School of Art Faculty Meeting with President and Trustees

School of Art Faculty Meeting Feb 5 2013 9:00 AM Peter Cooper Suite

PRESENT: Dean Bos, Steven Lam, Full Time SOA Faculty, Prop Time SOA Faculty, Adjunct Reps Mike Vahrenwald, Lisa Lawley, Student Reps Casey Gollan, Kristi Cavataro, Jenny Eagleton, Chairman Mark Epstein, Board Members Francois deMenil and Tom Driscoll.

Note: The notes are paraphrased. We’ve attempted to convey the conversation’s tone and content as accurately as we can, and have worked together to not miss anything, but we do not want to misrepresent anyone.

Meeting starts ~9:15 when Jamshed and the 3 Trustees arrive.

Saskia gives opening welcomes, thanks them for coming.

Epstein: We are here mostly because we want to hear why there was a reversal on how things are going with the art faculty (re: Art Faculty’s letter that went out last week) and what caused this change.

Bos talks about Cooper being a beacon and an important place in the current moment in higher education.

Epstein: This is not just a Cooper problem, it’s endemic. We unfortunately have to make difficult, disruptive changes because the reality is that this is unsustainable. We want to do this as painlessly as possible so we have to find out why you aren’t cooperating with where we’re going. I’ve always been against tuition but I see no other way out. If a mistake was made it was the Board in the 70’s — a lot was lost, Green Camp for example. They had the opportunity then to change things. If they had given, say, 75 or 80% scholarships then, we wouldn’t be in nearly such a bad place now. And I don’t blame the boards since then, they have worked hard, and always had hope that we could recover. The existing board can’t keep kicking the can down the road.

Bos: Have we done everything? Looked at the entirety and exhausted all options for solving this problem?

Epstein: People are not happy about the idea of charging tuition but we put that out there to faculty and we haven’t heard other solutions. I’m willing to listen.

Osinski: There was a major shift when the faculty were asked to both solve the financial crisis with excellent new academic programs. The two do not necessarily go together. Up until this year, the faculty has not been in charge of the finances of the school. It’s not up to us to solve this, especially looking at these types of programs elsewhere.

Epstein: With all due respect your premise is incorrect. Most institutions have programs which raise revenue.

Osinski: Most institutions have students and faculty representatives on their Boards.

Epstein: This issue of representation — students cannot fit into the existing structure of the Board. There is a group of us which meets with students. I was talking to a student who feels he doesn’t have access, but they can talk to us. If students can’t work out their representation, it’s not my problem and not the trustees’ fault.

Eagleton: The issue is that those meetings just don’t cut it. It’s not the same kind of access, we can show a group of you some student perspectives in those small meetings, but we don’t know what happens in Board meetings. Student representation would open that channel.

Epstein: There are 2 issues with that: 1. Confidentiality, 2. Conflict of Interest. For example we talk about union issues. Even the Alumni Council reps that are there are bound by confidentiality. Even if you had reps there they could not go back and tell people what happens.

Eagleton: Obviously other schools have figured this out.

Epstein: Most of those are public.

Eagleton: Some are private.

Epstein: Yes, well, this is a small school with a different level of access—

Ashford: In this moment of crisis, if we are really being threatened as we are, if that’s all true, shouldn’t we consider these concerns of representation? In our letter we have made it clear that we are ready and willing to completely change the game. We can’t just go on, business as usual. I was here in ‘76 watching the president sell Green Camp, it was like some guy mortgaging his house and buying Cadillacs. I’ve seen all that has happened and changed — now this is the time to do something different.

Epstein: Isn’t Jamshed asking for help radically different?

Osinski: No. A lot of things have all been thrown into the same pot. We’ve had threats of a school closing. That even if we come up with new programs we could still get cut. We have no idea what anyone’s intentions are in asking us to do these tasks, we want to know what the trustees’ vision is.

(Epstein starts to answer and gets cut off by Driscoll.)

