The Cooper Union

"My story today is not my own: it is Peter Cooper’s. He died in 1883, but his legacy is just as important now as it was then. He believed that education is a public good - that it should be available to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay, gender, race, religion, social class, or political beliefs. This may not seem like a huge thing now, but it was then.

The reason I bring it up now is because the institution he founded, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, is in trouble. It has been a full-scholarship college for art, architecture, and engineering students since 1902 but it will run out of money in 2015 unless it gets significant help.

I’m not soliciting donations (I doubt there are a lot of rogue billionaires on this list anyway. . .) but I would like you to take 10 seconds to Google “Cooper Union” and learn about Peter Cooper’s dream for education. It has become my dream as well (I’ve taught there since 2009) and it makes me sad that its future is in jeopardy."


Ben Davis
New York, NY

Comments

Post a Comment

Favorites

This is a puzzle.

Beyond this message a challenge awaits; In the listserve, no links are allowed, what a cruel fate! The first clue must be deciphered by ROT 8. . Let me know and just email if your brain needs a spark Your first clue is just after this punctuation mark / dsoqwj vwxwfvafy lge jgtafkgf af lg cadd s egucafytajv Listserve Puzzle listservepuzzle[AT]gmail.com
Read more

21,612 is a lot

Hi, everyone. I'm a teenaged girl. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I know much about the world. I'm 18, a freshman in college, and I struggle every day trying to see into the future: into what might be, where I might go. Recently I've decided that my destiny in life is to be a high-school biology teacher, but ask me again later and perhaps that will have changed. One thing I feel passionate about is body modification. Somehow my standards of beauty have developed in a way that put piercings, tattoos, implants and scarification at the forefront. However, my parents have threatened to cut off their funding for my education if I modify myself in any way. I already have piercings, and though my family will never see them due to their private locations, I would love to be able to share this important part of my life with them and express myself through modification in a more public way. Essentially, they have rejected my lifestyle, and through this, they have ...
Read more

Tiny wings

Hi all, I want to write about a subject that is very close to my heart - bees! I started bee keeping last year, and have two colonies right now. These two already managed to supply my family and my friends with more than enough honey, and keeping the bees is a tremendously satisfying activity. They smell so good, and are very tidy animals, and are just very, very interesting overall. The insects' way of dealing with the world is just so very different from how we as mammals approach it - it seems almost alien. Anyways, what is probably most impressive is the workload these little animals deal with. For one kilo of honey, they visit 4 million flowers, and fly a distance equivalent of more than 4 times around the earth. Think about that for a second. And then, if you start to think about how they "furniture" their housing themselves by the wax they sweat out, how they can control temperature inside the hive to the tenth of a degree, how they collectively make decisions i...
Read more