Though today's administration, besieged by an unprecedented budget crisis, insists that it must «creatively alter» this legacy
of free education, university organizers claim, in the words
of the communique released by Students for a Free Cooper
Union, that «an expansionist strategy and lack
of accountability have put this college in a financial deficit,» and that «all tuition - based revenue - generating programs are a departure from Cooper
Union's
historic mission, and will corrupt the college's
role as an ethical model for higher education.»
Jackson tells me that she first encountered new ways to think about the
historic role of abstraction during her undergraduate tenure at Cooper
Union, where several artist teachers, including Walid Raad, Dore Ashton, and Doug Ashford, showed her that artists could be part
of critical, public political theory.