Board Chair Meeting

Notes

Detailed notes from this meeting were posted by Architecture Student Council.

Agenda

• Early Decision Deferral
  • Present ASC Response to President Bharucha’s Letter: “If the Board does not plan to admit a class to the School of Art due to a misunderstanding, we would like to know that that is the case and have a conversation about it. If that is not the point of this mass-deferral, then Art Student Council would like to know: what is?”
  • From whence did a plan to defer Art Student applicants arise? On what day, and from what provenance? Was it in response to the plan put forth by the Art School Faculty in January, or was it pre-emptive as a negotiating tool to shape that plan?
  • Putting aside rhetoric, intention, and perception, on a substantive financial level, how do the plans put forward by the School of Engineering and School of Architecture differ from those of the School of Art?
  • “Why is there a lack of trust?” is a question that has been raised by Mark in previous Board Chair meetings. Bringing in the Hometest prompts and some real Hometests to understand on a personal level the level of commitment these students had to Cooper and how trust has been broken with them.
  • Why did the administration hastily send a PR blast directly to press 30 minutes into a student rally for deferred applicants? If there are, as President Bharucha has stated, many narratives, why is there only one — the voice of the students — that the administration continues to preempt?
• Board and Administration Transparency Check-In
  • Where is the Board Report from December? It has been 83 days since the meeting with nothing posted.
  • I met with Lawrence Cacciatore on January 24th and he told me that:
    • The “late-January decision-making meeting” that Jamshed had alluded to in a December email didn’t happen, and it was not going to happen in January because “everything has been postponed”.
    • How the timeline has shifted cannot be disclosed in terms of specific dates.
    • Board meeting dates, times, and locations will no longer be disclosed and they were never intentionally public information. For this, and for the following 3 questions, can anyone name other institutions — particularly public institutions — that operate similarly? If Cooper is exempt from conventional practices in this respect, why?
    • The list of which trustees are on which committees is not public information.
    • The group of trustees reviewing the Reinvention proposals hadn’t met yet, wasn’t finalized, and it is not public information who is on it.
    • Many rules are unwritten, such as the Executive Committee’s sub-bylaws. While over-specifying rules and regulations in writing might make the wheels of bureaucracy turn even slower, without board representation or access to meeting minutes the Cooper community at least needs clear protocol regarding decision-making procedures.
• Faculty/Student Board Representation
  • In a faculty / CUFCT meeting Stock was asked about a justification for not having faculty on the board that there is some kind of union-related issue and he denied it. the union is open to negotiation.
  • A petition for student representation on the board had reached 434 signatures as of January 22nd.
• ASC Website and Transparency Initiative
  • As seen in The New York Times!
  • Diligent record-keeping and consistent openness via Student Council is something I continue to advocate for and work on. We face an endless stream of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about it from some people — and there is a legitimate need to be sensitive and thoughtful about people’s concerns — but so far I’ve seen only unprecedented excitement and involvement.
  • We’re using Git-backed systems that expose all changes and record all history in the background as we work. This creates a high bar of accountability and transparency by default. It also opens up new possibilities such as authoring documents asynchronously and collaboratively, while maintaining a clear log of changes. For example, here is the commit history of the letter above.
• Bylaw Archives
  • Thanks for providing them!
  • There are still missing pieces.
  • This kind of transparency and realtime archiving can be integrated directly into administrative workflows.