Our Cooper Stories

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DISCIPLINE

AS TOLD BY ALUMNI OF THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AND ART

MESSAGE FROM BILL MEA ACTING PRESIDENT, THE COOPER UNION

Since arriving at Cooper Union in September 2014, and especially after assuming my current role as Acting President, I have listened to members of the Cooper Union community tell of the often dramatic impact that The Cooper Union had on their lives. These stories, expressed with great conviction, demonstrated to me the extraordinary results of Peter Cooper’s vision.

I found that those stories emboldened and strengthened me in my resolve to fight for The Cooper Union, to preserve its legacy for future generations. I thought that if more people knew about the exceptional contributions of Cooper graduates, we could gain additional financial support for Cooper Union and ensure its continued legacy. I called on the Cooper community to write down their stories so we could collect and publish them, both online and in hard copy.

I’m delighted to say that the response was as varied, intelligent and colorful as the Cooper community itself. Our Cooper Stories demonstrates the power of collective narrative and the shared love for the school.

You have my thanks for what you do to sustain Cooper Union and my continued pledge of devotion to the ideals that make Cooper Union great.

Sincerely,

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CHARLES BLISS 1939 | CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

I am, at 98, perhaps one of the oldest Cooper Union alumni, if not the oldest. In addition I am, perhaps, unique in that at this age I still am engaged in my professional activities as a chemical engineer with extensive experience in energy production and utilization over a period of 76 years. In November 2015 my colleague and I were awarded U.S. patent 9,187,724 concerned with a method to optimize the utilization of captured carbon dioxide through the cultivation and processing of microalgae. Moreover, my colleague and I, at this writing, are in the process of applying for a second U.S. patent, this one concerning a method for capturing carbon dioxide from the gaseous emissions produced by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Our goal in these efforts is the ultimate mitigation of adverse environmental impacts of major use of fossil fuels in modern economies.

We are involved in a startup company that will own our patents and become the licensing agent and we have two additional inventions in mind at this time for eventual patenting. The four inventions as a group in our view represent a route for the preservation of the world’s huge fossil energy resources to maintain the economic progress and quality of life that the Industrial Revolution has given us, while at the same time avoiding the environmental deterioration that excessive emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere can cause.

I would not be in this position now, if it were not for the opportunity afforded me during the 1930s for a college education by the tuition-free Cooper. It is difficult for one who has not experienced firsthand the

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economic conditions in the United States during the 1930s to appreciate the obstacles I faced as a young man highly motivated to obtain a future as a chemical engineer. My interests in chemical engineering had developed during high school, but my options for a tuition-free college education were limited to either the College of the City of New York, CCNY as it was then known, or The Cooper Union. I graduated from De Witt Clinton High School in 1934 with an average of 86% (the top average of the graduates was, I recall, 93). I recall that CCNY at the time did not have much of a reputation as an engineering school and that it was in somewhat of an upheaval because of a student body with a large left-wing population. I had no interest in applying.

Instead in 1934 I applied to The Cooper Union and took the entrance examinations. I recall there were 600 applications with the policy that 100 would be accepted. I was not accepted. Nevertheless, I applied again in 1935 and was accepted. I graduated in 1939 when, by that time, the original class of 100 had dwindled to 44. I was 23rd in the class.

I recall hearing stories of graduates in accounting or law, who paid companies for the right to be employed and to gain on-the-job experience. In New York City one could travel long distances in public transit for five cents. First class postage and the daily newspaper cost three cents.

My family was fortunate in that my father, who was a restaurant waiter with an income based on minimum wages and tipping by the restaurant customers, was able to support our family’s needs for food, shelter, and clothing, but little else. There were no savings, no vacations, and recreation limited to the movies at a ten-cent admission charge. Payment of educational expenses beyond high school was out of the question.

The 1939 class of engineers came almost entirely from the New York metropolitan area and lived at home. Expenses largely comprised transportation costs, lunches not brought from home, school fees, textbooks, and what was then the ‘computer,’ the slide rule. I was

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I especially remember the course in chemical engineering thermodynamics that was taught by Professor James Coull (with a Scottish accent). I have had to go back to my textbook for that course in order to perform the calculations to support the development of my current patent position.

able to earn sufficient money to cover these expenses through summer work largely through opportunities from family and relatives. Eventually, after graduation in June 1939, opportunities for employment opened up because of the U.S. defense program caused by the war in Europe. I obtained my first position in January 1940 as a junior draftsman in a company that designed and built oil refineries, which determined my specialization in energy and the focus of my future career.

Nine years after graduation, in 1948, Cooper Union awarded me the Professional Degree in Engineering based on my professional activities to that date. As an employee of Foster Wheeler and Arthur D. Little I worked on highly-specialized technical energy-oriented projects and had broad-scope involvement in the sociological and economic aspects of developmental progress in emerging countries. My current interest in mitigating adverse environmental impact of fossil fuel utilization in major part arises from the experiences of that combination.

I owe these accomplishments to the high quality of the education I received at Cooper Union, especially from the faculty. I especially remember the course in chemical engineering thermodynamics that was taught by Professor James Coull (with a Scottish accent). I have had to go back to my textbook for that course in order to perform the calculations to support the development of my current patent position.

In 2011, I was the recipient of the Gano Dunn award, which I accepted at the annual Peter Cooper birthday celebration at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. This recognition came because of

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my achievements to that date in a combination of engineering activities and through involvement in technical assistance activities in developing countries, notably through lengthy residences in northern Nigeria, Colombia, the Philippines, Ghana, and Pakistan among others. In gratitude for what I received from Cooper Union, I have been able to establish the Helen Janet Bliss Scholarship, fund the inscription of the names of my wife and myself on the stairway in the new building, and through an anonymous person have my name inscribed on the terrace of the new building.

I have specified the circumstances for the scholarship to help present day needy students at Cooper Union to cover the expenses associated with their Cooper Union education, an order-of-magnitude larger than those I encountered. They as much as I still need the great benefits of tuition-free education, which shaped my life and career.

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JOHN CASAZZA 1944 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

One day after high school l came home from my job as a messenger and I was greeted by my mother who gave me a big hug. I had taken the exam for Cooper Union. She said, “Cooper Union has admitted you.”

At Cooper Union I needed some supplemental funds since my father and mother had very little income. Barely enough to pay for my subway fare from home to Cooper Union each day. Dr. Walter Watson was handling students’ problems at that time and arranged some assignments for me. One was as assistant for the medical exams done each year for all the Cooper Union students. I arranged the schedules for the exams and assisted the exams by taking blood pressure, height and weight. He also arranged for me to work on a government program in the Cooper Union library where I was taught to rebind books. I had the opportunity to work with some of Peter Cooper’s personal library.

I also helped in the monitoring of the entrance exam for others who applied to Cooper Union. I was paid 30 cents an hour for this work and this was a great help.

When I reached draft age, I went to the Navy office and volunteered for a special engineering program that the Navy was conducting. The Navy let me finish my third year at Cooper Union and then ordered me to go to electrical engineering school at Cornell University. There, I began to realize how good my Cooper Union education had been. I finished at the top of the electrical engineering class at Cornell University, receiving a BEE degree. Cornell then sent me to Princeton for supplemental training.

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The Navy let me finish my third year at Cooper Union and then ordered me to go to electrical engineering school at Cornell University. There, I began to realize how good my Cooper Union education had been.