Driscoll: Mark is not all — thanks for taking the lead. We have to be financially sustainable. Jamshed has beaten us up behind closed doors about it. This is the 11th hour. The onus is on Jamshed and Jamshed has engaged the community. We have no preordained plan, we’re looking to everyone to help us find it.

Bordo: As alums, you must implicitly understand the value of that special contract — your scholarship. I take issue with revenue-generating programs being a kind of Trojan Horse. Graduate education is on the downswing, not the upswing. We need to imagine the pedagogical future of the school, not just the tuition-free part. The whole culture, the admissions process, it makes a contract in the classroom. Young people working hard to get to this place. What kind of institution do you envision without this asset?

Epstein: A sustainable one. I’ve never bought the idea that this is not a business because we’re a school. We have bills to pay. There are 2 things that make Cooper special: the scholarship, and excellence. Right now, we can’t have both.

Bordo: They are hand in glove. There is something here to sustain, we have to keep the vision alive. Reinvention has been a threat this last year. But reinvention does not have to equal expansion. That’s a very corporate model.

Epstein: For an example let’s look at St. Marks Bookstore. We’ve heard similar things about what they do for the community and have taken steps to keep it alive, but it’s not sustainable! And I want to address this myth I often hear about the New Building that it cost the school so much money. It is not the reason we are in this hole, we raised money for it, it will continue to generate money for us in the future. What’s ruining us is not the New Building, it’s the deficit.

Ashford: Running this place like a business is a good way to think about it, but in those terms how do you value assets that are symbolic? Aren’t we divesting in a similar way to selling off real estate assets? Giving away our biggest asset would be giving away future philanthropic opportunities.

Epstein: We’re not talking about eliminating the scholarship, just reducing it. In Engineering their plan talks about 75% scholarships. At $10,000 this is still a bargain. Look at Berea, another free school. They only admit poor students and those students have to work.

Adams: Our students could do that! We like that kind of thinking.

Epstein: We can’t just lay-off employees and have students work, it doesn’t work like that because of unions.

Osinski: Okay, but there’s a million things students could do, people are willing to do things.

Epstein: Nobody does the phonathon.

Raad: I want to go back to this issue of the value of symbolic assets—

Driscoll: How do we pay the bills with symbolic assets?

Ashford: That is the question we need to be asking: how do we leverage it into money.

Driscoll: It’s frustrating. The outside community isn’t necessarily impressed by “free for rich kids”.

Raad: Why is that a problem? Why should we give to rich kids? Can you tell me?

Driscoll: It’s the meritocracy — we’re all familiar with it.

Raad: What does that mean to you? Tell me what meritocracy means to you.

Driscoll: It means a no strings attached opportunity to feel good about themselves. It’s a great intellectual exercise but hard to raise the money for.

Raad: I ask because I have a similar project and part of my mission is explaining to donors why they should donate. If you can’t even tell the story, we’re in more trouble than we think.

Epstein: If we had a billion dollars we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Was Peter Cooper protesting at Harvard? We can ask ourselves: what was Peter Cooper’s mission—

Raad: Let’s ask: how do we better what Peter Cooper did. We’ve already bettered his model, I want to keep bettering it.

Bordo: Today Cooper is more democratic, we have a more contemporary way of running things. This is a special situation of pedagogy, one that has been bettered over 100 years.

Epstein: It’s not a pure meritocracy, you know. It’s filtered for gender, race, geography.

Hayes: My experiences with Cooper’s admissions process have been a total revelation. The kinds of classes we can build here are 30x more rich than any other institution I know. In admissions, we interrogate the idea of merit and talk about how it is constituted outside of Cooper as well. We look at people as individuals with a voice.

Raad: In admissions we unpack word after word as if we’re doing psychoanalysis. We recruit people who might not have even thought of going to art school. It is an astounding process, a complex, sophisticated analysis of what merit is.

Epstein: It sounds great. But how does some of those people paying $10,000 change that?

