Dear Cooper Union,

The start of a new academic year is always a time of great anticipation, especially for those of us finding new beginnings. Since I arrived in July to transition into my new role as Cooper’s inaugural Vice President of Academic Affairs (VPAA), I have been looking forward to meeting those of you who have just arrived as well as those of you returning, with all the promise and potential of our working together this semester.

Indeed, one of the things that initially drew me to The Cooper Union is the enthusiasm for collaboratively shaping a vision of what education should be and doing so in ways that can lead to meaningful impacts on the broader society. My role as VPAA is focused on extending that important work by fostering collaborations across the multiple disciplines and fields of research and teaching found here at Cooper. In particular, I am interested in creating opportunities in which the humanities and social sciences can deepen the engagements between disciplinary practices and urgent social concerns with which we find ourselves as a planetary species confronted.

As a Cooper first-year myself, I am eager to listen and to learn. My door is open, and as the semester gets underway, I do hope that you will stop by and introduce yourselves. I am eager to hear what matters to you as students, faculty, and staff and what your suggestions and concerns may be. Since arriving, I have been consistently impressed with the way in which faculty and students connect their scholarly work to the critical issues of the broader society. This was reaffirmed for me after speaking with students at the Welcome Back Picnic this past Saturday. The deep commitment of students to relate their education to the pressing social issues of the moment was tremendously inspirational.

Such a perspective has indeed been the core of my research and public-facing humanities work over the past two and a half decades. Trained as a U.S. historian and as a Black Studies scholar, my academic work has focused on politics in the long 19th-century as well as Black intellectual and cultural history from the founding of the Americas to the present. Central to my intellectual approach has been an attempt to understand the great power of history, which as James Baldwin forcefully argued in a 1965 essay cannot simply be relegated to the past, but rather constitutes something carried within us that remains “literally present in all that we do.” Such a pursuit has made me feel right at home at Cooper, where students and faculty carry on the charge bequeathed by Peter Cooper that calls for the creation of knowledge in the sciences and the arts to be made useful to our communities and to the wider world beyond campus.

Cooper is certainly already excelling in this regard. Through pedagogical collaborations like the Center for Writing and Learning, stimulating talks like those in the Intersectional Justice Lecture Series, and centers of innovation like the Benjamin Menschel Civics Project Lab and the IDC AACE Lab, you are forging new ways of applying your knowledge and skills across disciplines and fields of inquiry. I am deeply inspired by that work and look forward to collaborating with you all as we continue to build and expand upon the historic mission articulated by Peter Cooper in his original 1859 letter to the Trustees, where he insisted the purpose of this new institution would be to improve the situation of “our city, our country, and humanity.”

Thank you for warmly welcoming me to the Cooper community.

Respectfully yours, 
Demetrius L. Eudell, VPAA