seeks to stop the malignant growth of administrative bloat and to restructure The Cooper Union into an organization that is run cooperatively by its true stakeholders: the students, faculty, staff, and alumni.  

[Full Org Chart document available on Free Cooper Union’s Facebook]

Free Cooper Union presents #TwoWeeksOfLeaks

Free Cooper Union has received a collection of anonymously leaked confidential documents pertaining to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and the Administration of Jamshed Bharucha. For the next two weeks we will be releasing one document per day to our press contacts. Bharucha and the college’s trustees have claimed to run a transparent and accountable administration, yet the community has unilaterally been barred from participation in decision-making and access to financial and organizational information. On November 11th, the Board prematurely cancelled the election of a student representative because the process adopted by students was too democratic. Transparency without accountability means nothing, and Cooper’s Board has demonstrated that they are accountable to no one.

In addition to documents queued for release in the next two weeks, Free Cooper Union is calling for additional leaks pertaining to the mismanagement perpetrated by Cooper Union’s past and present Board and Administration. Information may be emailed to cooperunionsos@gmail.com or sent to our voicemail at 917-746-5634.

In celebration of open flows of information, on November 24th from 6 to 9pm, students will be performing a second reading of the Board transcript leaked this summer by the Village Voice at e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

@FreeCooperUnion #TwoWeeksOfLeaks, Day 4: Reinvention Media Strategy

Today’s document is titled, “MEDIA STRATEGY 11/17/2011 Confidential Draft 2 for Review.”

In the days leading up to October 31st, 2011 — when Jamshed Bharucha had scheduled an evening forum to break news of Cooper’s then-secret financial problems to the student body — he sat down with New York Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña to grant him an exclusive on the “Reinvention” plan he had been working on (also in secret) since summer. The Times story, “Cooper Union May Charge Tuition to Undergraduates,” was published online a good six hours before Bharucha had said anything publicly to the actual Cooper community.

The article set the stage for tuition, complete with lies about the history of tuition at Cooper Union, a vague roadmap for Bharucha’s plan to “Reinvent” the institution, and public statements that by now read as clear falsehoods: “‘Altering our scholarship policy will be only as a last resort…I will not be forcing solutions on the organization,’ Bharucha said, adding that he wanted employees, students and alumni involved in finding answers.”

At the time, many in the Cooper community turned a blind eye to the implications of the Times exclusive, lauding Bharucha for confronting Cooper’s challenges and creating what sounded like a participatory process. What the community couldn’t confirm until today was that every word Bharucha speaks — including a phrase as simple as “confronting Cooper’s challenges” — is formulated, vetted, and planned for dissemination by Lisa Linden and Lloyd Kaplan of public relations consultant Linden Alschuler & Kaplan, Inc. (LA&K) whose services advising the Board and Bharucha have been retained at a cost to the college of $10,000 per month. This is in addition to a separate, longstanding $7,500/mo contract with LA&K for general media relations services to Cooper Union. Not to mention the services of media strategy consultant Diana Pearson, hired to coach Bharucha at a rate of $250/hr in a contract capped at $150,000.

Free Cooper Union has been fighting for actual transparency in decision-making since December 2012. But what is revealed here is the Board and Administration throwing money at consultants to create a perception of transparency and trust amongst Cooper’s various “ambassadors” and groups of stakeholders. Not only has the strategy flopped, but it has flopped expensively. Conservatively speaking, Bharucha’s “real talk” and the Board’s pathetic jabs at publishing financial narratives have come at the very real cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past year. However, what may be even harder to stomach than the cost of the administration’s misinformation, is how the “Reinvention” of Cooper Union all hinges upon a slow, meticulously planned rollout of information so as not to incite a riot. What will they tell us next?

[FULL DOCUMENT available on Free Cooper Union Facebook]

Free Cooper Union presents #TwoWeeksOfLeaks

Free Cooper Union has received a collection of anonymously leaked confidential documents pertaining to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and the Administration of Jamshed Bharucha. For the next two weeks we will be releasing one document per day to our press contacts. Bharucha and the college’s trustees have claimed to run a transparent and accountable administration, yet the community has unilaterally been barred from participation in decision-making and access to financial and organizational information. On November 11th, the Board prematurely cancelled the election of a student representative because the process adopted by students was too democratic. Transparency without accountability means nothing, and Cooper’s Board has demonstrated that they are accountable to no one.

In addition to documents queued for release in the next two weeks, Free Cooper Union is calling for additional leaks pertaining to the mismanagement perpetrated by Cooper Union’s past and present Board and Administration. Information may be emailed to cooperunionsos@gmail.com or sent to our voicemail at 917-746-5634.

