Three years ago administrators at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art decided, along with their financial advisers, to “ratchet back the financial risk” in the institution’s investments, The Wall Street Journal says in an article today that describes how the college was able to afford a striking new academic building even though it charges its students no tuition.
Although many other colleges have seen the value of their investments decrease significantly, Cooper Union’s endowment is expected to amount to about $600-million as the fiscal year ends today — just about what it was this time a year ago, the newspaper says. The institution’s prize asset is the land underneath one of New York’s most prominent Art Deco landmarks, the Chrysler Building. The property, which brings the institution $19-million a year, was a gift from the family of Peter Cooper, the 19th-century industrialist and philanthropist who founded the college.
A 1999 deal between Cooper Union and the owner of the Chrysler Building set ground rent for the property far into the future, and that guaranteed income allowed the institution to borrow cheaply to pay for the new nine-story building, designed by Morphosis, the architect Thom Mayne’s firm. The sculptural, mesh-sheathed building will house Cooper Union’s engineering school along with its humanities and social-sciences programs, in addition to providing some facilities for art and architecture programs.
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9 Responses to Conservative Investment Policies Helped Cooper Union Afford Thom Mayne Building
renellin - October 5, 2011 at 1:42 pm
I have also noticed that a lot of teachers (I am somewhat of a permanent college student)–not a majority–seem to be vicariously living out their lives in their students. They can’t help but try and often succeed to indoctrinate the students into their point of view, even if it is not course-related. Many teachers confuse indoctrination with encouraging students to think. All of my children are college-educated, with one still in law school, and it just hurts to hear what some of their teachers tell them. Are they just being provocative? No. The relationship between a student and a teacher they really respect, even if due to false pretenses, can be a powerful force in shaping their future.
sdorley - October 5, 2011 at 1:43 pm
This doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Keep the PhD programs but cut admissions so that you have a smaller number of candidates. When the market opens up–if ever it will given that so many schools find financial benefit in moving from tenure-track to contract faculty–you can increase the number of entrants. This is no different that what we are all doing today with our own personal budgets–cutting back until things get better.
The problem is that we may be moving beyond the days of “guaranteed employment” with its concurrent benefit package. And at a risk of getting political–the government desire to make health care affordable would help professors who are working but not getting benefits. When, as a doctoral student, I taught one class at a local community college to make a bit more money, I became friends with a “lifer”–an adjunct faculty who had not found a permanent job. She was teaching at 3 different schools just to make enough money and to be able to have insurance.
We need to stop having adjuncts (or graduate teaching assistants– argument for keeping doctoral programs full) and admit that no one wants to pay for that many tenured positions any more. But reasonable contracts based on a decent pay scale and a 3 year renewable term might get some of our faculty back in the classroom.
11185283 - October 5, 2011 at 3:06 pm
I spent 9 years earning the terminal degree in English, with the intention of becoming an English professor. Probably the hardest lesson I learned – and it was not taught by my (otherwise wonderful) graduate faculty mentors – is that a career can mean more than “appointments culminating in tenure.” For more than half the new PhDs in English in a given year, it has to.
vpostrel - October 5, 2011 at 3:16 pm
You should also tell undergraduate majors considering graduate school that they should assume they will not get a job when they finish their Ph.D. program. If they’re OK with going to grad school for pure intellectual consumption, fine. Otherwise, they should try something else. They should also understand that even if they do go to graduate school and are among the lucky ones to find tenure track positions, those positions will most likely be at schools significantly below the quality of the ones where they themselves trained–that’s just how the math works out. If graduate programs aren’t willing to discipline themselves, at the very least undergraduates could get better advice from their professors.
theseus - October 5, 2011 at 4:49 pm
It’s the first thing I tell them. And the second is that if they must do this, at least they need to get decent funding, or they really, really shouldn’t go. But most of them are romantics who reckon that it will be different for them so what can one do?
minnesotan - October 5, 2011 at 7:54 pm
Perhaps you should amend that advice to “run for a public office you have a chance in hell of winning.”
Not to down the third party candidates — they have my undying support. It’s just that losing nobly in an election and losing nobly at the tenure-track lottery aren’t functionally any different. Either way, you followed your heart, had it trampled on, and now have to deal with the government’s threats to send you to debtor’s prison if you don’t pay them back for the privilege of training for ten years to flounder in a market with no jobs.
realtyannie - October 6, 2011 at 4:21 am
Well, copesan, we are talking here about English degrees. Probably a PhD in Physics or another hard science would open up some pretty cool doors. As noted by Mr. Jacobs, the only reason people get English PhDs is to become English professors. Whatever alternative careers might interest them are probably accessible with a humble BA.
By the way, PhD programs should not be stopped. We do need new English professors. Just not so many.
realtyannie - October 6, 2011 at 4:28 am
You could get their email address and forward them every single article like this in the Chronicle. And every article about declining tenure. And every article about universities declaring financial exigency. And every article about the loss of state funding. Ad infinitum. There is enough bad news in the Chronicle to sink into a few of those brilliant young minds!
theseus - October 7, 2011 at 11:23 am
The one I talked to yesterday said that he’d READ articles like this, but was still keen!