Meeting with Board Chair, Vice Chair, President and Student Reps

people present: Mark Epstien, Francios DeMonil, Jamshed Bharucha, Lawrence Cacciatore, Che Perez, Rachel Appel, Casey Gollan, Mauricio Higuera, Kristov Toth

Q - Can we have a student representative to the Board of Trustees?

• People aren’t allowed into BoT meetings because
  • there is no time for them to speak
  • trustee meetings are confidential
• There is a perceived risk that if others were present, board members wouldn’t be able to speak freely for fear of something being skewed.

HOWEVER they still don’t understand why there is a mistrust amongst the alumni and the students about the BoT. They absolutely refuse to see a need for direct (ie: someone who has a current relationship to the school, non-alumni) connection between the Board. We attempted, many many times, to articulate that the mistrust comes from the opacity of the BoT but they refused to believe that was the cause of mistrust.

According to Mark and Francios, noone but the market is at fault for the current position of the cooper union.

NEW Every trustee will be invited to future meetings with students. They will not be required to attend but they will be notified of the event.

NEW Two Student Council Reps can be sent to these meetings from each school IN ADDITION to 1 “Student Body Member” tbd by each Student Council

Documentation from CDG will be released however there will not be an official report

Rev. Task Force will be releasing their Final Report shortly

T.C. is willing to share ‘many things’ but not publicly or online

Jamshed - the administration needs to have a way to have a “family conversation” within the institution

Engineers have less objectionable stance toward undergraduate and graduate tuition, they have confidence in their dean and the taskforces to make good decisions and recommendations for the school

Mark - if the faculty aren’t behind a decision, the school can’t continue

They believe they’ve tried for decades to get the schools to come together but they understand they can’t dictate what the schools should do so they’re letting the schools find their own way, what’s best for them

Jamshed supports bringing more tenured faculty on board (this was in response to Che’s questions about only having 2 tenured arch faculty)

Jamshed believes the Art Faculty quickly embraced talking about rev. generating grad programs where the Eng. faculty did not