The Navy was planning to provide the engineering personnel needed for the invasion of Japan. After Princeton, I was sent to the Naval Academy at Annapolis to become a reserve officer. At the Naval Academy I was commissioned an Ensign and assigned to the USS Springfield CL66, where I was made Chief of the E division which handled all electric power equipment on the ship. It took almost six months of assignment from one ship to the other until I caught up to the Springfield. Before that, the atomic bomb had been dropped and peace was declared. I was offered the opportunity to continue my Naval career but decided that I wanted to go back to my family and help them and live a more normal life.

I have always considered myself a member of the Cooper Union alumni. I have contributed funds from time to time to help the new Cooper Union students.

Attached is another check.

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RUTH RESNICOW AMIEL 1946 | SCHOOL OF ART

Born in 1927, I cannot ever remember not wanting to be an artist. It was ALWAYS the forerunner and my only choice for my future.

My mother however, was horrified at the thought of her sweet little daughter as a Bohemian ne’er do well and I was denied opportunities to go to art classes, museums and the like to learn and fulfill my dream…my hearts desire.

As I grew older and choices for high schools were approaching, I really had to fight to go to the art school in Brooklyn called “Girls Commercial High School” which had both academic and art studies. I won the hot and heavy arguments and spent high school learning and loving art. I also had the opportunity to learn drafting from my brother (a Cooper Union engineering graduate) and I was really very good at it …as it introduced me to Architecture as well…which soon became my second love.

World War II was at its most intense moments when I graduated high school, and with so many men away at war, with the need for draftsmen so great, at 16 years old I was hired as a draftsman at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where my job was to draw the plans and rearrange piping and electrical, for the second level of the Aircraft Carrier FDR as well as assessing damages on ships in from the sea wars. A most extraordinary, soul-satisfying accomplishment to say the least.

Fulfilling my need to help our country and its fighting men…

As we were not a very “comfortable” family money wise, and I also was the “girl” in the family, my brother was given the opportunity, nay,

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My dream had come true. When I opened the acceptance letter, I ran through the streets waving it and yelling to my neighbors that I had MADE IT!…

he was urged to go to engineering college. Luckily he was accepted by and ultimately graduated from Cooper. I, on the other hand, being a girl, had the choice of becoming a nurse, teacher or secretary. Girls simply did NOT go to college.

I fought long, loud and hard and was finally allowed by my parents, to take the test at Cooper because it was a free school and would not cost anything. Now that I had stood my ground and chose my path in the arts I would live my dream if I could get into this free school.

I applied and I took the three-day test (I think I remember that time) and to my surprise and hysterical delight and joy, I was accepted.

My dream had come true. When I opened the acceptance letter, I ran through the streets waving it and yelling to my neighbors that I had MADE IT and three blocks later reached my father’s family grocery store still waving the letter and crying…I made it…I passed the test at Cooper Union.

I stood up for my dream and it was now about to come true. I cannot describe the time spent at Cooper. Lunches sitting at the feet of Peter’s statue, buying my first set of drafting instruments in a pawn shop on the Bowery (which I still have and use) learning to SEE what I looked at and to be able to portray the scene on paper or canvas using paint, ink, mixtures of all sorts. Giving my mind the freedom to translate life as I thought I saw it…in my own way. Finding my love of architecture—I switched my major—but no matter how I studied, I didn’t have enough math and reverted to Fine Arts which added some time to my school years.

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Studying the past artists and their works…always learning about what I loved best then and now with the best professors and people who didn’t just teach, but mentored and opened doors for me to fly through.

I had the great good fortune to marry a man (for 64 years) who urged me to continue to learn…giving me opportunities to travel the world to study and learn from others. I lived with a Japanese embroidery master in Japan for one month at a time…on my knees…learning traditional Japanese embroidery…learning another way of seeing color, texture, design with the life and heart behind the work…and which captured my life for almost 33 years.

Now at 88 years old, I am the mother of three, grandmother of six, and great-grandmother of two, I have taken to the computer. Still using the lessons I learned all those years ago, I am producing electronic “paintings” as I continue to nurture the love of my life. My art!

Thank you Peter Cooper and Cooper Union.

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JACQUELINE BISSETT AUGUSTSON 1947 | SCHOOL OF ART

In 1943 when I started my first job at Famous Studios, which made animation shorts shown in movie theaters, I was accepted to Cooper Union. The night art classes were four nights a week for four years and I loved every minute.

Our great teachers included Peppino Mangraviti, Mr. Delavante, Mr. Dingilian, Hans Moller and Henrietta Schultz. Because of my exposure to these wonderful professors and artists, my career and life has been immersed in the art field.

My education provided by Cooper Union has enhanced my life and travels with Sydne Meyers (also class of 1947) on our many trips around the world through our 25 years of traveling together.

Many weekends were spent at Camp Green and the friendships have lasted for over 60 years from nine girls to around 20 or more guys and girls (with many engineers and artists) in the third and fourth years (and of course all the chaperones). Chores were distributed evenly as we did all our cooking and clean up in the Great Kitchen with its huge pots hanging over the work table.

In the evenings we would sit by a roaring fire in the Great Room and have a wonderful time. I have many wonderful memories and am grateful for my time spent at Cooper Union.

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ANNAMAY OLSEN 1951 | SCHOOL OF ART

I began Cooper Union Night Art classes during the late 1940s after graduating from the High School of Industrial Art (now Art & Design High School). Out one evening in the area of Astor Place I ran into a high school classmate who was on her way to take the entry test at Cooper Union and suggested I come along and take it with her! I worked days in the field of Fashion Illustration while majoring in Graphic Design; since the Fashion Illustration class had been canceled and I graduated in 1951. Though I enjoyed a 36-year career as a fashion illustrator—the introductory courses in the first year, Architecture, Photography, Painting, as well as all the others through the years, were all very beneficial! I was involved in many extra curricular activities such as weekends at Camp Green in Ringwood, NJ and the Green Camp Committee, the Pioneer newspaper, frat parties and formal dances! I was introduced to a variety of art forms and associations that matured me in a very special way and retained many friendships made during my years at Cooper. After graduation, I participated in a number of alumni events such as a dinner at Delmonico’s in Wall Street, a hydroplane trip up the Hudson to Bear Mountain picnic grounds, a Governor’s Island visit and a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to a restaurant. I’m forever grateful for that accidental meeting with a high school friend which brought me my enriching experience at Cooper.

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JOAN GOLD 1954 | SCHOOL OF ART

I suspect my story will be similar to that of many of the people who had the fortunate experience of a Cooper Union education.

At 17 I wanted only an art education, nothing else. My family did not have the means to pay any form of tuition. After I took the entrance exam I went to see the Cooper annual show and left in tears. I was amazed by what I saw and couldn’t imagine myself doing anything of that quality. But I was accepted, I learned and I found myself. The experience was tremendously validating and those were years that became central to everything that followed.

I graduated with a fellowship from the Institute of International Education (a Buenos Aires Convention Grant, another life changer) to spend a year in Venezuela painting the tropics. After that, a stint designing textiles in New York City and then back to Venezuela where I married and raised my four children. After 24 years there, I returned to the US in my forties as a full time painter.

Now in my eighties I live in a rural area, paint, and sell enough paintings to support myself modestly. It is a happy old age and I am always aware that it was at Cooper that my real life began. I am beyond grateful. http://joangoldart.com/home.html Blog by Joan Gold

AS TOLD BY ALUMNI OF THE COOPER UNION

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PETER ADLER 1954 | SCHOOL OF ART

The spring of 1951 was the end of my second year at Cooper Union.

