Though students and faculty alike have lobbied hard to keep Cooper Union from charging tuition, the administration at the historically free university says the school is so cash-strapped that they'll be voting on whether or not to nix the tradition next month.
The East Village institution's been struggling financially for a while now; University President Jamshed Bharucha says the cash drain dates all the way back to the 1970s, and the school is now losing about $12 million a year. The school board has floated around the concept of charging tuition before, and announced last April that graduate students would no longer attend for free. That move was heavily protested, and last fall eleven students barricaded themselves in the Peter Cooper Suite of the Cooper Union building for a week to call attention to the administration's lack of transparency regarding tuition. "We're not fighting for our own tuition," the group's spokeswoman, Victoria Sobel, told us in December. "We're fighting for future generations and for the model for sustainable higher education."
And the students aren't alone in their fight. The university's architecture school has argued against tuition, saying free attendance was "an essential attribute." The School of Art's faculty has strongly criticized Bharucha and the board, and formally rejected requests to assess tuition costs. Alumni have tried to drum up donations and a consulting firm contracted by the school suggested cutting scholarships by more than a quarter would affect the quality of students attending the university.
And, naturally, no one's forgotten about the $111 million Cooper Place building the school built in 2009. But Bharucha says the board will still vote on charging tuition and other revenue-increasing measures next month. "There will be some tough decisions,” he told the Times. “There have to be. Because the model that has been in place cannot be sustained."
