For as long we continue to receive them, Free Cooper Union will be publishing letters from applicants, accepted students, and families who have said “No” to Cooper Union as a direct result of the board’s decision to destroy the college’s mission of providing free education to all admitted students. If you’ve got a story to share, email us at: cooperuniosos@gmail.com
Today’s letter comes from a student accepted to the School of Engineering:
M.E.S. applied to Cooper seeking a multi-disciplinary curriculum, meritocratic environment, and close-knit community that only a small tuition-free school could provide. Instead, M.E.S. was accepted to a college that has lost its mission and its way — a Cooper Union where both the founding ideal and the culture of the school have been sacrificed for tuition and expansion.
Without free education, the culture of Cooper Union will crumble.
————— Forwarded message —————
From: MES
Date: Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 7:03 PM
Subject: Re: Why I said no
To: CooperUnion SOSI was admitted to the chemical engineering program at CU. I value the humanities and social sciences a lot despite being an engineer. For me, CU seemed like a university where engineers were only engineers. To quote the student who showed me around last year for the admitted students reception, “I am an engineer. I don’t want to write a paper or do anything else.” I dislike that kind of attitude in engineering programs. I love both engineering and humanities/social sciences, and I didn’t want to have to wait until grad school to study both, and I didn’t want to go to a university whose programs were so close minded.
The other thing for me that I didn’t like was the setting. CU didn’t feel like a campus. It just has a bunch of buildings that don’t really look like they go together whatsoever. I didn’t see a place where students could just be students and hang out. I didn’t feel like there was something defining about the campus or the students or the faculty. There wasn’t something that put them all together besides the name Cooper Union. These factors kind of bring me to what really got me about CU: It felt like you could only be engaged so much. When I tried to imagine myself going to CU, I saw myself just going to “campus” for classes. There wasn’t anything more I could do. Sure, I could join a sports team (which was REALLY emphasized at the admitted students day), but what if I didn’t really enjoy any of the sports? I felt like CU boiled the college experience down to an all-freshman dorm, going to classes for your major, and joining a sports team, and that’s not what I wanted in my college experience. I want to be more than an engineer. I want to do things outside of my field of study, and I felt like I would have to build that experience myself without the help from the university. I felt like CU said that I should come because CU is CU, because their name is so well known in engineering. I am not swayed by big names, and I wasn’t satisfied with what I found as I tried to look deeper into the CU experience.
When I was admitted last April, I made myself aware of the problems that were happening in regards to the finances of the university. I found the Free Cooper Union FB page, and I watched some videos online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_K9wkQAick). I really didn’t want to go in to a university where the students and administration were in such tension with each other. I understand now that there will always be tension between a university and its students, but I feel like the tension at CU was especially bad because of the discord between the students, administration, and the very ideology that CU was founded on. I think one of the articles y’all have posted put it best: it’s not just the finances of a full-tuition scholarship but the idea behind a full-tuition scholarship, how that changes how students act toward each other and how the whole of a university is set up. I really loved that about CU, how everyone was almost made equal by this scholarship, but I knew that if I joined CU the classes that followed me wouldn’t be equal. It is such an essential part of the CU experience, and to have that equality taken away made me question whether or not I wanted the CU experience altogether.
With learning about this crisis, it also made me realize that one of the aspects of CU that is lauded above all else, its small community in a big city, was being taken away. Not only would the students not be equal, but the CU community, including the students, faculty, and staff, went from “we” to “us vs. them.” That made me really dislike CU. All universities have their own problems, but none of the universities I applied to nor the university I am now attending had such a combative attitude in between the university administration and its own students. I am from a very small town, and I was already very apprehensive about the thought of going to a university in the middle of NYC, and when I imagined myself going to CU I easily saw myself getting lost mentally in the city, and becoming disenchanted with my own university. I saw myself losing the small community I was supposed to be in.
Please keep me posted on anything that happens with this move, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to voice the reasons why I declined my acceptance. I was put on a bunch of email lists for current CU students and I had to repeatedly say that I wasn’t going, and no one inquired further why I declined my acceptance.
M.E.S.