Transformation in the Making
POSTED ON: November 13, 2024
This past summer, The Cooper Union’s leadership team, Board of Trustees, and members of the Free Education Committee (FEC) presented an overwhelmingly positive update on the institution’s financial and strategic progress since adopting the 10-Year Plan to Return to Full-Tuition Scholarships in March 2018. Their report, The Plan at Five Years, details critical efforts made to improve academic programs, introduce new spaces, and foster collaborative student experiences, all while increasing scholarship levels and keeping tuition rates flat.
Behind that positive momentum is a community dedicated to Cooper’s current and future students. To mark this significant milestone, we offer a glimpse behind the scenes with community members who are contributing to Cooper’s transformation and, in many cases, doing so in unexpected ways. We asked them to share their perspectives and tell us about their work. These are just a few of the many people who are pushing Cooper forward.
Carol (Robinson) Wolf), a 1984 graduate of the School of Art, served on the Board as Alumni Trustee for the past four years and as chair of the Free Education Committee. Wolf is an accomplished graphic designer, an active member of the Cooper Union Alumni Association, and a leading voice in efforts to return Cooper to a full-tuition scholarship model.
Q/ What do you see as the role of the alumni community in helping to shape the future of The Cooper Union? How have your attitudes toward Cooper changed in the years since the adoption of the 10-Year Plan?
A/ Peter Cooper already answered this question more eloquently than I ever could. He envisioned a day when graduates would “rally round this institution, and if the plans I have formed can be executed in no other way they will see they are carried out.” We did that when untold numbers of alumni joined with students, faculty, and the rest of the Cooper community to get our beloved institution back on a path to full-tuition scholarships. Today, “rally(ing) round this institution” means staying engaged with the school—following school news, staying connected with classmates, and attending on-campus or online events, exhibitions, and programs. And it means continued financial support by everyone in the alumni community—standing with the Cooper students of today and tomorrow by ensuring the successful culmination of our 10-Year Plan.
By the time I joined the Board as an elected Alumni Trustee in 2020, the 10-Year Plan had been in full swing for two years. I was honestly surprised and inspired by how much had been accomplished. I was, of course, keenly aware of the daunting financial challenges the school faced. I had also harbored real concerns about whether the Board was fully behind returning to full-tuition scholarships. What I found instead was rigorous fiscal discipline and a conscientious approach that considered how every decision might impact the Plan. This ardent commitment to the Plan has put us on a more stable, solid foundation—and because it took into account unexpected events and the potential for market downturns, it kept us on track even through the pandemic. We remain on track today, and I have great confidence in The Cooper Union’s future.
Lisa Norberg is the director of The Cooper Union Library. She joined Cooper in 2019 and has overseen a major initiative to revitalize the spaces and resources of the library.
Q/ How has the library responded to the evolving needs of students and faculty?
A/ The role of the library continues to shift toward being a dynamic, technology-enhanced hub. We’re not only preserving and providing access to information but actively supporting students in navigating the complexities of the digital age, fostering critical thinking, and promoting community engagement. For example, we are increasingly focused on providing digital resources while our librarians concentrate on assisting students in developing the skills to critically evaluate information, discern credible sources from misinformation, and use evolving technologies effectively.
With the help of the administration, we have also transformed the library into a more public and collaborative space where students can engage in group work, discussions, and project development; faculty can attend lectures, panels, and book talks; and everyone can view archival exhibitions, help curate a book display, or enjoy a cup of coffee with our colleagues in the Center for Writing and Learning. But students and faculty still draw inspiration from browsing the stacks, discovering a quiet corner to study in, and comparing notes with Dale Perreault on the latest cultural happenings in town. While we continue to be aspirational in how we define The Cooper Union Library, we hope never to lose what makes it special.
Alex Fischer, director of Student Care and Support, and Cassandra Jolicoeur and Elizabeth London, both student care coordinators, are familiar faces to many Cooper students while they adjust to college life and navigate academic and personal challenges.
Q/ What does holistic support for students look like at Cooper today?
A/ Our team is committed to understanding the complex factors affecting wellness today and to expanding our services to meet our students’ varying needs. We’ve grown our counseling network by adding mental health professionals with diverse backgrounds and specializations. This ensures students can access free, short-term therapy with providers they connect with. All students have free access to our 24/7 telehealth platform offering crisis counseling, short-term therapy, and medical visits.