One evening at the end of that year my Cooper classmate Sheldon Rose’s father drove in from Queens to help bring home Shelly’s artwork and the contents of his locker. Since I lived near the Roses, they offered to drive me and my materials home as well. Shelly’s sister Ruth had come along for the ride and she and I hit it off. In 1955 Shelly asked me to serve as an usher at his wedding. His sister Ruth was the maid of honor and we had a wonderful time together. Since 1951 Ruth and I had dated occasionally, for instance spending days together at Cooper Union’s “Green Camp” picnics. I was also present at Ruth’s graduation from Queens College in 1956. Ruth and I dated on and off for those five years, were married in 1956 and two children later are still together so many years after that memorable ride from Cooper Union to Queens.

After graduation in 1954 I volunteered my service to Cooper’s public relations department, designing a monthly magazine plus a variety of literature and advertising. For many years I also served on the Alumni Council. In 1975 I received my Bachelor of Arts degree from Cooper as part of President John F. White’s External Degree Program. In 2009 I was re-elected to serve on the Alumni Council. So you see Cooper Union has been a very important part of our lives. We have a large number of friends from Cooper and Ruth and I have returned to Cooper as participants in the Cooper Alumni Phonathon. We very seriously consider ourselves an Almost Cooper Couple.

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JAMES TELLEFSEN JR. 1955 | SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

I graduated from Cooper Union in 1955. In those days they had a night architecture school: four nights a week and three days of homework for four years. This was acceptable to Architectural Review Boards with three years of experience after graduation. I received my license in New Jersey on February 5, 1959, when I was 25 years old, and started my practice the same year.

I later received my Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cooper in 1977, after submitting photos of completed structures designed by my firm, and further education in the Humanities.

My family could not afford paying for college and my parents had told me that I could not go to college, much less be an architect, “a rich man’s profession.”

You can see that Cooper Union’s tuition-free education was what made my life a success.

I hope the current students become successful in their lives and remember what they owe to Cooper, and also contribute toward making Cooper Union tuition-free again. It has been my pleasure to assist students in reaching their goals, and I plan to continue to thank CU by contributing to others in the future.

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RICHARD LYTLE 1955 | SCHOOL OF ART

Ray Dowden was head of the art department during my attendance at Cooper (1952-55). Although I had been painting seriously for ten years prior and had sold several on commission I was thinking of a career in advertising. Rudy DeHarak hired me to work for him part time while I was his student and I won a scholarship to the Art Directors Club where I learned what really mattered to an account executive, and it wasn’t art. But the real turning point in my evolution was when Ray Dowden (who also at that time was also director of art at the Yale Summer School for Music and Art) petitioned Yale to allow me to attend the all scholarship program—even though I was only finishing the second year of a three year program and all other schools sent juniors from four year programs. Because my training at Cooper Union was so thorough I did well at the summer program (and it probably didn’t hurt that the main instructor in painting then was Nick Marsicano from Cooper!).

The faculty from Yale thought well of my work and encouraged me to apply to Yale, which I did. Albers accepted me, later chose me as his assistant in instruction for both drawing and color and upon graduation I received a Fulbright to Italy. The paintings I did in Italy were chosen for the “16 Americans” exhibition at MoMA in 1959 and Yale hired me to teach full time in 1960. I will always be grateful for the intensive, six hours a day for five days training at Cooper. It was a solid foundation for a long career both in the studio and the classroom. I taught and administered at Yale for more than 40 years and am still pushing a paintbrush around in my studio.

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DONALD SCHWINN 1957 | CIVIL ENGINEERING

After graduating the Bronx High School of Science in June 1952 at age 16 I entered The Cooper Union that fall. I became almost immediately involved in varsity basketball and volleyball, several clubs, and weekend trips to Green Camp. These activities, coupled with my three-hour daily commuting from the north Bronx and back led to my underperforming in my freshman year and having to repeat some courses. This delayed my graduation until 1957.

At Bronx Science my guidance counselor told me I was foolish to think I could qualify for entrance into CU. Luckily, he was wrong! I actually had applied as a chemical engineer and was told by CU’s interviewer that I ranked 27 out of 25 applicants in that discipline. I was also advised that if I changed to civil engineering I’d rank 23 out of 25.

That was fortuitous as my first job led to my very successful career in environmental engineering. However, I found in that first job that a master’s degree was essential if I was to choose that field as my future occupation. So in 1958-59 I did a whirlwind nine-month master’s fellowship program at MIT in what was then called sanitary engineering which has now broadened greatly into environmental engineering. I was able to breeze through this program not only because of learning tough courses at Cooper but also because, instead of three hours commuting daily, MIT’s classrooms were across the street from their Graduate House where I resided. And my two highly disciplined doctoral candidate roommates (one from CU class of 1956) were also a great help.

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It’s fair to say that with degrees from Bronx Science, The Cooper Union and MIT one could not ask for a better education, especially with no tuition! There was no other way my parents and I could have afforded to get a college and post-graduate education. I strongly support the effort to restore the no-tuition policy that made my engineering education possible.

With Cooper and MIT degrees I was offered a job at Metcalf & Eddy in Boston, one of the largest and first engineering firms to specialize in the field of sanitary/environmental engineering. I rose to become the youngest ever to be appointed Vice-President.

After 13 years there, I was approached by Stearns & Wheler, a midsize civil and environmental engineering firm in the Syracuse, NY area, to join the firm as a partner. Three of the other four partners also had master’s degrees from MIT, a powerful connection. After 25 years in that position having managed more than 200 projects I retired, having achieved national recognition in the advanced wastewater treatment field and being influential in the five-fold growth of the firm.

I met my wife, Mary Lou, about a week after my Cooper Union graduation. We recently celebrated our 55th anniversary. We spend six months a year at our house on Cape Cod and the other months at our Florida home or traveling the world.

The only negative aspect of attending CU was the lack of an oncampus residential experience. Most of my pre- and post-retirement friends have had this experience at larger colleges forming lasting friendships with classmates. In my case, especially after moving away from New York City, it was difficult to maintain friendships. But to all my classmates and teammates who might read this, I remember you all and hope you might get in touch at donschwinn@comcast.net

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ALBERT CARNESALE 1957 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

As I entered Cooper Union in 1953, my ambition was quite simple: to become an engineer (like my cousin Leo) and to get a job in which I would work in an office, wear a tie, and earn $100 per week (or more).

Four years later, I was graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in mechanical engineering, went to work for The Martin Company (a predecessor of Lockheed Martin Corp.), and took comfort in knowing that my goals had been met.

As a young engineer, I learned how to use analog and digital computers to perform calculations needed to design compact nuclear reactor systems for use at remote locations and radio-isotopic generators for auxiliary power in space satellites. The work was exciting and provided a strong incentive to pursue further study. An after-hours graduate program sponsored by Drexel University enabled me to earn a Master’s Degree in mechanical engineering, but by then I wanted more. This led to my taking a position as a full-time instructor in nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and to continue my part-time graduate studies, which led to a PhD in nuclear engineering in 1966.

A sabbatical leave from the NCSU faculty provided an opportunity for me to work at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (the functions of which have since been absorbed by the State Department) on implementation and verification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was to enter into force early in 1970. Soon after my September 1969 arrival in Washington, however, it was announced that the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to hold Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) intended to constrain the nuclear arms

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competition, and I was invited to work on that. My participation in the negotiations provided an introduction to fields such as policy analysis, national security, international relations and politics, as well as opportunities to work closely with leading scholars and practitioners in those fields. My assignment in government stretched from one year to three, ending with my return to NCSU soon after the May 1972 signing of the SALT agreements. But the SALT experience led to redirection of my career path. I returned to NCSU not as a professor of nuclear engineering, but as a professor of university studies, with administrative responsibility for the university’s interdisciplinary programs.

