Today is the day.
Today is the day that the Cooper Union trustees will hold their final vote on whether to impose tuition on this fall’s incoming class of undergraduates, or to, by adopting some other package of financial reforms, maintain Cooper’s status as the country’s most prominent and well-regarded tuition-free university.
The imposition of tuition at Cooper has been years in coming, and for much of 2013 it appeared all but inevitable. But student activists last summer forced the college to establish a formal working group to consider alternatives, and when that working group brought forward a robust, detailed plan for keeping Cooper free last month, the trustees blinked. Announcing that the proposal needed further review, they deferred final action for another day.
Today is that day.
As for what’s coming, nobody’s offering predictions, at least publicly. One active alumnus posted on Facebook last night that by his reckoning there are nine solid votes against tuition on the board, and five trustees clearly in favor. With twenty-three voting seats on the board, that would mean tuition opponents need to pick up three of the nine unknowns.
I have no sense of how reliable that count is, though, and no concrete inside information from other sources. Tuition opponents have a huge mountain to