Hayes: Admissions is one place where I can clearly feel the symbolic value as monetary value. We don’t have to convince people to come here with good labs and facilities. At other schools you see them pouring money into luring students.

Epstein: I want to tell my story. I grew up in Coney Island. My family was working class. We couldn’t have afforded Harvard but we could’ve afforded $1,000, it wouldn’t have changed my choice to be here.

Hayes: I have talked to students here who can’t even have that conversation with their parents. I’ve heard people say that without Cooper they wouldn’t be at college.

Epstein: That won’t change, it would still be free for the needy.

Driscoll: I like the admissions process, I hadn’t heard of it. But you haven’t answered how do we pay for it?

Hayes: We took this charge very seriously. We developed, interrogated, probed, and concluded that we couldn’t maintain the excellence of our programs if there’s tuition.

Driscoll: Could not? Because you would be stretched too thin?

Ashford: Possibly. But it’s more that it creates a different context. We’ve watched things get given away. We can’t lose our asset: a context for experimental thought. I agree with Walid that we need to exploit this asset. It has not been fully exploited. If we give it away what will we get back? $3 million from a summer school?! Is that the bottom line?

Epstein: I think one of the strongest assets is the quality of students. I can’t argue with what you’re saying but what we’re facing is that we don’t have enough money. And we have donors who ask, “why should I give this kid money, his parents make more than I do”.

Eagleton: I had a meeting with development a few weeks ago, and I asked how students could help reach out to alumni, and they said, “Oh, that’s too hard.” I think the biggest mistake is that students aren’t being involved in the fundraising, if students are our biggest asset, why aren’t students at events and speaking with donors?

Epstein: The alumni give-back rate at Cooper is very low: 20%. I spoke with one student who said, “If I give back it wasn’t a scholarship, it’s a student loan”. That’s a quote from a student.

Gleeson: It’s shocking to me that our trustees didn’t know about our admissions process. We should have faculty reps on the Academic Affairs committee of the Board.

Bharucha: There is.

Gleeson: Who? Who is our rep here?

Bharucha: You have reps from the Senate.

Essl: It is the executive committee of the Senate that gets invited to those meetings, this is not necessarily a faculty member, for a while it was Tom Michelli, who is not a faculty member. So a senate rep does not always mean a faculty rep. I’ve been invited only once as chair.

Bharucha: That’s how governance is done.

Essl: Can we see a show of hands here of who has been invited to an academic affairs meeting? (No one.)

Bharucha: Day, you made a false statement. Also, students spoke at an event last night.

Gleeson: Sorry if you think it’s false but we haven’t been invited.

Jenny: If development is saying we just can’t help because it’s too hard—

Bharucha: I will talk to them.

Gleeson: There are more issues of representation. The School of Art was not involved in the presidential search.

Bharucha: The faculty were invited to the Board Meeting in December, and you know what happened there.

Gleeson: Expense reduction was also absent from the charge.

Bharucha: That’s false. I don’t know what to cut, it has to be a local decision. I don’t see cost reduction in your proposal.

Epstein: We could cut but you wouldn’t like it.

Driscoll: There is a power and ability that faculty have which we need to harness correctly. I’ve talked to Derek from Development about this.

Bos: Can we talk about how to leverage this main asset, our mission?

Driscoll: We should explore that. I see passion from the faculty.

Bos: We have not yet seen free tuition as the main campaign from Development. Why isn’t it our tagline?

Epstein: Most schools get money from Alumni, our alumni base is small and not as rich as other schools. We’ve never gotten huge gifts: $10, $7, $5 million have been our biggest gifts in the last hundred years.

Bordo: Isn’t that what reinvention is about? Cultural change is work. The way students do through their work and activism.

Epstein: Do you talk about giving back in admissions?

Raad: Our students do this on their own. They want to give back to the community. For example, they insist on classes being open to the public, like the Interdisciplinary Seminar.