We also provide wellness and mental health programs tailored to fit our students’ busy schedules. This year, we’ve offered a weekly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) student talk space, free subscriptions to the Calm App, continued access to the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine for music therapy, as well as monthly visits from therapy dogs and chair massages during midterms and finals. Most of all, we want Cooper students to know they are not alone in their struggles and to ensure they are aware of the resources available throughout the year.
Wonderment is a regular consequence of working in The Cooper Union Archives & Special Collections. So report Dale Perreault and Mary Mann, senior library technician and archives librarian, respectively, whose work puts them in direct contact with artifacts from the school’s history.
Q/ What do the archives tell us about the meaning and relevance of Cooper’s history for our present moment?
A/ Mary Mann: Every day in the archives we can and do learn a lot. We can trace the interests of an era by looking through the school’s publications and recordings: records of speakers in the Great Hall lecturing on ending slavery and increasing the rights of women; events and documents on the need for improved urban architecture and city planning; a 1969 edition of At Cooper fully dedicated to the war in Vietnam. And this is still a revolutionary institution where students care so deeply about Peter Cooper’s vision for free education and how that vision contributes to a unique worldview. I see that regularly in an HSS class I co-teach with Peter Buckley, The Archives and the City.
We recently came across records showing that a couple staff members in the ’90s didn’t have funds for a satellite dish, so they designed and built one from scratch! To me, that’s such a Cooper story: the mission of being free means that we’re lean, which could lead to aggravation, but over and over what we see instead is innovation. The archives make that spirit so clear.
A/ Dale Perreault: It’s true the constraints add to the innovation. The expansiveness of our holdings always surprises me. We regularly post finds from the archives that keep our alumni connected, they see things they didn’t see here as students, and they’re astonished by the imagery. We’re inspired by this incredibly noble attempt to make education available to all—it’s very moving. And every day we see students doing research about the school and being highly motivated to continue the idealism of Peter Cooper. The archives show that Cooper’s mission has always been a place where the impossible is imagined. It’s an open story.
Julio Santillana, chief engineer of the Buildings and Grounds department, has been at The Cooper Union since 2008. He’s led various initiatives to bring the school’s physical plant in line with the recommendations of the Plan after years of deferred maintenance.
Q/ How have Cooper’s facilities been updated and improved in recent years?
A/ These past five years have been an exciting period, preserving a significant part of Cooper’s past. In this time, we have restored the Foundation Building’s façade and also reorganized spaces to fit the college’s current needs. Since the Foundation Building is a New York City landmark, it needed quite a few complicated masonry repairs. After a study of the façade was made three years ago, we began working with firms that considered everything from the brownstone needed to the exact paint colors. The results not only look great but also ensure that the building is safe and in excellent shape.
There have also been a few interior changes and renovations done in the library. For example: making the space more user- friendly by installing whiteboards, electrical outlets, lighting, accessible bathrooms, and quiet spaces. We built the Center for Writing and Learning, connecting it to the library so students and tutors have easier access to research materials. We also helped create two new centers—the AACE Lab, which is the school’s maker lab, and a space named the Benjamin Menschel Civic Projects Lab for collaborations with the community.
Lastly, I would like to conclude with an inspiring quote from Peter Cooper: “Neither piety, virtue, nor liberty can long flourish in a community where the education of youth is neglected.” We are all very proud of the extensive improvements that have been made. Ultimately, our aim at The Cooper Union is to preserve a safe, functional, and comfortable environment for all students so they may achieve the success that Peter Cooper envisioned.
Through her work in the Office of Communications, Kim Newman, media relations manager, is central to bringing relevant, vibrant, and free public programs to the Great Hall. She also creates social media content to amplify those programs and lift up stories of students, faculty, and alumni, and liaises with journalists to do the same.
Q/ What do you see as the connection between the Great Hall and the institution as a whole?