In celebration of open flows of information, on November 24th from 6 to 9pm, students will be performing a second reading of the Board transcript leaked this summer by the Village Voice at e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

@FreeCooperUnion #TwoWeeksOfLeaks, Day 5: Accountability?!

Today’s document is a letter from Phillips Lytle LLP, Attorneys at Law, to former Vice President of Finance and Administration T.C. Westcott. The upper right-hand corner of the letter is penned with the name “JAMSHED” in blue ink, indicating that the document may in fact be Bharucha’s personal copy. Dated January 18th, 2012, a full year prior to the Board’s April 2013 tuition announcement, Westcott’s inquiry affirms the board and administration’s ignorance regarding who the college is accountable to.

Accompanying the letter, the law firm has attached two publicly available PDFs from the New York State Attorney General entitled “Right from the Start: Responsibilities of Directors of Not-for-Profit Corporations” and “Internal Controls and Financial Accountability for Not-for-Profit Boards.”

The community has been demanding to know to whom the Board and administration are accountable since at least the Fall of 2011, when Jamshed went straight to the New York Times to announce the the beginning of his plan to institute tuition. The information from this document has never been proactively communicated. Prior attempts to seek definitive answers as to whom the Board is responsible have been met with derision. The Board has even publicly claimed that the community has no recourse against their decisions.

It’s not just Free Cooper that’s skeptical of Cooper’s management. The board has been skewered by Reuters’ Felix Salmon in a series of articles about Why Cooper Union Can’t Be Trusted, and New York Times finance reporter James Stewarthas interviewed investment advisors who admit that Cooper’s Board strikes them as irresponsible.

[Full document on Free Cooper Facebook]

Free Cooper Union presents #TwoWeeksOfLeaks

Free Cooper Union has received a collection of anonymously leaked confidential documents pertaining to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and the Administration of Jamshed Bharucha. For the next two weeks we will be releasing one document per day to our press contacts. Bharucha and the college’s trustees have claimed to run a transparent and accountable administration, yet the community has unilaterally been barred from participation in decision-making and access to financial and organizational information. On November 11th, the Board prematurely cancelled the election of a student representative because the process adopted by students was too democratic. Transparency without accountability means nothing, and Cooper’s Board has demonstrated that they are accountable to no one.

In addition to documents queued for release in the next two weeks, Free Cooper Union is calling for additional leaks pertaining to the mismanagement perpetrated by Cooper Union’s past and present Board and Administration. Information may be emailed to cooperunionsos@gmail.com or sent to our voicemail at 917-746-5634.

In celebration of open flows of information, on November 24th from 6 to 9pm, students will be performing a second reading of the Board transcript leaked this summer by the Village Voice at e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

@FreeCooperUnion #TwoWeeksOfLeaks, Day 6: Reinvention: A Ten Year Road Map for Cooper Union

Today’s leaked document was authored by Jamshed Bharucha on October 30th, 2011, entitled “Reinvention: A Ten-Year Road Map for Cooper Union.”

The ‘Road Map’ implicates Cooper’s administrative body as being undeniably committed to the vision of administrative expansionism currently ravaging institutions of higher education across the country. Jamshed Bharucha’s administration has continually deterred and undermined innumerable alternatives presented by students, faculty, and alumni since the Fall of 2011. This ‘Road Map’ predates Bharucha’s announcement of tuition to the Cooper community as well as the New York Times exclusive outlining Cooper’s financial ‘crisis’. Ultimately, ‘The Roadmap’ underscores Bharucha’s profound lack of imagination in considering alternatives to tuition.

“State of the art communications, development, expanded admissions and financial aid staff, enhanced student services, and an infrastructure that should pay off later in grants, contracts and technology transfer. The investments in reinvention should provide immediate pay-off in academic reputation (when coupled with communications), but only medium to long-term pay off in grants, technology transfer and development.”

Many of the enumerated points of reinvention plan have since been initiated, including a multi-million dollar investment in Datatel WebAdvisor (a new registration software), multiple administrative hires (including six brand new recruiters in Admissions and international recruitment trips to China), as well as the appointment of the new Dean of Engineering, Teresa Dahlberg.

The ‘Road Map’ repeatedly compares Cooper Union to Bharucha’s former employers, Tufts and Dartmouth. Bharucha is ultimately betrayed by his inability to envision beyond the narrow scope of his personal experiences at New England’s upper echelon liberal arts colleges. Despite the looming reality of Cooper’s financial situation, the Cooper community has insisted that this is both an opportunity and the perfect time to improve upon the college’s landmarked mission of ‘Free Education to All’. It is abundantly clear that Cooper’s finances are little more than an inconvenience for Bharucha as he continues to force his personal vision upon Cooper despite it’s irrefutable incompatibility.