Epstein: That doesn’t pay the bills. Last year there was this student donation drive where some students donated $0.01. I guess because they thought it was cute to donate one penny. And I have to tell donors that our students think their education is worth one penny.

Bharucha: Donors ask about these things.

Raad: There is financial sustainability and ideological sustainability. We feel that the ideology is worth much more. I’m going to leave this room having met some people who can’t make the case for this.

Driscoll: We’ve told the story—

Adams: The story was never told. They have never understood.

Raad: And you can’t even tell it to me right now! Tell me the argument! I do this in Beirut. If I can do it for 12 students you should be able to do it for 100. You can’t make the argument.

Driscoll: Shoulda woulda coulda are famous last words. If a donor doesn’t write a check, the story doesn’t matter.

Ashford: Why don’t we meet with other people we work with from other institutions—MoMa, ICP, etc., who regularly have to tell their story to raise money? There is “project oriented philanthropy”, as Jamshed has explained to us in past meetings. These people could share with us, the people who have been making artists for them for the last 30 years. We need to tap this asset with the art world!

Epstein: There is a famous artist whose child went here recently who did not donate a penny.

Ashford: Who talked to them!?

Bos: Roni.

Ashford: Exactly. It does not matter what they have, it’s who makes the call.

Hayes: Raising money is complicated right now. Higher education is not going in our direction. We are an anomaly, we stick out like a sore thumb. We’re not naive about the work it would take to do this.

Ashford: We’re willing to do the work. We want to do the work.

Bharucha: We do that work every day.

Bos: We should do it more together. There was this Houston event that I was not invited to with donors that could have been a lovely event with faculty where we could leverage this energy. I would like to be more involved. Our energies will help only if we can do it with spirit.

Hayes: I want to say that our letter, this statement, isn’t intended to throw a wrench. It is participation — with our expertise — in this hard, deep, urgent, dire, complex discussion.

Driscoll: Everything I’ve heard sounds constructive. We do, however, have short term financial issues.

Osinski: We haven’t looked outside of education programs. If we installed cigarette machines in this building we would make so much money. (Laughter.)

Bharucha: I wouldn’t do that. Smoking kills.

Gollan: I know it’s a joke but I would consider a cigarette machine a lot less dangerous than charging tuition.

Bharucha: Commercial revenue is on the table and continues to be important.

Raad: We’re not deaf to the finances. We have $40 million from the Chrysler building coming in. What does a $40 million college look like? This would mean cutting administrative costs, cutting salaries. Reinvention means reassessing: what is a college? This is an incredible opportunity, but that’s not what we’re hearing. Instead of hearing “we have $40 million”, we’re hearing “we’re short $17 million”.

Bharucha: We are open to that, but you need to help me. Given labor laws we can’t just downsize the institution arbitrarily. If solutions come organically, we would love that.

Ellis: What do you mean “organically”?

Bharucha: I mean I can’t discuss terms and conditions of employment, it would have to come through your bargaining units. We’re talking to other administrators about efficiency. If you look at the 990s and divide instructional costs over the total, Cooper has a higher ratio than anybody.

Osinski: You can’t compare Cooper’s numbers to RISD or Columbia. Sorry to be direct but consultants were a total waste of money. Faculty did all this work for free, and consultants were millions yet they yielded nothing.

Epstein: The trustees do this for free too, and we donate. So we’re in the negative. If you want to say, “we have $40 million.” Lets be blunt: that’s a third our budget. We’re switching from a scalpel to a machete. What three of you will walk away right now?

Raad: That is a false choice. We need to reconsider what labor means. Give us that charge.

Bharucha: I’m not authorized to.

Gleeson: The faculty spends countless hours on admissions and we do not get paid for that work.

Epstein: So there’s no savings, nothing to cut. It’s either save or raise new money.

Raad: We need a process where everyone, faculty, staff, students, alumni, the unions, can come together to talk about what we can do with $40 million. They all need to be a part of the solution.