A/ Running in tandem with the Plan to Return to Full-Tuition Scholarships has been the work of reestablishing the Great Hall as a New York City destination for civic dialogue. In the time that I’ve been involved with that effort, starting in 2015, the world has changed so much. I see my work as knitting together Cooper’s academic mission to its civic one. I love that performances and programs here can address some of those changes and speak to important social issues and to the disciplines Cooper students are exploring.
Fia Backström, assistant professor in the School of Art, is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who joined Cooper’s faculty in 2019. During the fall 2022 semester, she taught a course titled Institutional Therapy in which students explored collective approaches to creating changes—both tangible and intangible—from within the institutional context of The Cooper Union.
Q/ Tell us about institutional therapy. What do you see as the value of this practice for Cooper and its students?
A/ Institutional critique has a very important legacy at The Cooper Union, from Hans Haacke to Walid Raad. For me, the proposal of institutional therapy is in relationship to that legacy and to a French tradition associated with figures like François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, and Félix Guattari. In the class, we had visits from guest speakers who worked directly with Guattari to try to make that legacy come alive. We started from their basic notion of a de-hierarchized idea of healing, in which there is no specialist therapist. We were all each other’s therapists, focusing on the group dynamics and relations between groups. This extended to the larger institution of Cooper as well, to security guards, janitors, people who work in financial aid, and so forth—anyone from the upper administration to part-time staff.
Instead of disciplining people to become good citizens, institutional therapy emphasizes desire. During the first class, everyone expressed their desires for their work, and we began to work. What surprised me was the extent to which students felt they didn’t have a say in the institution. They expressed an incapacity or inability to make change and be heard. So the class tried to change their position from being a victim of the institution to understanding that they have agency, even to create their own institutions. To facilitate that work, the students wanted to adopt a method called “the grid,” developed by Guattari and Jean Oury, where all of us rotated different roles each week. That was also surprising: how well it worked, the joy it created, and how much care and responsibility the students took to create and follow the format.
Institutional therapy is a long-term, inclusive model, and I think all of us who went through this class were changed by it. We started to relate to each other and this institution differently. Students worked with people from various parts of the college. I believe this process can make us more present with each other, and not merely feeling like separate cells with different functions. It could bring awareness and empowerment into the many parts of our institution.
The team behind the Architecture Archive—made up of Chris Dierks, collections manager and grants liaison; Caitlin Biggers, project manager; and Steven Hillyer, director—has been creating a digitized database of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture’s exhibitions. This new Exhibitions Collection gives researchers access to 45 cubic feet of analog records dating from 1965 and born-digital records dating from 1997.
Q/ Can you tell us about the process of putting the collection together?
A/ We undertook this project to provide broad public access to the school of architecture’s extensive and influential exhibi-tions program. We started working on it in the fall of 2020, about a year after we launched a digital platform for the Archive’s Student Work Collection, which documents student projects dating back to the 1930s. Exhibitions have been central to the school’s pedagogy for decades, and they incorporate student work, particularly through End of Year Shows.
So instead of creating a new, separate digital platform for exhibitions, we’re merging it with the student work database in a way that foregrounds their relationships—i.e., they can be searched separately, but they also share data and cross links. This has also allowed us to build on our previous work and experience with CollectiveAccess—the cataloging and publishing software we’re using—which makes the project more efficient and cost-effective. Our work has been funded primarily by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services; we also received cost- share support from the New York State Council on the Arts, The Cooper Union, and private donors.
Exhibitions Collection: 2000–2021 is the final of three Third Floor Hallway Gallery exhibitions drawn from the collection. The last installment will present the collection’s relatively recent material—including the work of Lebbeus Woods, Louis I. Kahn, John Hejduk, Margaret Morton, and Costantino Nivola. The exhibition will be held in the spring of 2025 together with a public launch for the collection’s digital platform.
Jennifer Weiser, associate professor of chemical engineering, along with Sam Keene, professor of electrical engineering and the John and Mary Manuck Distinguished Professor of Design, and Mili Shah, chair and professor of mathematics, have forged collaborative research alliances that provide hands-on experiences for Cooper students. These partnerships include esteemed institutions such as the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Q/ You and your colleagues have created exchanges with leading medical and research facilities while also encouraging greater communication among the schools and departments at Cooper. What’s resulted from these initiatives?