In 1974, scholars at Harvard University with whom I had worked on SALT facilitated my being offered a position as associate director of Harvard’s newly created Program for Science and International Affairs, and I accepted enthusiastically. Our mission was to conduct research on national security issues and to guide the research of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. The Program was very successful, raised funds for an endowment, and became the first research center (now known as the Belter Center for Science and International Affairs) in Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Part of the endowment was dedicated to establishment of a professorial chair, and I was selected to hold it. As a professor, I taught courses, conducted and guided research, and consulted to government on policy issues having substantial scientific and technological dimensions. Over time, I also held a number of administrative positions at Harvard, including academic dean and then dean of the Kennedy School, and provost of the University.

In 1997, I was offered the position of chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with responsibility for the full range of educational, research and service activities. Recognizing our nation’s need for excellent institutions of higher learning, both private and

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As a professor, I taught courses, conducted and guided research and consulted to government on policy issues having substantial scientific and technological dimensions.

public, I welcomed the opportunity to lead this outstanding public university. After nine productive and enjoyable years as UCLA Chancellor, I stepped down to resume my professorial career.

This has included teaching and research (e.g., in science, technology, and public policy, in national security policy, and in energy and environmental policy); chairing National Academies studies (e.g., on Nuclear Forensics, on America’s Climate Choices, and on NASA’s Strategic Direction); and serving on the U.S. Secretary of Energy Advisory Board and on the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.

No one, certainly not I, would have predicted or dreamed of this career. A number of people and institutions played key roles in making it happen. Cooper Union stands high on that list.

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GEORGE BARLETTA 1959 | CIVIL ENGINEERING

I left graduation and attended Sylvia Zalite’s wedding that weekend and joined NY Telephone Management Trainee Program the following Monday. They proceeded to train me in all things electronic and most thought I was an electrical engineering graduate in the years ahead. I spent the first five years working in Westchester County in a procession of engineering jobs. I was then sent to Manhattan to work at ATT Headquarters working on the original teletypewriters used with early timesharing systems. I became on of the early “gurus” of using our network for data communications. My commute was the same as going to Cooper just one more subway stop! I did find time to get an MBA at night from City University. Took too long because of interruptions from corporate offsite training at Cornell and Stanford.

After two years I was returned to NYT into a procession of engineering jobs in Manhattan and even found time to get a P.E. license which I never used. I then recognized that the path ahead required time in operations and was transferred to handle Cable Installation and maintenance for Manhattan and the Bronx. It was my first experience being “on call” 24/x365 days per year that followed the rest of my career.

Now promoted to AVP I returned to ATT again now in the rolling hills of New Jersey but found myself implementing computer operational support systems. In the middle of my tour the divestiture of the Bell System was announced and I was transferred to divestiture implementation. My job was to make sure the Bell Operating Companies got a fair share of the assets and revenues. Must have done a good job because Verizon and ATT (really SBC, Pacific and So Bell) are the only

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companies still standing. The only tragedy was the dissolution of Bell Laboratories and Western Electric. I had worked with them quite a bit.

I returned to NY Telephone just before the January 1, 1984 divestiture date and was made an officer in 1984. I was responsible for network operations and engineering for the company. Our main task was the implementation of equal access for all of the interexchange carriers which meant the replacement of all of our electromechanical switches.

It was fun for five years leading 25,000 people. I was involved in engineering and maintenance from step by step to crossbar to electronic to finally digital switches in my career. They were very exciting years, other officer assignments followed with NYNEX and I retired happily in 1995 on my timetable. As we merged the first surplus groups were the officers and they paid you to leave! Interesting the last assignment included responsibility for all the buildings in New York and New England. I finally used my Cooper degree. I did some consulting work for the next few years. One company was in the Sonoma Valley and that was a treat.

We moved back from New Jersey to Old Greenwich, CT and hope to stay here. After official retirement I began to “give back” and joined the board of a non-profit responsible for a Congregate Housing building for the elderly with 37 apartments. I serve as a vice president responsible for all the facilities. Job can be more consuming than working for money. I am also on a committee who keeps a group of NY Telephone senior managers connected via e-mail all year. We also gather for a dinner once a year.

I married an Irish lass (first generation pure Irish) in 1963 and we are married for 45 years. Our children call it an “integrated marriage.”

We have three children and as I have said earlier we made sure they got away from home to go to college. That is my only misgiving in going to Cooper Union. They are all doing well and have blessed us with three granddaughters.

I hope this does not sound like the brag and drag holiday cards we sometimes receive. I did leave out all of the pills I take and the aches and pains in my body!!!

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STEVEN BATTERMAN 1959 | CIVIL ENGINEERING

When I was a freshman at Cooper Union in 1955, Professor Leroy Buckingham told our English class, “look closely at the mother of the girl you are presently going with because that is the woman you will marry.� Professor Buckingham was so right! In March 1959, prior to graduation, I married Judith Wilpon, which has been the best decision of my life. Judy and I are celebrating our 57th wedding anniversary and have lived in Cherry Hill, NJ for 48 years. We are blessed to have three wonderful children and six fabulous grandchildren.

The other significant thing I took away from Cooper Union was a superb, fundamental engineering education that prepared me for a lifelong learning and growth experience. As a former Ivy League university professor for 33 years I can state with authority that the education I received at Cooper Union education has not been surpassed by any school/university I have compared it to. My Cooper Union education enabled me to grow as technology rapidly changed and new fields developed in the last half of the 20th century, and allowed me to branch out and change direction, as I needed to or desired.

Immediately after graduation from Cooper Union, I taught surveying at Green Camp in June 1959 before starting my summer job with Grad, Urban & Seelye, an engineering firm that was designing a 600-foot diameter radio telescope. It was a challenging structural task, since the dish had to retain its parabolic shape, within specified limits, as the telescope was turned and tilted. Recall that in 1959 finite element methods were not available nor were large high-speed computers. We

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I can state with authority that the education I received at Cooper Union education has not been surpassed by any school/university I have compared it to.

were very lucky to have an IBM 650 computer and a Friden mechanical calculator for square roots!

After the summer job ended, I started my graduate studies in September 1959 at the Division of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, RI. Our beloved professor, Charlie Peck, told me I would not be going anyplace for the next four to five years so I might as well have children. While at Brown, my son Scott was born in July 1960 followed by my daughter Risa in March 1963 (Scott is an engineer, specializing in forensics, with a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania, and Risa is a stained glass artist with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Warnborough College UK, Canterbury, England). I received my Sc.M. at Brown in 1961 and my Ph.D. in 1964, and left Brown in September 1964 to become a faculty member in the Towne School of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. While at Penn, my third child, Daniel, was born in 1967 (Daniel graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and is a lawyer).

At Penn, I rose rapidly up the academic ladder from assistant professor to associate professor to professor. Due to various university reorganizations, my primary academic appointment moved from the Towne School, to the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, and then to the Department of Bioengineering.

During 1970-71 I spent a fabulous sabbatical year, with my family and our collie (Oofie), at the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. By a wonderful coincidence, our classmate Lewis Felton was also there on sabbatical

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with his family! Israel was an incredible experience for all of us, including the dog, and enriched our lives enormously.