De Menil: I have to leave, but if you come up with a plan with Architecture and Engineering, I would listen to that. (Leaves.)

Driscoll: Why start from $40 million, that’s like building from the group up?

Epstein: What you’re saying makes sense, but it’s not doable. Don’t take offense, but the benefits faculty have here are out of line. Overly generous compared to other schools. We tried to talk about it and it was a battle. Cutting $20 million is not realistic.

Bharucha: I want to see good benefits. We should ensure that it is affordable to people who work here.

Ashford: Yes, but lets be real, 80% of classes in the School of Art are taught by uninsured faculty. Can we try to look beyond barriers to certain conversations like these? The whole reason for this meeting is to say that we’re a committed core willing to start from scratch and creatively address finances.

Driscoll: There are long and short-term issues. This is great for the intermediate, but we need a short-term solution now.

Raad: The revenue-generating programs we were designing weren’t going to make money until after two or three years. There were talks of going to the Attorney General for a loan, if we can prove that everyone is on board for a sincere reinvention.

Epstein: You need tangibles or you’re just kicking the can down the road.

Raad: The only tangible solution was the M.Arch program.

Bharucha: Even if you downsize to $40 million, you have to sustain that. There’s inflation in healthcare, so you can’t sustain that. No bargaining unit would agree to a 1.5% increase over 30 years.

Raad: The hope is that our fundraising will increase.

Bharucha: It will. Last year was a record year with $9.7 million raised, but two-thirds of it is restricted. Most gifts now are restricted funds, right now only about $3 million is unrestricted. To get to $15 million would be a 500% increase! There are estimates you can expect to raise by, 5, 6, maybe 7% is considered ambitious. A 500% increase cannot be our plan. No one is capable of helping us at that scale. If you don’t think I’m making the pitch, I’ll bring you along and you can make the pitch. The largest universities are anchored by their alumni. We don’t educate our students to become rich, nor should we. But then we have alumni who don’t give back. The largest lifetime gift from an alumni is only $2 million. At other schools it is $30 million. We can’t just say “raise more money”. After recognizing our unsustainability in the ’60s they gave away the Cooper-Hewitt museum. That was a huge loss.

Epstein: And unless they went to Cooper, donors have their own schools to donate to.

Driscoll: This is a rich vein. It’s hard to find people who write five or six figure checks. Maybe we can help. But we still need a plan.

Epstein: We’ve been talking about giving tours of the school to wealthy people.

Bordo: We have produced excellent visible artists for years. That we do this is an untapped resource. It creates many friends of Cooper. We have tremendous social and cultural reach. Maybe not for the ask, but to tell the story of saving this place.

Driscoll: How do you tap it?

Bordo: One issue is that artists and collectors are not represented well enough on the Board. When we talk to people in the art world, they don’t know the Board, it doesn’t look like them. Alex Katz was a resource.

Bharucha: Katz is on my presidential council, giving me names, but he also has issues with the school.

Bordo: The art school produces something the Development office is not able to understand, based on my conversations.

Ellis: There is a discrepancy between the Art Faculty and Development. The art world has its own peculiar moires, normal development strategies are not going to be effective. That’s why Katz was effective. There needs to be a conversation between students and faculty and development, we need to change the administrative culture.

Bharucha: I can’t take responsibility for the past fifty years. We’re building capacity with Development now.

Driscoll: How do we engage faculty? Who calls who when?

Bordo: We really are invested. To reiterate Sharon’s comment: we’re not trying to throw a wrench. This is an act of faith. A partnership.

Ashford: A story has to be crafted, and development can’t do it.

Bharucha: There are many stories. Yours is not the only one. Even Alex Katz’s is different. When I had lunch with him he said to shut the school down because it has lost its way.

Ashford: We know.

