# Free At What Cost Eye on Design #06: Utopia The fight to keep renowned art school [[Cooper Union]] tuition-free has earned its students an honorary degree in activism By Meg Miller ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.52.05 AM.png]] On May 9, 2013, the brownstone building that houses Cooper Union in New York City glowed red. To people crossing the busy East Village streets below, it must have looked like an omen—a blood red bat signal shining below the clock tower of the school’s historic academic building. Behind arched windows, the office of the college’s then-president, Jamshed Bharucha, was packed with around 40 students, sitting cross-legged on the floor and hunched over laptops in office chairs, all bathed in the glow of the red bulbs they’d just installed. ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.55.30 AM.png]] The day before, they had stormed the office to deliver Bharucha a vote of no confidence, and finding no one there, they decided to stay. Now they were projecting their message outward into the heart of the city: Cooper Union, one of the last remaining colleges in the country to not charge tuition, should remain free. It was the end of a disorienting school year, and the occupation of the president’s office was the culmination of a flurry of tense board meetings, behind-the-scenes revenue reports, and simmering unrest in the months prior. During the 2012 spring semester, the college announced that it would start charging tuition for graduate students in the fall of 2014 due to a spate of financial trouble and mounting debt. It would be the first time in well over a century that the art, architecture, and engineering institution, renowned for its progressive founding philosophy, would not be free for its students. The school’s founder, Peter Cooper, a self-taught industrialist and inventor who amassed a fortune from iron milling, insurance, and real estate[^1], endowed the school in 1859 for the purpose of educating working-class New Yorkers at no cost to them[^2]. Cooper was an abolitionist and an ardent supporter of education for all, regardless of gender or race, and that sense of social responsibility, coupled with high qualifications for acceptance due to the full-tuition scholarship[^3], has earned Cooper a unique reverence in the art and design world. Thomas Edison is a Cooper alum, as are sculptor Eva Hesse and architect Daniel Libeskind. In graphic design alone, the school can claim Herb Lubalin, Milton Glaser, Seymore Chwast, Lou Dorfsman, Stephen Doyle, Carin Goldberg, Ellen Lupton, Abbott Miller, and Emily Oberman as graduates. By December of 2012, the school was tense with anticipation. In response to the announcement of graduate tuition and an inclination that a broader tuition plan was to come, a small group of student activists staged the first of their lock-ins—this one in the Peter Cooper suite, housed in the clock tower. It lasted a week, and in the following months students, faculty, and alumni worked together with the administration to prevent what was at the time still considered a last resort measure. But by April 23, 2013, when the chairman of the board called an early morning meeting in the Foundation Building’s Great Hall, it was already apparent that tuition was on the horizon. As students filed into the lecture hall, they were greeted by the full board of trustees sitting onstage. When they announced that Cooper would definitively end its free-tuition policy for undergraduates, effective the following fall, many of the students who had participated for months in working groups, task forces, open discussions, and public protests felt that they had been given the runaround. In the weeks after the meeting at the Great Hall, a group of students drafted a document to indicate they no longer supported President Bharucha, and more than 400 of their peers signed it in person[^4]. Wanting to deliver it by hand, they forced themselves through narrow hallways and double doors, past the feeble protests of the office administrators, only to arrive at an empty office. It seemed that Bharucha had heard they were coming. So they set up camp in his office, and they stayed there for 65 days. May turned to June, and the office evolved from a red-tinted symbol of resistance to a well-organized activist headquarters. Provisions were brought in, the police were sent away. Students took calls, talked to press, liaised with the board and faculty, and ran a sophisticated social media strategy, consisting mainly of Vine videos. Occupying students who graduated at the end of the spring semester left the office to cross the stage, then went right back up. “We were connecting with all these people from other countries, wheeling and dealing with the board, having these very intense conversations, and then I would get a phone call that was like, ‘Your student loans are due,’” says Victoria Sobel, an artist and activist who took out loans for her living expenses while a student at Cooper. “There was this real collapsing of time.” After a while, visiting lecturers were brought in so people could keep up with their studies. Art students found ways to transform the cramped office into a makeshift studio space, creating small sculptures out of the dwindling office supplies, making videos, and even staging an art show within the Foundation Building. One night, they held a performative reading of the 41-page board of trustees meeting transcript leaked by the Village Voice, variously taking on the speaking roles of Bharucha and members of the board. ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.55.52 AM.png]] The occupation ended with an agreement that called for the formation of a working group made up of trustees, faculty, students, and alumni tasked with preparing an alternate plan to charging tuition. The working group’s report— which involved suggestions for restructuring academic programs, cutting costs on administrative overhead, and renting out areas in academic buildings—was ultimately declined by the board in favor of their original tuition plan, prompting a new group of students, faculty, and alumni to sue the school. Last year, as required by the lawsuit settlement, Cooper Union announced that it would reinstate free tuition by 2028. In the five years between the protests and the new plan, the energy amassed and the impact made by the occupation led those former students to explore the crisis at Cooper, and the premise of a free institution in deeper, more probing, and more sustained ways. For many of them, the spirit of protest made its way into their art or design for years following the sit-in. By making social activism and community engagement an extension of their art and work, these students experienced a feeling of agency—of not only envisioning an ideal, but leading an effort that forced an actual change of course. It made them rethink the artist’s role in society, and what they themselves were capable of. Cooper Union remained divided over the board’s decision, which seemed to serve as a sort of microcosm, or at least a sign, of the larger crisis of college funding and student debt playing out on a national scale. If paying tuition at Cooper sounded the death knell for the idea of fully-funded education in the U.S., its students were not going to let it go down easy. ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.56.50 AM.png]] “There’s a lot of power in ‘free education’—a simple message that can be understood and that people can rally around,” says Casey Gollan, an artist, designer, and a member, with Sobel, of the student protest group Free Cooper Union. “It’s a lot more diffuse once you start to expand those ideas and parse out the different meanings: What is free? What is education?, but that for me is the thing that I’m still interested in doing—pushing those goalposts further and further in exploring what a place like Cooper could be.” After the occupation, both Sobel and Gollan finished school, but neither of them ever really left Cooper. Along with a small group of other students, they continued to run Free Cooper Union, leading reading groups and making it their mission to provide incoming and prospective students with information about recent events that would provide an alternative to the official statements from the school. The group published Disorientation, an extensive website and PDF reader comprised of an introduction to the tuition struggle, a toolkit for joining the cause, and a series of essays that “dig into why Cooper matters, what’s going wrong with education everywhere, and how we might fix it.” ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.57.11 AM.png]] Done in the cutand-paste, Risograph-printed style of a punk zine—with snippets of slogans like “Get Your Thieving Hands Off Our Community Assets” and “A Streetcar Named Tuition”—the reader is an impressively comprehensive overview of Cooper Union’s story, albeit one with a definite agenda. ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.57.45 AM.png]] At the bottom of the website, an illustration of the clock from the Cooper clock tower about to strike midnight flashes red with the scroll-over; beneath it a mantra reads “Stay Free or Die Tryin’.” Sobel and Gollan continued to organize around and teach about free education, and in 2015 they launched Nonstop Cooper, an initiative they describe as a “community residency that was housed in the former St. Mark’s bookstore—a beloved neighborhood institution that was forced to move from its space near Cooper Square when the college raised its rent. ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.58.21 AM.png]] The timing was right: the lawsuit brought against the school by the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU) had reached a settlement that required the school to return to a tuition-free policy and forced the departure of President Bharucha. “We kind of took advantage of the fact that there was a transition in leadership to point out that there was a very acute lack of community space, and a lot of unresourced time and effort that had gone into what had just happened,” says Sobel. Nonstop Cooper was loosely an outgrowth of the Free Cooper Union group, focused more on public engagement, art, and discourse (including outreach to other institutions, like Ohio’s Antioch College5, which had recently experienced similar tumult) than the traditional protest tactics the group had employed before the settlement. After proposing the residency to the school administration, they were given free rein of the vacant space for one month. That month—the end of August to the end of September 2015—coincided with the beginning of the school year, and Nonstop opened its doors to the new students filtering into the dorms and classrooms around them. They held a community discussion with the Cooper board of trustees, held workshops, and brought in guest lecturers, creating a “school outside of the school,” as Sobel puts it. The group quickly made the space their own, covering the broad storefront windows with a mission statement, printed in undulating type. A collective mural painting workshop produced enormous Dalí-esque melting clocks on the white interior walls. A donation of pillows from a “pillow fight flash mob” during student orientation provided lounge seating for a movie night. A theme began to emerge. “We were joking at the time that it was like waking up from a fever dream,” says Sobel. Nonstop Cooper held karaoke nights, potlucks, clothing exchanges, and small concerts. Members logged diaristic accounts of[^6] their days to their gradient-infused Tumblr , which took the form of a calendar. They also took seriously their self-imposed mandate to provide resources and useful context for students about the environment at Cooper[^7]. Their discussions aimed to frame the crisis as a cultural problem rather than strictly a financial one, and question the meaning of “free.” ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.58.54 AM.png]] On September 2, 2015, the fourth day of the Nonstop residency, the lawsuit against the school ended in a settlement agreement brokered by New York State attorney general. An independent monitor was appointed to oversee the school’s finances, and yet another committee was created, this time by the trustees, tasked with creating a plan to return the school to tuition-free status. This was anticipated by the organizers of the Nonstop residency, most of whom had been advocating to keep Cooper free since 2012, and many of whom had been involved in the lawsuit. But over the course of those three years, Sobel and Gollan started to think more broadly about the prospect of free education in general, and not only within the confines of getting Cooper back to financial solvency. Their correspondence with Antioch College had brought about questions of governance, and whether an institution needs to be run by a board of trustees and an administration, or if it could be self-governed by students and faculty. ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.59.11 AM.png]] “Especially in the past couple of years, it’s become less and less clear to me whether we are still even trying to influence the course of events at Cooper, or whether we are just working with Cooper as subject and material,” says Gollan. “To think through some of the questions that this has brought up has became more important than arm wrestling with the institution.” ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 10.59.44 AM.png]] After the Nonstop residency ended, Gollan and Sobel continued their research into free education as fellows at the New School’s [[Vera List Center for Art and Politics | Vera List Center]], where they looked into the corporatization of art institutions and universities. They’ve lectured at Yale, exhibited as part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and in March of this year, Sobel gave a talk at CalArts amid students protesting a tuition hike. After the lawsuit, the media moved on, and the new administration at Cooper began to focus on developing a plan to return to free tuition under New York state’s regulatory oversight. But Sobel and Gollan wanted to continue to expand the conversation they helped start, even if it was less visible and perhaps less accessible than their early protest efforts at Cooper. After school, Sobel and Gollan’s decision to continue that work came at a very real price, as it did for many of their fellow organizers. Gollan went into debt working freelance and Sobel worked restaurant jobs to make ends meet, with most of their effort, and a ton of their time, going into organizing. Like many college students, Sobel and Gollan couldn’t have predicted the way their careers panned out as undergraduate students studying art and design. But in a less typical turn of events, their college’s story became inextricable from their own. And it still is. Gollan says he now views the dichotomy between art and activism as a false one, especially for students at Cooper. “It’s always been unclear and a little bit contentious around what constitutes artistic practice or activism, and I’ve come to understand it as something that’s inescapable for everyone that’s here,” Gollan says. “Whether you see yourself as contributing to the struggle or not, everyone is part of that system—everyone is implicated.” In 2018, Cooper Union’s current president, Laura Sparks, released the plan required by the settlement to reinstate free tuition by 2028. Students currently enrolled at Cooper pay $22,275 a year (the full tuition, according to Cooper’s admissions site, is $44,550, but each student receives a “half tuition scholarship”). The price squares with average tuition costs across the country. For the 2018-19 school year, the average tuition price was $35,830 per year for private four-year colleges, and $10,230 at public four-year schools. In 2014, the year the first undergraduate class at Cooper paid tuition, student loan debt in the U.S. had exceeded $1 trillion. Today, it’s risen past the $1.5 trillion mark. Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, college affordability and debt forgiveness are major issues for democratic primary candidates, with at least two—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—proposing policies that would make all public undergraduate education free[^8]. It hasn’t always been this expensive to attend college in the U.S. As Warren has mentioned on the campaign trail, her tuition at the University of Houston was just $50 a semester. In the mid-1970s, the average total tuition, room, and board for all four-year institutions ran at about $2,500 a year. In New York City, Cooper was joined by the City University of New York (CUNY) colleges in providing free tuition until 1976, when a city fiscal crisis led the public university to start charging[^9]. By the early aughts, Cooper’s free tuition program was considered an anomaly—a unique holdover from a time before rising college prices and default rates. While the college was struggling internally to pay off its deficits, to the outside world it looked like it had figured something out that the rest of the U.S. educational system could learn from. On June 30, 2009, in the middle of a recession that had introduced state-funding cuts for education and contributed to rising tuitions, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on Cooper Union with the headline “One College Sidesteps the Crisis.” ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 11.00.21 AM.png]] That turned out to be false, but even in Cooper Union’s best years, its model for free tuition was never broadly replicable across other American universities. Much of Peter Cooper’s fortune was tied up in real estate holdings in what is today some very valuable property in New York City; a sizable portion of the school’s annual revenue, for example, comes from leasing the land beneath the Chrysler Building[^10]. Even with its endowment, though, the school still struggled to keep its finances in the black. That came to a head after it added a $166 million building at 41 Cooper Square[^11] to serve as the new academic building. The building’s $10 million annual mortgage, coupled with the investment of $35 million in borrowed funds in the stock market just before it crashed, is what pushed Cooper into the financial crisis that precipitated the tuition plan. The scope of this financial mismanagement was revealed in the investigation by the state’s attorney general, which resulted in the imposition of a reform plan in 2015. The plan required that the school spend three years developing a strategy to reclaim its tuition-free status, and assigned it an independent financial monitor to ensure that the administration was held accountable for its financial decisions. The details of this type of house cleaning—and the logistics that go into financial planning, cutting costs, and ensuring total transparency—might have been lost on the student protesters at the time of the occupation, but that had quickly changed. “The first questions we were confronted with at the start of this were, ‘What is the root of these problems, and who is responsible? Who can affect the course of events here?’” says Gollan. “A lot of what came out of that was research on the power structures of the institution, finding out for the first time, things like: We have a board of trustees. Okay, who’s on it? And why do colleges and nonprofits have boards?” The unsexy truth is that idealism must be backed by planning and logistics and a real understanding of what’s at play. The path back to its former tuition model had to be informed by these things if Cooper was ever to return to a sustainable model for free education. In April of 2016, Gollan and Sobel got an offer to co-teach a class within Cooper’s art department the next fall term. The class, a studio elective called Projects, almost felt like a curriculum-sanctioned extension of Nonstop Cooper. Gollan and Sobel wanted to give their students the space to see how their work and their ideas were being affected by their academic environment and questions around free education. They saw a similar psychological toll taking hold on their students, who were some of the first to pay to go to Cooper, as they themselves had experienced in their last year at school, when so much of their physical and mental energy was going toward the events unfolding around them. The class existed for six semesters, during which Sobel and Gollan led students to create work that addressed the school’s current state and recent history. In that time, they also watched Cooper change significantly, and they became increasingly disillusioned with what they saw. Since the early, energetic years of protests, their ideas and discussions had become underpinned by extensive research and a real understanding of the historical record of free education. They found precedent in efforts like Wages for Students[^12], a movement for student compensation that arose from the unrest in the 1970s when CUNY started charging tuition. As students and recent alumni, their activism required them to become familiar with the power structures inherent in nonprofit institutions. And in many ways, the resulting years of working groups, committees, and task forces gave way to an environment of shared governance, in which students played a key role. This instilled in them the belief that artists are more capable of self-governance than they might think. What they were witnessing now, back inside the formal institution, was a much more bureaucratic approach. It had to be: the attorney general had handed Cooper a reform plan with benchmarks for the school to achieve. The state assigned the school a financial monitor to keep Cooper on track to become free again in 2028 and make sure its board remains truthful and transparent about its financial situation. A proprietary “[[Composite Financial Index]]”[^13] which is generated algorithmically based on the school’s financial statements, is used to report on the school’s progress. According to Cooper’s plan, once the school hits a CFI of 4.0 (it is currently at a – 2.01), it will be solvent enough to reinstate free tuition[^14]. ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 11.00.51 AM.png]] For Gollan and Sobel, these methods are too data-driven and normalizing. They believe the plan puts too much emphasis on financial ratios, measurable indicators, and quantifiable improvement—tactics that might work for other institutions, but not for Cooper. They see it as taking standards and approaches from tuition-paying colleges and applying them to a school that had always been the exception to the norm, simply because of the visionary ideas of its progressive founder. Over the last couple of years, Gollan and Sobel watched as the fight back to free lost sight of the movement’s original vision. Now, they’re asking themselves a new question: Free at what cost? “We’re now perceived as ‘against the fight for free,’” says Sobel. And that’s not altogether wrong. Much of the current faculty, many of whom took part in the same fight as the two former students over the past decade, do believe in the school’s new plan. But for Sobel and Gollan, even the language around getting “back to free” is anachronistic and nostalgic, and they’re questioning whether a past version of the school is something it should even want to return to. Time has a way of warping things. In the rhetoric surrounding the course of events at Cooper over the past decade, the story of the school’s founding is often evoked. But less often mentioned is that Cooper wasn’t officially a college at first; it was a civic institution with a library and a Great Hall that was open to the public for forum and debates. The first classes allowed people to wander in; they didn’t take attendance. For Gollan, it’s that history that has the most interesting potential for guiding the school into the future. “It’s not inevitable that Cooper is a college by the standard of what colleges are in 2019, and in fact, that might be a failing model, and not an interesting one to carry forward,” says Gollan. “Policy interventions around debt forgiveness and free education are important, but I think they stop short of being visionary and actually leveraging the expertise of artists.” ![[Screenshot 2020-10-25 at 11.01.44 AM.png]] Through their work and teaching, Gollan and Sobel have been trying to envision what a new kind of institution could be. What they’re proposing now is not a cut-and-dry solution to the rising costs of college—it’s a seismic, idealistic shift in the way we think about education. The last ten years have given them the language with which to talk about their ideas and convictions, and the agency with which to act on them—even when they’re viewed as unpopular or impractical. That’s not something you typically learn in art school. [^1]: He also designed America’s first steam locomotive and, weirdly, patented the powdered gelatin we now know as Jell-O. [^2]: In the very early days of the school’s history, some students who could afford to pay did so. [^3]: Cooper Union is a private college with about 1,000 students per year. [^4]: Over 2,000 signed an online petition. [^5]: Founded in 1850 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and led by educational reformer Horace Mann, Antioch is a progressive liberal arts college with shared governance between faculty and students and a mandatory co-op education program. It shut down in 2008, but was reopened as a separate institution thanks to a movement organized by students, faculty, and alumni called Nonstop Antioch (where Nonstop Cooper got its name). [^6]: The Tumblr entry for September 1 reads: “One of the first truly bustling days at Nonstop Cooper! Freshmen have moved into the dorms above the space and across the street and are starting their orientation programming, Nonstop offers a space away from the official posturing for students to have access to an alternate telling of the state of Cooper from the perspective of other students, alumni, faculty, and staff.” [^7]: Another entry on the Nonstop Tumblr page, for example, explains the concept of a cy pres filing, which allows the court to amend the terms of a charitable trust (in this case, Cooper Union). Part of the lawsuit hinged on the CSCU’s argument that the decision to charge tuition by the school’s trustees violated its tax exemption status, which is based on the school providing tuition-free education. They argue that the trustees should have petitioned the court for a cy pres relief to change the terms of the trust before making the decision to impose tuition. [^8]: Warren has also proposed a debt forgiveness program that would cover about $1 trillion of the current student loan debt, meaning students who have already received their education would have their loans forgiven. [^9]: New York State’s recently announced Excelsior Scholarship seeks to cover tuition for New York residents, but requires certain qualifications. [^10]: In 2018, revenue from leasing this building alone was $32.5 million. [^11]: Designed by Thomas Mayne, the new academic building sits across the street from the old Foundation Building, its glittering perforated metal facade and glass lobby provide a stark contrast to the latter’s old New York brownstone. [^12]: The name riffs on the famous feminist campaign Wages for Housework founded by Silvia Federici in 1972. [^13]: Per Cooper Union’s website, “The Composite Financial Index (CFI) is a widely-used metric within higher education to measure long-term financial health and determine the financial impact of strategic decisions.” [^14]: This has been criticized as a flawed metric as to hit the 4.0 score, the school will need to have a minimum of $152 million in reserve. Former trustee Mike Borkowsky, among others, has argued that the high surplus is not necessary.