Returning to Penn from Israel I became engaged in research with the School of Dental Medicine and the School of Medicine looking at the oral cavity and the human body as a structural system. In addition to research, I taught in the Dental School and in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, School of Medicine and for 25 years held a secondary appointment as a Professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Interestingly, I also worked with the School of Veterinary Medicine doing research on gait analysis of race horses. Hence my expertise and continuing interest in biomechanics became highly developed. Along the way I developed and taught a pioneering course in forensic engineering, i.e., the application of engineering towards the purposes of the law, which received a great deal of nationwide publicity. In addition, I have served as an engineering and biomechanics expert in thousands of forensic engineering cases including the terrorist bombing of PAN AM 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. I have also been a media consultant in such high profile accidents as the Princess Diana accident, and the JFK, Jr. plane crash. After 33 continuous years, I retired from the University of Pennsylvania in September 1997 with the titles professor emeritus of bioengineering from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and professor emeritus of bioengineering in orthopaedic surgery from the School of Medicine.

Following my “retirement� from Penn I continued actively consulting to this day in the areas of forensic engineering, accident reconstruction and biomechanics. This consulting is done through my company, Batterman Engineering, LLC, which was formed with my son Scott and daughter, Risa. I also continue to do research and to publish, and along with Scott, we are currently developing our recently granted US Patent on a new method for determining slips leading to falls. Thank you Cooper Union for all you have done for my family and me.

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IVAN NELSON 1960 | CIVIL ENGINEERING

In high school I had vaguely heard of Cooper Union. I knew it was “a good” engineering school and was hard to get into. My math teacher, Mr. Graf, who taught at Cooper Union at night, suggested I apply.

I was rejected since I had not taken trigonometry. At the time, Passaic High School offered a new math class for seniors who were the best math students, called “Senior Math.” Previously, college bound seniors would take a half year of trig, followed by a half year of solid geometry. The new class included trig, solid geometry and an introduction to calculus. My teacher, Mr. Graf, wrote to Cooper and explained the situation, emphasizing that the new class was offered only to the best math students. Needless to say I was accepted.

I studied civil engineering since I had always been fascinated by bridges. I did well at Cooper, finishing first in my Civil Engineering class. I had never thought of graduate school. One of my main civil engineering professors, Anthony Armenakas, said of course you are going to graduate school! He advised that the best graduate schools in the field of applied mechanics were Brown, Columbia and Stamford.

I applied to the first two, and was accepted with fellowships at each.

I chose to go to Columbia where I was offered a three-year National Defense Education fellowship. I received my D Eng Sc in 1965.

In addition to working in industry, I also taught engineering classes at various times at Columbia and at NJIT. I even served as an advisor for a master’s thesis for a student at Cooper.

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PETER SCHMIDT 1960 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

This was first submitted to the Cooper Union in 1994, responding to the request of Memories of WW II. I added a few updates and submitted again to the 2016 call for stories.

To put my memories in context, I was born in Berlin, Germany, in October 1938, and eventually emigrated to the U.S. with my parents in October 1949. We lived in one of the distant suburbs of Berlin, in Neuenhagen, on a plot of land next to a wide open field and other well-separated houses, with no tactical or strategic targets nearby.

One evening in the early 1940s, there was yet another air-raid alarm.

It was likely that the planes were British, since the Americans had the popular reputation of flying bombing missions by day, and the British by night. As the planes flew over, presumably on their way to targets in Berlin, or perhaps returning, they dropped some small flare bombs in our vicinity. As we looked out, our garden had a number of these long, hexagonal “Stabbrandbomben� burning like candles; I think one even came through the house and stuck in our kitchen floor.

My father was at in Berlin that evening, at work as a metal trades teacher. My mother and I retreated to the cellar of our house, and it was there that we heard the extended shrill whistling of an approaching bomb, which then hit our house. We owe our lives to two extraordinarily fortunate circumstances, without which we would have perished: First, the cellar only extended under half of the house, and the bomb landed in the other half; second, it was an incendiary phosphorus

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bomb rather than an explosive one, otherwise the whole house would have been blown up, and we in it. While the house burned, my mother quickly salvaged what items she could, such as bedding.

Although I was only four or five years old at the time, all this has remained an amazingly vivid memory through the years. Oddly enough, ours was the only house in that whole area to be bombed during the entire war.

Now being homeless, my mother and I traveled to and lived with friends of the family in the Erzgebirge, in Sachsen (Saxony) near the Czech border, while my father remained at his job in Berlin as air-raids reduced much of the city to rubble.

After the end of the war, we returned to the Berlin area to re-unite, in what would later become East Germany. It was now that we learned what hunger meant. Food was very scarce, and finding food meant scavenging potato peelings and fatty paper from garbage heaps, as well as begging from Russian soldiers. We stole cabbages from fields; once, after being caught by a Russian soldier, we were released only because he became more interested in the bicycle of a passing rider. At age seven, I became the family expert in mushrooms so that we could gather them as food. Who of you would pick and eat orange-colored mushrooms that bled green when bruised? I knew they were safe, and the family trusted me.

Later on, relatives of ours in the U.S. sent CARE packages to us.

I can still recall these wonderful cartons marked #1 to #5, each with different selections of essential goods. Not too many people remember any more that there were real “care packages” at one time, from which the generic common-use phrase emanated.

To this day, these experiences have left an indelible mark on me of food as a sacred entity. It hurts me deeply to see the food that is wasted and thrown out here in the U.S. I’m the one in the family that still finishes what’s left on plates, and that eats the bread ends. Only one

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person that I met since understood completely, and had reacted the same way: a Hungarian refugee with quite similar experiences.

When my father found out from a friend at the local city hall that his name was on a list of people likely to be picked up (being perceived as having anti-communist sympathies), we decided that we had to leave East Germany. Those picked up by the officials and occupying forces often tended not to return. My father bought train tickets for a town near the East-West German border; purposely buying single tickets in three different places so as not to arouse suspicion. On the travel day, we each took only one suitcase, leaving behind all other possessions and our piece of land, so as to look like vacationers. Arriving at the town near the border, we found a number of similar-minded travelers intent on crossing, and joined into a group. The border was not yet fortified (this was 1947), and guarded sporadically. Townspeople were afraid to tell us when the border would be unguarded, so we all proceeded cautiously along the road toward it. To our great fortune, all we found at the time was a dug-up road, without guards. Some of the group wanted to rest immediately, but the more knowledgeable drove us on, explaining that there was first a no­mans-land to cross before safety in the West.

So now it’s about 50 years later. I have a good life, a 27-year marriage with a loving wife, and two fine children, and a career with several branches, and another to come. Last spring it was my good fortune to go back to Berlin after 47 years, to meet some relatives for the first time, and to actually visit that piece of land on which I spent my earliest years. My memories had held true, although everything was smaller than I remembered. I could even point out to the present owners why one portion of their garden plot kept settling and needing more soil— that was the house cellar in which we had survived back then.

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Notes added March 2004: Our house was bombed in the evening of November 18, 1943, which turned out to be a historic date in the war. Just recently I read more details about that evening in “Berlin Diaries, 1940-1954” by Marie Vassiltchikov (Vintage Books, 1988). She was a Russian princess, known as Missie, who worked in the German Foreign Office in Berlin, and kept a daily account of life during the war, in English. On this particular day, her entry reads: “Thursday, November 18...In the middle of supper at home....there was suddenly a lot of violent shooting. As there is no cellar, we took refuge in the kitchen, which is half underground, its windows overlooking a small garden, and sat there for two hours. There were several fires in our neighborhood and it became quite noisy. We later heard that several hundred planes had reached the outskirts of Berlin, but only about fifty got through the flak barrage.”

“Air-Marshall Harris’ attempt to ‘smash Germany to its knees’ consisted of a number of major air battles named after their main target.

By the fall of 1943 Harris’ bombers were poised to tackle their prize target—the capital of the Reich. Unsuspectingly, Missie has just described the opening shot of what was to become known as the ‘Battle of Berlin’.”