Bharucha: There is a wide range of Cooper experiences. You’re asking why we haven’t told your story. If I sounds like I’m not a believer, it’s because I hear many stories and others want theirs told too. Many think the mission of Cooper is to make outstanding, distinct contributions to society in tangible ways. I listen for hours. “Why isn’t Cooper leading in innovation?” “Why are we departing from Hejduk’s legacy?” There are many that agree with Mark Epstein. Yours is not the only narrative.

Epstein: We’re looking at every possible action. The other schools came up with plans to help, and you started to but stopped. Now we’re talking about Development. Development isn’t going to solve the problem.

Bharucha: Recently, one donor gave an eight-figure gift to another school. I asked why and he said Cooper was no longer the leader in advancing science and technology. We have to grapple with others. Your story doesn’t raise money. Our narrative has to mesh with theirs. Philanthropists today see themselves as investors. And the opportunity for corrupting the integrity of the program is larger than ever. Especially here. Donors ask all the time for favors in admission. For example, they say, “let this person in”, and we say, “no”, and then they don’t donate.

Epstein: People don’t give you money because you need money. People give you money because they want to be a part of something, put their name on something. You have to play these tricks.

Hayes: This is the burden of the three schools.

Bharucha: Plus a faculty of humanities.

Hayes: People in invest in art for almost the opposite reasons. You’re absolutely right that this isn’t a single story and doesn’t have to be. There is an institutional need to come together and discuss both the differences and the singularities. Tom was pursuing the School of Art’s relationship to Development.

Epstein: Everybody wants progress but nobody wants change. Lets stop talking about development and get back to what the School of Art can do to make money besides just asking.

Adams: Professionalized development people don’t belong here. We at least need an interface, so that they can speak about this with passion. I’ve never sensed it.

Bharucha: I’m not sure that’s fair. Donors expect professionalism and personal attention. You can’t speak to major donors without a major gifts person.

Ashford: There may be reasons to break expectations like these. What we do every day in art. Like a collage.

Epstein: I can’t go back to the Board after this meeting and tell them, “they just said raise more money”.

Raad: We have said much more than that. Living within our means—

Epstein: Okay, you talked about raising money and merit. This is not a simple question.

Eagleton: I think what Professor Raad is getting at is that it’s not as simple as cutting classes. We have to rethink the relationship between the schools, curricular issues, etc.

Raad: You cannot say “School of Art, this is your target amount that you need to raise”. It’s a false question. You can’t be so reductive. It needs to be a discussion with the whole institution. Our former president reminded us that we are teachers no researchers.

Bharucha: This is the burden of the past, what does Campbell have to do with this?

Raad: Your transparency is refreshing, but there’s drag. How do we reinvent? Generate or cut is too limited.

Bharucha: I tried to bring the school together with Joint Faculty Meetings but attendance was spotty. Peoples’ hours were different. The culture was not at the point to come up with solutions. There was no joint faculty governance, which is why I broke the charge into pieces from each school. We need to get that going. I travel listening to donor concerns. One donor was outraged by a pro-Palestine event in the Great Hall, but we were able to connect over science. He said he could only donate if I could promise to never have that kind of event again. I said we couldn’t and he didn’t accept that. When you pitch the idea you forget that it’s about connecting with people. The narrative needs to be as diverse as the donors.

Epstein: What if there had been a student on the board 5 years ago when we were talking about closing schools. What if students knew? Where would we be now?

Ashford: We knew. We tend to know. We’re trying as a joint faculty. This meeting is evidence of that. Things have changed due to positive involvement of students. We’re not asking for this to be the only thing. You’re looking for a package. I’m flattered that we were involved but we were asked to give it away.

Bharucha: It was intended to protect the institution.

Ashford: It didn’t.

Bharucha: Quiet faculty tell me that’s not the core value. You can’t write them off. You can’t respond to people who think the opposite as you with outrage.

Ashford: And we don’t. We’re here to talk. To harness this momentum from the students and faculty. It can be used to create a new conversation with Development. To protect our primary asset and give us a different relationship to fundraising. The faculty is engaged, we keep describing the problem. Use us to build consensus.