[Full Reinvention Roadmap available on Free Cooper Union Facebook]

Free Cooper Union presents #TwoWeeksOfLeaks

Free Cooper Union has received a collection of anonymously leaked confidential documents pertaining to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and the Administration of Jamshed Bharucha. For the next two weeks we will be releasing one document per day to our press contacts. Bharucha and the college’s trustees have claimed to run a transparent and accountable administration, yet the community has unilaterally been barred from participation in decision-making and access to financial and organizational information. On November 11th, the Board prematurely cancelled the election of a student representative because the process adopted by students was too democratic. Transparency without accountability means nothing, and Cooper’s Board has demonstrated that they are accountable to no one.

In addition to documents queued for release in the next two weeks, Free Cooper Union is calling for additional leaks pertaining to the mismanagement perpetrated by Cooper Union’s past and present Board and Administration. Information may be emailed to cooperunionsos@gmail.com or sent to our voicemail at 917-746-5634.

In celebration of open flows of information, on November 24th from 6 to 9pm, students will be performing a second reading of the Board transcript leaked this summer by the Village Voice at e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York.

For immediate release:
#TwoWeeksOfLeaks Day 7: Bharucha’s Annotated Disciplinary Guide

Today’s leak is a version of the Cooper Union Student Code of Conduct approved of by the Board of Trustees on March 14th, 2012. It is believed that this copy of the document was annotated by Jamshed Bharucha. While the previous six leaks have been released with additional context, Bharucha’s annotations speak volumes for themself.

Here, the code of conduct is underscored in a frightening manner, literally highlighting disciplinary measures reserved for use by the President. This August, a mere two weeks before the start of the semester Bharucha abruptly fired Dean of Students Linda Lemiesz, who had faithfully served the students of The Cooper Union for twenty-three years. Bharucha then filled Lemiesz’s position with the hasty promotion of Director of Athletics, Steve Baker, who in turn appointed Director of Student Housing, Chris Chamberlain, as Acting Associate Dean. At Bharucha’s behest, Chamberlain has been assigned the task of rewriting the Code of Conduct in such a way that would to eliminate student judiciary, a process by which students are responsible for reviewing breaches of the code of conduct and deliberating the consequences.

Pending the administrative takeover of the historically student run Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center, the City College of New York (CCNY) recently pressed charges against two student organizers. It appears that Cooper’s administration is moving towards taking similarly extreme and oppressive disciplinary and legal action against the college’s own students.

Free Cooper Union stands in solidarity with CCNY students organizing against current and ongoing struggles of CUNY, a college that was also — until recent decades — free to all.

[Full document on Free Cooper Union Facebook.]

Free Cooper Union presents #TwoWeeksOfLeaks

Free Cooper Union has received a collection of anonymously leaked confidential documents pertaining to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and the Administration of Jamshed Bharucha. For the next two weeks we will be releasing one document per day to our press contacts. Bharucha and the college’s trustees have claimed to run a transparent and accountable administration, yet the community has unilaterally been barred from participation in decision-making and access to financial and organizational information. On November 11th, the Board prematurely cancelled the election of a student representative because the process adopted by students was too democratic. Transparency without accountability means nothing, and Cooper’s Board has demonstrated that they are accountable to no one.

In addition to documents queued for release in the next two weeks, Free Cooper Union is calling for additional leaks pertaining to the mismanagement perpetrated by Cooper Union’s past and present Board and Administration. Information may be emailed to cooperunionsos@gmail.com or sent to our voicemail at 917-746-5634.

In celebration of open flows of information, on November 24th from 6 to 9pm, students will be performing a second reading of the Board transcript leaked this summer by the Village Voice at e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York.

Free Cooper Union has received a collection of anonymously leaked confidential documents pertaining to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and the Administration of Jamshed Bharucha. For the past week we have been releasing one document per day on our Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and to our press contacts. We will continue to leak documents for the next seven days.

7 Suspicions, Confirmed.

(To access each leaked document in full and a brief contextualization, click below.)

1. The Board dreams of shutting down the School of Art
2. George Campbell expensed luxury cars, hotels, whiskey, and hand-arranged Niçoise
3. Administrative bloat is growing fast (amidst a “hiring freeze”)
4. Cooper’s Board has spent over $250,000 on media consultants to promote tuition and suppress alternatives
5. The Board didn’t know (or care) who they are accountable to
6. A ten-year “roadmap” shows tuition has been in the works since Bharucha was hired
7. Bharucha is changing the Code of Conduct to expel student organizers