The second excerpt is an annotation by her brother. The starting date of the ‘Battle of Berlin’ is confirmed by an excerpt from an online RAF Bomber Command November 1943 diary entry (webpage no longer available) “18/19 November 1943 | The ‘Battle of Berlin’ begins: 440 Lancasters and four Mosquitos were dispatched. Few German fighters intercepted the force. Nine Lancasters were lost, 2% of the force. Berlin was completely cloud-covered and both marking and bombing were carried out blindly; Bomber Command could make no assessment of the results.”

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AARON LEIB LOBEL A.K.A. DAN LOBEL 1961 | SCHOOL OF ART

1957: I had just gotten out of the Navy and started Parson’s School of Design. Art was in the family. My father Paul A. Lobel had some pull and though the time for applications had passed, he was able to get me into the test for Cooper Union. I am not sure of the percentages; the school took about 10% of the applicants. That was 1958. I did well and passed the test. At the time, the school had a three-year course and awarded graduating students with a certificate. The school changed and the class of 1961 was the last of the certificate classes. The class of 1962 was the first of the degree classes. At the time the school was free thanks to the foresight of Peter Cooper. Though the school allowed certificate students to go for one more year to make up the academic courses, I was not interested in that. We, the students of ’61 felt that the art ability of the incoming class had been compromised because art students who did poorly with academics in high school would not be admitted. In 1958 some of the teachers were Nicholas Marsicano, Charles Cajori—who was one of the last of the second-generation abstract expressionists, Nicholas Carone, Stefuno Cusumano and Charles Seide. I was given credit from Parson’s and allowed to choose an extra class. I knew just what I wanted: another drawing class with Cajori.

The first year I lived with my mother in Washington Heights. My mother had a big apartment so that there was no difficulty in using one of the rooms as a studio. I had the G.I. bill from the Navy so expenses were no problem. I can still see before me a drawing of a snow scene done on brown wrapping paper with India ink and white tempera.

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The commute to Cooper was about half an hour on the speedy ‘’A’’ train. I got off at West 4th Street and walked the several blocks to Cooper. At that time the Art School and the Architecture School were in the main building and the Engineering School had its own building.

Because I had been in the Navy for four years I was older than the other students with the exception of Eliot Koslof who had been in the Army. Across the street was the Sagamore Cafeteria. I had lunch with Elliot and we said nothing to each other; just ate lunch silently.

After some months of this, one of us spoke. I don’t remember who it was.

Back to the school: I remember the project given by Cusumano. We had to make a collage out of various spices. He was teaching us twodimensional design. In the architecture class, the teacher, I think his name was Davis, gave a project to design a museum. He was very happy with my design of a building that stood out over the water of the Hudson River. Another class that I had in the first year was photography with Josef Breitenbach. I had taken a photo of three birds, which was placed in the annual show. I had work from every class in the annual show. I still remember a charcoal drawing that I did in Washington Square Park. The drawing came from Cajori’s class. I finished the first year with good marks.

The second year started poorly for me, and I don’t remember why.

Now it’s coming back to me. I was making a transition from living at home to living in a loft on Wooster Street. A student had a loft floor to share. On the first floor was a lumberyard. We were able to get scraps of wood to fill our potbelly stove. The wood burned up by midnight, leaving the loft freezing. My partner had an electric blanket but I didn’t. By the middle of the year, I got so sick that I was taken to my father’s place where I recovered. My father had separated from my mother and had built a living place at the back of his store on 8th Street.

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I had a class in two-dimensional art with John Kacere and he gave me a B. This was lower than the A’s that I was getting in my other classes.

In the second year I also took advertising and though I had an aptitude for art, I didn’t have that advertising touch.

The social activity or scene was frenetic. Jackson Pollock was rumored to have bitten Joyce Sudborough on the shoulder. She was a little student, who in sculpture class had picked up a piece of granite to sculpt, not the usual marble which is soft. Pollock died in 1956 leaving the leadership of the avant-garde to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. The center of the art world had shifted from Paris to New York. But in 1961 Claes Oldenberg was the Cooper Union librarian and Tom Wesselmann was in the class of 1960. The abstract expressionists had a strict set of requirements: large canvas, no signature on the front of the painting, no recognizable image, de Kooning’s women being the exception.

Coming back to my third year at Cooper: I got a night job at Photo Lettering and went to Cooper during the day. My third year was the best. I had Marsicano for painting. One of my paintings was shown at the entrance to the annual show. I was also chosen to be “Athlete of the Year.” This was for bowling which had been a hobby of mine. I look forward with pleasure to the reunion of the class of ’61.

Before concluding, I’d like to step back and take a bigger view of The Cooper Union. The main building has a lectern that was used by Abraham Lincoln in his famous speech of February 27, 1860—156 years ago. At that time, it was known as the Cooper Institute speech. He talked about his views on slavery, his reply to Steven A. Douglas, and his defense of the Republican Party. It was at The Cooper Union that Lincoln became more than a regional curiosity; he became a national leader.

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JACK EICHENBAUM 1963 | CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Geographer Jack Eichenbaum ChE ’63 is retired from his job as a City Assessor for NYC Finance, but he isn’t inactive: He is the official Queens Borough Historian, continues to provide walking tours and teach, is active in local (Flushing and Queens) civic associations and remains on the Board of Directors of GISMO, an organization he founded to unite people working in Geographic Information Systems in New York City. Jack has a Ph.D. in urban geography from the University of Michigan (1972). Although he didn’t work at Pier 92, it is indisputable that the mapping center that sprung to life there after the September 11th tragedy could only have happened, manned by GIS volunteers from around the city, because of the close friendships that had already formed at GISMO under Jack’s leadership. Jack was recently interviewed by Barry Drogin EE’83.

You grew up in Queens and came to Cooper during a special time of transition.

When I entered Cooper in 1959 the neighborhood was the Bowery and Lower East Side; when I left it was becoming the East Village. I had classes in the Foundation Building in my freshman year. After that, engineers had classes in the new (now demolished) engineering building at 51 Astor Place.

You were always interested in geography and history, but came to Cooper to learn engineering. Can you explain that choice?

Who knew what to study at age 16? It was the post-Sputnik era.

Engineering was a well-paid profession and Cooper was a free education.

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I always did well in math and science. I had no idea that geography was studied beyond the fifth grade. When I worked on an M.S. in chemistry at Indiana University, I discovered they had a graduate program in geography one floor below the Chemistry Department!

You studied and lived around the country and around the world.

Then you came back to Queens and found your Cooper education had given you special skills.

Cooper was not just classrooms. I learned from the evolving Village/East Village environment. I was active in Green Camp and got to know students in art and architecture. I commuted on the subway and became a “New Yorker.� I lived in four other states and three other countries during 13 years away. I eventually realized that NYC and my native Queens were the best places for me.

Obviously, the assessment of property taxes is very important to The Cooper Union, because that determines how much money Cooper gets from its three properties. Describe some of the work you did for NYC Finance.

I was part of a team that was computerizing the valuation system.

First I spent three years all over the city taking photos of every property and collecting data on all 1-2-3 family homes. (This is the most common property in NYC and the easiest to valuate using a statistical comparative sales approach.)

Tell us about the founding of GISMO. In 1990 I was using Geospatial Information System (GIS) to generate computerized property valuation for property taxing purposes in the NYC Department of Finance. I needed information about crime, school quality, demography and other data to help explain the variation of property value based only on physical characteristics. I also needed to learn more about GIS technology. With the blessings of my supervisors, I was able to devote time to organizing GISMO which

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stands for Geospatial Informational Systems Organization. GISMO is an affiliate member of the New York State GIS Association.