A/ First, students get to work on fascinating projects. A few recent projects have included developing injectable biomaterials for various medical applications, using machine learning for better cancer treatment outcomes, and creating computer vision algorithms to track the body. While many of these projects involve interdisciplinary teams of engineers, some also include students from different academic disciplines. For instance, a team of engineers and art students worked to create an assist device for an individual who lost use of their arm. Subsequently, some members of this team became intrigued by natural biomaterial formulations. They explored the potential use of these materials as coatings to protect the assistive device, and other team members experimented with incorporating them into an art piece. That project was fun because they used natural red cabbage, which is pH sensitive, to create an umbrella that changes color with weather conditions and eventually degrades over time. Students are learning a funda-mental lesson from these opportunities: to recognize the areas where their knowledge is lacking and acquiring the ability to collaborate with individuals from diverse academic backgrounds who can complement those gaps. To address a complex medical problem, you need to seek out help from people with skills different from your own. Students realize that they need to find common ground and a common language to really tackle intricate medical problems.
Ninad Pandit, who first arrived at Cooper in 2018 as a postdoctoral fellow, joined the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) last fall as assistant professor of history. He is an architect, urban planner, and a historian of modern South Asia who recently co-taught a course titled Public Art as Alimentary Infrastructure with Nora Akawi from the school of architecture and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa from the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Q/ How has your thinking about humanities education evolved during your time at Cooper?
A/ I was always convinced about the need for HSS to be central to a Cooper education, but more recently, I’ve better understood the ways in which this can be realized and sustained. Student demands and faculty interests have motivated all of us to seriously consider ways in which HSS and the three schools can work together, sometimes quite literally. For instance, some of us in HSS are teaching with colleagues in other schools and bringing this experience back to HSS while also developing new collegial relationships. The increasing popularity of the HSS minors reflects the potential of our joint efforts. I’m very excited about the revision of the HSS core that we’re working on because I think this gives us a new opportunity to rethink the central questions that guide our efforts and find new areas of collaboration.
Avra Spector runs The Cooper Union’s Retraining Program for Immigrant Engineers (RPIE), a free professional development opportunity that supports immigrant, refugee, and asylee engineers looking to practice their profession in the United States. In 2023, New York State invested $250,000 in RPIE to support and expand its impact.
Q/ How does RPIE reflect the broader mission of The Cooper Union?
A/ Peter Cooper’s original vision was to create opportunity for people to pursue their interests at the highest level. RPIE participants are immigrant, refugee, and asylum seeker engineers with international degrees who often encounter barriers to applying their STEM expertise in the US workforce. As a free professional development opportunity, our curriculum supports people as they activate their experience and build the skills needed to participate in New York’s competitive STEM professions. These participants, over 400 a year, embody Cooper’s commitment to equitable opportunity, community, and civic engagement: participants gain proficiency in new technical skills and support each other through peer mentoring and collaborative learning structures. They take these experiences into their new professional roles and continue to contribute to the vitality of the city.
Aftab Hussain ME’97 was elected to The Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees in 2019 and currently serves as vice chair as well as chair of the Finance Committee, helping to steward the institution in meeting the financial targets of the 10-year Plan. He is a managing director and senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group.
Q/ How has the Board worked to balance fiscal discipline with strategic investments in the institution over these past five years?
A/ Balance is the right word. While one of the goals of the strategic plan is to provide full-tuition scholarships, we are equally committed to providing an excellent education. This requires investment in our facilities and academic programs as well as building our endowment. When we first embarked on the Plan, we needed to make trade- offs that included prioritizing funding of the endowment and delaying needed capital investments. In recent years, we have looked to “catch up” on deferred maintenance to upgrade our facilities. We have also kept a close eye on the reinvestment needed to maintain our educational standards and have worked within our budget and with donors to support all three needs.
Cooper succeeds on the support of its community. Going forward, we will continue to need that support. In my opinion, our biggest challenge is ensuring that the strong contributions from our community of donors continue. As a graduate, I owe my success to my time at Cooper. Like many of us, I forgot that for a time. I am glad to give back to ensure others get the same opportunity I was lucky to receive.
RPIE is made possible through generous donations from the Robin Hood Foundation, Con Edison, and Thomas ’77 and Diane Driscoll.
