Cooper Union’s endowment is concentrated in a single asset, the land under the Chrysler building.
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Those groups and the office of the attorney general of New York State, which began investigating the board’s handling of the institution’s finances after the lawsuit was filed, said they had reached agreement on a consent decree to settle the case.
After years of roiling tension, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will announce a settlement between Cooper Union’s board of trustees and a group of alumni and faculty who sued the school over alleged mismanagement.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he hopes the deal eventually could lead to the school restoring free tuition.
Cooper Union is located in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
The Cooper Union Alumni Association will also elect between five and nine of the trustees, depending on the size of the board at the time, with one serving as char or vice-chair. The school counted on paying for the building partly by its investments.
The trustees’ statement says that the board neither accepts nor agrees with the factual findings in Mr. Schneiderman’s petition, but believes it is “in the college’s best interest to approve the consent agreement and direct full and collaborative attention to preserving the college for future generations of students”.
“Thanks to the tireless dedication of an extensive network of alumni, faculty, students and supporters, the Committee to Save Cooper Union was able to mount a highly effective legal battle to protect the mission of The Cooper Union”, *said Adrian Jovanovic, President and Co-Founder of the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU)*.
Peter Cooper, the industrialist who founded the school in 1859, did so based on the belief that education should be “as free as air and water”. “We welcome this opportunity to provide additional alumni representation on the Board of Trustees, and pledge to do our part on the road ahead to restore the full scholarship model at Cooper Union”. “Once again, we would like to thank the Office of the Attorney General for recognizing the Cooper Union and its full scholarship policy as a national treasure, and valuing the CUAA’s role in its stewardship”.
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The Attorney General’s office also launched an investigation into Cooper Union’s financial and operational management a year ago and, in June, the college’s president Jamshed Bharucha resigned, along with five trustees. The petition goes on to note that the school plagiarized course descriptions for a computer science program that it attempted to register with the state while revealing that the school’s own engineering school had rejected it. Bharucha and members of the board refuted these claims in interviews with the Journal. This plan was foiled by the 2008-2009 stock market crash, where the money was lost.