I’ve been on so many types of walking tours, but I have to admit that it is amazing going on a tour with a geographer. Tell us about some of your tours.

My favorite walks are in Flushing (home) and in Long Island City (my “pet” neighborhood) which I have been monitoring since 1976.

When the Metrocard was introduced, I pioneered all-day Life Along a Subway Line tours with the International Express (#7 train.) On my website www.GeogNYC.com, all of my public tours are described.

You’d like to do a tour of the neighborhood Cooper Union is in?

I already have. It’s called Conforming to the Grid. Cooper is located where the Manhattan grid plan collides with earlier street systems.

Did you have to do a lot of research when you became the historian for Queens, or did you already know most of it?

Nobody knows “most of it” and every day adds more.

You came to celebrate the agreement between the Board, the Office of the Attorney General, and the Committee to Save Cooper Union. What are your thoughts about the mission and the future of the college?

I am delighted that Cooper Union is returning to its mission to provide free merit-based higher education. This important step should not be subjugated by bloated administrative cost, the “edifice complex” and “publish or perish.” I hope that this is a shot heard round the world of higher education!

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STEPHEN RATTIEN 1963 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

I, Steve Rattien, am retired now and, as I’m reasonably well off and truly grateful to Cooper Union for providing me with an outstanding and free education, will continue to support it annually and remember it in my will.

Here’s my story: I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and was a good student, winning admission not only to Cooper Union but also to MIT and Columbia. But as the son of a taxi driver who had not graduated from high school, I did not want to burden my family with tuition obligations, choosing instead to live at home and attend Cooper Union. It was a very challenging four years, more difficult than my subsequent MSEE education at the University of Rochester or my PhD from Cornell. I remember doing mechanical drawing during stops on the BMT (now D train), with a nun handing me the appropriate instruments, or working NY Times crosswords while strap-hanging.

What stands out, though, was the academic excellence, camaraderie and commitment of my fellow students, as well as the care and personal attention of the faculty. I still remember fondly sharing an ale (the drinking age was 18 back then) at McSorley’s with math professor Arsete Lucchese, not to mention other great adventures with students and faculty at Green Camp, Wolman Rink and elsewhere. I’m sure that all in my class of 1963 remember our horseback riding experience in Prospect Park—Roy Rogers had nothing on us.

Having entered Cooper at 16, as did many of my classmates, some of whom were born abroad and most of whom were from first-generation

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What stands out, though, was the academic excellence, camaraderie and commitment of my fellow students, as well as the care and personal attention of the faculty.

American families, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to be—or thought I knew, but was perhaps naive. It turned out that electrical engineering was not really me, but the quality and depth of the education was extraordinary and enabled me to excel in my subsequent academic endeavors, first in biomedical engineering and, later, at Cornell in city and regional planning, focusing on regional economic development planning. My quantitative and analytic skills, honed at Cooper, gave me a distinct advantage over fellow graduate students and, to be frank, the doctoral program at Cornell was a snap compared with my years at Cooper. My dissertation, on patterns of minority group upward mobility, seems pretty far from my Cooper experience, but it was quantitative skills developed at Cooper that enabled me to do what at the time was a pretty sophisticated computer-based analysis of Census data.

Ironically, over the years, my core engineering education from Cooper Union became central to my career successes. After several years teaching in graduate programs in planning and public health at the University of Pittsburgh, I took a leave of absence to work at the newly formed President’s Council on Environmental Quality, where my quantitative skills proved most valuable. I authored a book, Energy and the Environment, which became the first definitive effort to quantify the environmental consequences of energy supply and use, and that led to my eventually rising to become the deputy director the President’s Science Adviser’s Office of Energy R&D Policy. I subsequently headed a small science-policy research firm, then moved on to the National Academy of Sciences where I helped create the UN’s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), and

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headed up the NAS’s new Commission on Geosciences, Environment, and Resources, which addressed the myriad challenges of environmental protection vs. resource development and use. The IDNDR exposed me to leaders throughout the world with whom I had to persuasively interact, and required considerable, and fascinating, international travel, and the broad variety of Academy studies under my purview truly kept me on my toes. Finally, as a last full-time position, I led RAND’s science and technology policy program, which addressed a wide range of national and regional issues primarily for government clients. After being retired for several years, I became involved in the launch of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at a facility designed by Pritzker Awardee Zaha Hadid. KAPSARC’s broad-based international team is now beginning to contribute to creative thinking about the wide range of issues relating to global energy supply and use.

Perhaps most interesting (to me), though, was that for more than a decade, beginning in the ‘80s, I served as a judge for the, at first, Westinghouse and, later, Intel Science Talent Search, where I came to meet and evaluate some of the best and brightest high school students and prospective scientists. Many of these outstanding young people reminded me of my Cooper Union peers and, indeed, in a number of instances, I recommended Cooper to them as an institution they should consider--quite a few were from the metropolitan NY region and were themselves immigrants or were from immigrant families.

I see Cooper as uniquely, or at least especially, able to provide a no-nonsense disciplined education in engineering and the underlying skills in mathematics and science. And although perhaps neither I nor Cooper appreciated it at the time, I think it helped foster leadership skills, build confidence, and prepare its graduates for careers that benefit from the broad skill set (analytic, oral, writing) that was embodied in the Cooper experience.

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EDITH HILLINGER 1964 | SCHOOL OF ART

Women artists are lagging far behind in saving their artistic legacies.

In 2014 I founded Bay Area Women Artists’ Legacy Project. Please visit our website to read the full story: http://bawalp.org

Serpentine, 2012 | 33 x 33 inches | Mixed media collage on birch panel

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JEROME GARCHIK 1965 | ENGINEERING

I graduated from Brooklyn Tech in 1961 and started CU that September.

At that time the area was still skid row—St. Marks Place and environs were flop houses and deeply hardscrabble. Drunks and addicts slept in the alcoves of the Foundation Building.The gentrification we now see in the area is just astonishing!

When I started, CU still had Green Camp which was a very large part of my CU life in the next four years. I tell my artist friends now that I went to Art School, which I did, but studied engineering! I love the smell of still drying oils in the local galleries here in San Francisco, a smell I always associate with happy days with friends in the Foundation Building!

CU also had a library in the Foundation Building. In 1964 and 1965, despite student uproar, the trustees PAID $600,000 to Smithsonian to take if off their hands. Did they know they were parting with an original Audubon folio which has since disappeared, or with a Michaelangelo drawing worth tens of millions, now hidden up town at the Cooper Hewitt Museum? Wasn’t this an omen of the financial mistakes and debacles yet to come?

After CU, my classmates mostly went on for PhD programs in engineering. Many have I suppose retired since. I am still working, practicing civil rights and labor law in San Francisco. I got a Masters Degree at Yale in 1967 and my law degree at Harvard, but I always tell people I am an elitist only because I went to Cooper Union!

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In the midst of the recent turmoil and upheaval, what I was most thrilled to see was when one of the students led his classmates in a hand holding ring around the Foundation Building, to give CU a hug.

In the midst of the recent turmoil and upheaval, what I was most thrilled to see was when one of the students led his classmates in a hand holding ring around the Foundation Building, to give CU a HUG. That is the image that should be posted on your web page! Is it too late to join in that HUG? Peter Cooper and his son in law and granddaughters, the original creators of CU didn’t attend CU, nor did my friend Maurice Kanbar.

They were inspired by Benjamin Franklin and by the Mechanics Institute and Library movement in Britain and the US, to bring the achievements and discoveries of the Enlightenment to practical application and to workers and crafts people. Their noble goals should continue to inspire major donations to CU, so long as CU keeps its eyes on its historic mission and ideals.

