Student Council Meeting with Saskia Bos

Student Representation

RA: We’ve heard electives are being cut.
SB: No announcement yet on that. Cutting electives is a one-time solution we came up with that would be temporary, just for one semester so far to save money.
RA: That decision was reached after students were asked to leave a meeting on account of personnel issues being discussed. We need to be able to maintain representation at meetings where things like that get decided.
JE: Why can’t students be present for meetings with personnel issues?
SB: It’s always been that personnel issues have been decided on without students present. Questions like: Who should teach? For what salary? Salaries will remain private. Not sure if it’s contractual or just a tradition.
KC: Those things are inextricably linked to curriculum.
RA: We’d agree to a non-disclosure about certain figures like salaries.
SB: I will investigate. It’s even more regulated now because of the adjunct union.

Revenue Generation Presentations at Full Faculty Meeting

SB: Full faculty meeting is tomorrow.
JE: Won, Jenny, Kristi (Rachel’s alternate) will be present.
SB: We’ll be sharing our work with Revenue Generation.
SB: The new deadline for deans giving their reports to the President is Tuesday November 27th at 6pm.
SB: Should we have another conversation with art student body? There is a lot of tension building in student body that shouldn’t be necessary. I’d hope Won can keep you all informed, but everyone is working in little groups so it’s even hard for Faculty to keep each other informed. We’re building consensus and it’s something that has to be presented to the board. They are more interesting and complex than what I said in my website interview about new programs on instutitional critique and graphic design. That was loosey-goosey.
SB: I can’t say it enough: we’re doing all this to avoid undergraduate tuition. We have to solve it. It’s a mathematical challenge. How many students will we need in 2018 for what sorts of programs? We work on this on the weekends even. It takes time to get the language right.

Presenting the Hybrid Model to Board of Trustees

JE: Asked president about letting deans propose to Board of Trustees, he said yes.
SB: Now he has postponed it. We were supposed to present these programs in the presence of faculty to the Board’s Academic Affairs committee on the 14th of November. Now the deans will present to the full board on the 5th of December for 30 minutes each in the presence of faculty members.
SB: As far as I have heard, news from the board will be released in third week of January.

President / Board Conflict of Interest

RA: Is there a conflict of interest in having the President on the Board?
SB: It’s a given now.
CG: He’s a voting member.

Consultant Reports

JE: Don’t forget about the desirability of the Hybrid Model programs, not just how much they make.
SB: Maguire report talks about value not price.
JE: We heard there’s a report from CDG to President?
SB: It wasn’t given in our presence.
RA: Was there a report?
SB: Might’ve been interim. We’re not ready. They’re not ready. Numbers are recalculated often.
CG: We’ve seen that figure before, it’s not a secret. It’s in the RTF report, which leaked to a bunch of people here twice but is still not oficially released. We should follow up with the President about that.
SB: I don’t want you to worry, that’s for me to do. We will have evidence of programs working in other universities, some of them abroad, to mitigate the risk of implementation.
RA: We’re concerned about opacity.
SB: Let’s schedule the student body meeting soon.
SB: Walking on eggshells. It’s not so much because of the sensitivity of the information, but because we’re just not there yet. Not secret, just not ready.

Meeting to Update Students on Hybrid Proposals

SB: I can give you content but not sure I can give you all the financial data. The most important thing is what are these programs about. Would you guys be interested in it? Does it fit the bill? I don’t think you’re interested in going over all the minute details of financial information. The President wouldn’t like it. It’s for the Board. What if you comment on it on a blog and say it’s bullshit? It wouldn’t be favorable to the School of Art in this moment.
CG: Without good information we just make up numbers. Tuition numbers are what people want to hear most, not that we’re hitting our target.
SB: Is it for yourself or assessing a different consituency? It’s very early in the game. The first conversation will be the one we’re having with the Board in December. It’s great if you have that information at the same time as the Board, but not earlier. We want to protect the undergraduate tuition, and this means there will be discrepancies in price of non-undergrad programs.
CG: Who has been talking about “low-tuition?” Can you share the numbers you have and just say that it’s tentative?
SB: I will have to clear with President and he will probably say no.
RA: Why can’t it be cleared with the faculty who created the plans?
SB: It’s at the request of the President, he’s asked me to write this for him. You have the right to be informed and I’ll see how far I can go.
JE: We have the program content from Revenue Generating Group notes.
SB: That’s old by now. Please understand I need your help protecting our work. It should be a cohesive, positive effort. If we cancel out the principle of Revenue Generation and say no to the President they could close the school.
DF: When you ask us to “protect the work of making these plans”, that runs counter to what the student body wants.

New Website

JE: We’ve spent a lot of time discussing to whom are we accountable and how transparent we should be and this is a result of that.
CG: It’s open source and based on a technology called Git, which gives us version control that creates historical accountability for every file. I built it in a week, we’ve been learning how to use it together for the past week, and hope to have it on the official Cooper domain by next week.
SB: Congratulations, it seems very effective!

Hurricane Sandy

SB: Anything I should know about students who were in harm’s way with Hurricane Sandy? Tried to contact everyone last week and didn’t hear any bad news. SQ: We’ve heard of one or two students who are being helped already.

New Trustee

SB: Steve Lam wants to know how it went with the new board member tour?
KC: It went well. He’s nice. Showed him Julie and Sami’s show and the studios.
SB: He mentioned the possibility of internships at Google to students in School of Art, which is exciting.
JE: School of Art alumni Joshula Weibly has also worked at Etsy and Google doing fabrication.

Board Chair

SB: Who is the rep to the Board?
JE: Rachel, Casey, and a student body representative that is TBD.

Good to Know

SB: Wednesday through Saturday I am in Boston, as a member of the Visiting Committee for the reaccreditation of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.