Architect 2014-02.pdf

front
State of
the union
Cooper Union’s board voted last
month to begin Charging tUition for
UndergradUate stUdents, ending the
sChool’s historiC legaCy.
In January, the board of trustees at the Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art voted to begin charging tuition
for undergraduate students with the next freshman class. The
decision to quit offering a free education for all, a founding
principle for the New York school over the past century and a half,
promises to utterly transform the institution.
There were lots of arguments over what should have been
done to prevent this moment. Perhaps 41 Cooper Square, the
$166 million academic building designed by Los Angeles–based
Morphosis, should have been done differently, more cheaply, or
even not at all. Maybe the board should have decided against
hiring a president whose annual salary amounts to the tuition
of more than 60 students—although the financial problems
certainly preceded his arrival. Attempting to look forward, a
working group of faculty, alumni, staff, and trustees offered
alternative ways to address the school’s budget problems.
But the board concluded that “tuition remains the only
realistic source of new revenue in the near future.” (The trustees
nevertheless declared that it would also implement several of
the working group’s recommendations for austerity in addition
to raising tuition.) Ultimately, whoever shoulders the blame for it,
the outcome that so many have dreaded has arrived.
The school’s leaders pledged that admissions will continue
to be merit-based, and tuition-paying students will subsidize
scholarships for needier students. Yet this is the same financial
model practiced across American universities that is saddling
students with unprecedented debt. As Cooper Union transitions,
some not-insubstantial sum must be spent on administrators to
capture that tuition. And even if Cooper Union is able to navigate
the tuition process, it will only have landed itself in the same boat
as traditional centers of higher education—a cold comfort.
Future students will adapt. Unfortunately, that may mean
the school loses the next Elizabeth Diller or Shigeru Ban to sticker
shock, as Philip Nobel noted in ARCHITECT last April. No longer a
peerless, need-blind alternative to the flailing university model,
Cooper Union has elected instead to join its ranks. A Stanford
Daily op-ed puts it best: “This country doesn’t need fewer Cooper
Unions. It needs more of them.” SARA JoHnSon
21
ARCHITECT February 2014 WWW.arCHITeCTMaGaZINe.COM