Bharucha: The fact of the matter is that joint faculty meetings have spotty attendance, it is hard to get people involved. And you have to be prepared to listen to people with very different opinions. We need representative not ad-hoc groups.

Epstein: People can’t agree on the primary asset. Is the primary asset the scholarship or the academic excellence?

Hayes: Another issue is that these tuition-based programs would create a divide between students who pay and students who don’t. My experience teaching here is that there is something unique happening and you cannot categorically say you disagree with that.

Epstein: Before Cooper I went to Stony Brook. People paid different amounts and nobody cared.

Hayes: So did probably two-thirds of us, including me. As a teacher, not as a student, I can see a difference.

Osinski: My son just graduated from an Ivy League school and it is a totally different culture. People talk about who there is there on scholarship and who is a legacy. Your experience is not universal. It changes the social circles and the culture of the school.

Bharucha: Legacy and philanthropy are interrelated.

Osinski: And the students talk about it directly.

Raad: Even in this room we come from very different places and we started this process not all agreeing at all. But we have come to consensus. We did not start there. The consensus is that merit-based full-tuition scholarships are the central thing which needs to be sustained. As Doug said, use us for another kind of consensus. There is consensus here.

Ellis: What’s the mechanism is for having this school-wide conversation?

Bharucha: I’ve been asking that for a year-and-a-half! I would love to crack that nut but it is hard to people to schedule. People are committed to their individual schools. Ad-hoc groups are very productive but do not lead to consensus.

(At this point Epstein and De Menil and some faculty have to leave the meeting ends officially but people keep talking.)

Epstein: Thanks for your time.

Driscoll: This was unusually constructive.

Bos: Faculty can wrap up together. (to Jamshed) You can can stay if you want.

Bharucha: We’ve probably run our course but I can stay until noon.

Bos: How do we build on this momentum? An hour-and-a-half meeting next week? Are we talking about just School of Art?

Bharucha: I’m in Boston for a fundraiser. I want to continue with Join Faculty. We’ve been flummoxed by representation.

Ellis: What about a Senate meeting?

Essl: What about using Senate time?

Ashford: If this really is a sinking ship and the house is on fire people will come. We can meet on a Saturday. If it’s really that bad, we can figure it out.

Hayes: As Senate secretary for two years the culture isn’t great, but if the issue and the urgency is made clear, there will be attendance. Perhaps there need to be preliminary meetings, one long meeting, or a series of meetings. We need a slight structure. One regular meeting won’t do it.

Bharucha: It needs representative consensus. Criticism is unfair and inaccurate. It’s only been 18 months. We do raise money. I know I’m politically unpopular but I could use support. We never reached consensus even in the Revenue Generating Task Force, it was fraught.

Adams: The Task Force was not the right type of representation, it didn’t have enough intellectual capital, there were lots of outsiders, and it was very corporate.

Bharucha: Not everyone agrees. It was organized to the best of my abilities.

Ashford: Dennis is not saying that in order to say it was a mistake, but that we need to figure out how to make this work, figure out the right type of representation.

Raad: (to Jamshed) You said yourself last week how long it took you to get here, to realize how bad things are. Especially for somebody who had been deceived. Things take time & conversation.

Jamshed: I have to agree. The protest community just puts forth allegations. I’m a junkie for this kind of larger discussion.

Raad: Let’s bring the unions.

Bos: Jamshed was trying to do this.

Bharucha: Election of faculty reps was foiled because Architecture only has two full-time faculty. You need to help me. I can’t solve all your problems. We all have responsibilities. (to Walid) I can’t reconsider the context of labor, as you said. You have to do it. If it’s not everybody at the table, and we can’t have that, we need representation.

More people leaving, meeting basically over. Casual discussion of how to frame next week’s all-school faculty meeting in order to get attendance, figure out topics of discussion, suggestions from dean Bos to the student reps to try organizing something in parallel with students from all three schools.