Save Cooper Union Crowd-Funding Campaign Hits Fundraising Milestone

Legal fund helps in fight to preserve free tuition and to seek accountability of the Board of Trustees

July 10 (New York, NY) – The Committee to Save Cooper Union’s (CSCU) campaign to preserve free tuition at the historic arts and engineering college in New York City has received overwhelming support from donors in recent weeks with the campaign surpassing its initial fundraising goal of $150,000 to support its legal battle to maintain free tuition and seek accountability of the Board of Trustees. The $150,000 target was reached a few days shy of the 45-day window set in the Indiegogo campaign launched on May 27th. More than $30,000 was raised in the last week alone.

CSCU, a coalition of faculty, alumni and students, is pursuing legal action as a last resort after Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees proceeded to stop offering students the free education required by the Charter. Free tuition has always been an integral part of Cooper Union and an essential means to fulfilling Peter Cooper’s legacy. He believed in giving back to the City and central to that vision was his dream of a school where education would be free, designed to lift the working classes from poverty much as he himself had risen to fortune from his modest beginnings.

Preserving the unique mission of this esteemed institution, especially in today’s climate of rising university tuition and student debt, clearly resonated with hundreds of people from across the country, many in New York City, and abroad. Donations reached into the thousands of dollars. The campaign will be extended an additional 15 days to build on this momentum and to get a head start on the second phase of fundraising.

“Supporters of Cooper Union do not want to see the school’s historic mission jeopardized and corporatized,” said Adrian Jovanovic, alumnus co-founder of CSCU. “The imposition of tuition at Cooper Union, for the first time in the school’s 155-year history, and the botched series of decisions by the school’s leadership, conducted under a shroud of secrecy, have gotten a lot of people fired up.”

After carefully evaluating all of the legal options, CSCU filed a lawsuit on May 27 in New York Supreme Court seeking a declaration that The Cooper Union is required to be tuition-free. The lawsuit also calls for the formation of “The Associates of Cooper Union” as required by the Cooper Union Charter. The Associates would serve as a check on the Board of Trustees. The suit also petitions the court for an audit, as provided for in the Charter, to help provide more detail on the fiscal mismanagement of the Cooper Union.

“The goal of the lawsuit is to shed light on this institution’s gross mishandling of its assets and the culture of extravagance and wastefulness perpetrated by the administration while the school’s finances were tanking. Clearly, these concerns are resonating with many people from within and outside the Cooper Union community,” said Cooper Union Professor Mike Essl, co-founder of CSCU.

Last month, CSCU scored a legal victory when Administrative Judge Hon. Sherry Klein Heitler unambiguously denied the Board of Trustees motion to transfer the lawsuit from the New York Supreme Court’s Civil Branch to the Commercial Division. In her decision, she wrote,

“This matter does not involve ‘business dealings’ … but rather the alleged mismanagement and governance of a not-for-profit educational institution. Thus, it does not fall within the guidelines for assignment to the Commercial Division.”

“The Board of Trustees’ troubling tactic is symptomatic of the ongoing danger to Cooper Union. The school is not a commercial asset that they can manage and alter in any way they see fit. The Save Cooper Union lawsuit holds them responsible to the specific intent of Peter Cooper’s Trust that formed and governs the school,” said Richard Emery, founding partner of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP.

CSCU will launch a second phase of fundraising that will further help legal proceedings to preserve free tuition including an August 13 court date where oral arguments will be heard.

For more information about the Committee to Save Cooper Union, please visit: www.savecooperunion.org

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