The Cooper Union has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation as part of a Teagle initiative called Cornerstone: Learning for Living, which aims to revitalize the role of the humanities in general education. At Cooper, the grant will be used by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) to design a new first-year curriculum. According to Nada Ayad, acting dean of HSS, the goal is to rethink the humanities classroom by enabling students to engage with texts and ideas that they can bring to their work as artists, architects, and engineers.

HSS expects to implement a new curriculum and pedagogy for its two required first-year courses for an incoming class of 220 to 250 students, a sequence anchored by common readings. Through a series of workshops funded by the grant, the faculty will identify texts designed to encourage students’ engagement with both the world and the self that are critical to the study of architecture, art, and engineering. Workshops will also let faculty share strategies for teaching texts and for designing student work that lets them experience New York’s many social, cultural, and civic institutions. The faculties of all three of Cooper’s schools will be engaged to build a shared understanding of the centrality of humanism and the social sciences. 

The authors of the grant—Ayad along with Kit Nicholls, director of the Center for Writing and Learning, and HSS faculty members Ninad Pandit, assistant professor of history, and William Germano, professor of English Literature—say that Cooper's student body, by the nature of their fields of study, "will, necessarily, consider big and complex problems: for example, the social realities that structure the design of buildings, the way art lives in society, or the technological solutions we create to address engineering challenges."

The work funded by the Teagle grant is intended to build on the recommendations of a committee of external scholars who were convened by Cooper in Fall 2021. Tasked with conducting a comprehensive review of the HSS curriculum, the visiting committee published a report on "the ways in which professional practice can be meaningfully influenced by HSS’s longstanding commitment to providing ethical, social, and humanistic frameworks that are crucial to personal development, professional excellence, and engaged citizenship for our students."

The grant will also underwrite talks by visiting scholars and the grant writers’ travel to the Cornerstone convention in Austin, Texas.