HSS Leadership Update

Dear Students, Faculty & Staff, 

I am writing today with an update on our HSS leadership transition. As I shared in June, Nada Ayad decided to step down from the Acting Dean role and join the full-time faculty. As is required by HSS governance, the HSS Administrative Committee set about the work of making a recommendation to me for the next Acting Dean. 

That process is now complete, and I am pleased to report that Kit Nicholls has accepted the Acting Dean position, which he will officially begin as of Aug. 1, 2026. 

Kit has been Cooper Union’s longtime Director of the Center for Writing and Learning. He joined Cooper as a writing center associate while he was an NYU graduate student in 2006 and, as he says, “immediately fell in love with the Cooper community.” Since then, he’s also taught a wide range of courses, including Irish Modernisms; Climate, Culture, and Society; Neoliberalism; and Keywords. In the last year, he also led the effort to secure $325,000 from the Teagle Foundation to support our faculty’s reimagining of core HSS courses, and that transformational work is underway. 

Kit earned his Ph.D. in English at NYU and holds a B.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In addition to his time in the library and classroom, he is co-author, with HSS Professor William Germano, of Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything (Princeton University Press, 2020). His essays have appeared in venues such as European Romantic Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Psyche. 

I am thrilled that the Committee brought Kit forward and that he was both open to and excited about leading at this critical time. My thanks to the Committee, to Kit, and again to Nada for her dedication to this role and our students over the last seven years and for her service and support through this transition. 

With this important position determined, we will turn our attention this fall to opening a comprehensive search for a permanent Dean with the goal of having that individual in place as of the fall 2027 semester. 

Hoping the remaining weeks of summer are good ones for all of you. It will be time, soon enough, to kick things off together for our 2026/2027 academic year! Steve

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.