Is it a Trap? Thoughts on the Cooper Union Agreement
Yesterday the students who had been occupying the office of the president of Cooper Union round-the-clock for sixty-five days announced that they had ended their occupationwith a negotiated settlement. Though most observers hailed the agreement as a victory — at least a partial one — in the Free Cooper Union campaign to reverse the administration’s tuition plans and bring other reforms to the institution, at least a few were considerably less enthusiastic.
“In our experience,” the folks at Reclaim UC tweeted this morning, “negotiations and working groups tend to be administrative strategies of misdirection and neutralization.” Over at the Free Cooper Union Facebook page, one commenter declared the plans for “an exploratory working group” to be ”the oldest evasion in the playbook.” He continued, “I’m sorry, but if