Last year I told one of the lawsuit activists that CU didn’t need litigation, it needed an emergency fund for students in crisis with tuition, housing or medical care bills! That is what the alumni should contribute to separate from the Annual Fund, and the CU annual budget. If any fellow alumni agree, and want to start and organize such a fund, e.g., fund a need, or crowd source, whatever, I would be proud to help within the scope of my modest means. I believe many other alumni would feel that way too.

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ALAN FELTUS 1966 | SCHOOL OF ART

Excerpts from an autobiography/memoir in progress.

In September I was in school again. Cooper Union was a free school.

There were no tuition fees for any student, and in the sixties one could afford to be poor in New York, before housing became outrageously expensive, before Brooklyn started to become fashionable and became where students and artists settled. I already knew and loved the museums, and the school was in an interesting part of the city, on St. Marks Place and Astor Place, down at 8th Street at the upper end of the Bowery. The Village is just west of there and the East Village and Lower East Side right there where Manhattan gets wider, Little Italy and Chinatown and SoHo just a short walk away. I loved McSorley’s Old Ale House and the Surma Ukrainian Book and Music store, both on 7th Street, half a block from Cooper Union’s Foundation Building.

I used to buy buckwheat honey at Surma. It was honey from the bees belonging to the founder of the store and his family and was by far the best honey I have ever tasted. They sold beautiful hand embroidered blouses and the elaborate Ukrainian folk art pysanka Easter eggs and the tools and beeswax and dyes to make them. And music and books and postcards, all Ukrainian. When I was in Surma I felt a connection to the Russian heritage my mother denied me in my childhood. It was an interesting kind of nostalgia in that I was experiencing something that felt deeply related to my past without having actually been part of my own life. And McSorley’s was the other side, from my father’s heritage, but I didn’t feel the Irish connection in the same way

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because of the many generations my father’s ancestors lived in the United States. Ireland didn’t have a place in any family stories I had ever heard. McSorley’s was still a men only pub when I used to eat lunch there. They served a good bowl of chili, and a plate of cheddar cheese and crackers and raw onion was always on their limited menu because it was a favorite of McSorley. And, of course, they had very good dark and light draught ale. McSorley’s opened in 1854. In the United States that was really old. Almost nothing had ever been modernized or changed in any way at McSorley’s. The wishbones still hanging from the horizontal tubes of the lights above the bar that were once gas lamps were put there by boys going off to fight in World War I, to be removed on their return. The ones I saw were never removed because the boys never returned, so they are covered in the same patina of cigarette smoke and ale that colors what little you can see of the walls between framed Irish memorabilia from which nothing had been removed since 1910. Only the glass of the picture frames is ever cleaned. Surma and McSorley’s and Cooper Union are part of my fondest nostalgic memories of being a young art student.

Our classes focused on understanding the structure in what we were looking at. We were learning to draw from observing a few objects assembled on a table in the middle of a studio, or a model on a model stand in front of us holding still for some stretch of minutes or possibly of hours. The objects we observed were distinguished from their otherwise lack of importance, being no more extraordinary than things we knew from everyday life, by their placement and by our scrutiny. In time we began to discover other meanings, deeper meanings in what we were looking at, and how the looking was more significant in the process of learning than the identity of the things we were depicting. We were discovering the possibility of things having meanings on different levels, each of which was potentially very important and purposeful. Objects can reveal stories, whether those stories were

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somehow inherent in the things themselves in an actual or symbolic sense, or suggested through the pictorial relationships we created.

What we were observing could become utterly amazing if seen with the kind of penetration that focused observation brings. The extraordinary, heretofore unnoticed, quality of something is made evident to others in a work of art because the wonder of appearances, and appreciation of how meaningful they could be, is felt by the artist and made communicable. It can be about relationships of shapes seen and manipulated in drawings for their ability to become parts in a complex organization, a composing of abstract forms within the edges of the piece of paper or canvas. Skill in handling charcoal and pencil or brushes and paint improves slowly, almost unconsciously. Even when we depict recognizable objects and persons there is the element of abstraction that great works of art always have. An awareness of how things observed translate into a visual language as line and tone on the paper gradually became more understandable, and a whole new world opened up to us. The art we were looking at in slide lectures, in books, in museums started to communicate on levels we were only beginning to know existed. And those works began to tell us how little we knew, and to hint at how far away and nearly impossible it would be to make something like those works we saw as great. The sense that I might arrive one day at that ability was very exciting to me.

I was involved equally in drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking as an undergraduate student. We had classes in two and three-dimensional design and in typography and calligraphy. We shared our foundation year with students who then would choose to follow either graphic design or studio art, and in our first year we had a beginning architecture class with students who continued in the architecture department. Transfer students weren’t given credit for studio classes taken in other schools, so I repeated my first year of art school, but instead of taking a couple of academic classes that I had at

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Tyler I could double up on studio classes. My program at Cooper Union was therefore a full four years which meant I did five years of undergraduate art school before my two years in graduate school.

As an art student in the 1960s the many teachers I worked with had their different ideas about what the making of art was about. And there were the museums and galleries I had always liked spending hours in. And there were the art magazines and there was the talk among classmates. There were the trends that were being promoted and the influences those might have on a young student. I had to steer a course in order to remain true to what interested me, which I was beginning to understand had to do with figurative imagery that was about that silence that was also about loneliness. I think I understood my loneliness to be both a curse and a strength. In my life loneliness was difficult much of the time but in how I was seeing it in art I welcomed it and knew it as my friend.

I was happy being an art student spending my days in the sky lit studios of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building and going to the museums I knew and loved, but all that was overshadowed by a fear that the Vietnam War might suck me into its infernal depths and take from me everything I cared about.

At Cooper Union Charles Cajori and Reuben Kadish and Varujan Boghosian were my favorite teachers. What they taught me has stayed with me as an artist. And I valued them as friends. One day Cajori took me and another student to an empty studio and had us draw from a few objects on a table against the wall. He directed us by telling us what to draw, one line at a time. One edge of something, then another, moving through the several objects. He showed us how what we saw, like the back edge of the table top that we knew formed a straight line, when overlapped by something else, specially when overlapped by something at a diagonal to the back of the table top, starts out one way, and then when it is interrupted by the object in front of it, would

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appear to pick up and continue on the other side from a position that is not what our logical mind believes to be right. He showed us that seeing, really seeing, explains what happens in Cézanne’s paintings and drawings. When one puts down exactly how things appear to be, instead of what we know to be right, a construction made from observation is not so likely to conform to reality in a strictly logical sense.

That was the beginning of a new understanding of painting for me. It was an aspect of working from observation that was more than getting things right in a conventional sense. It was about how paintings are made, and what painting composition could be about that I had not yet been aware of. Cézanne is a painter whose unfinished paintings and drawings, in particular, taught me a lot about pictorial structure.

What Cézanne’s works were about was not the objects themselves so much as the spaces between them. To draw or paint the shape made by the edge of one object and the edge of the next object, in exact relationship, what is often referred to as negative space, or what Cajori called the interstices, would integrate all the forms in a drawing or painting so that the picture becomes something whole unto itself, apart from what we think of as the subject of that work. We were learning to understand how pictorial space is different from real space. It is one thing to appreciate a drawing or a painting for the image we see in it and another to see the whole of the image as a construct deliberately put together as a work of art, and not simply a depiction.

Reuben Kadish and Varujan Boghosian taught sculpture at Cooper Union when I was there. Like Cajori, they were serious working artists who also taught, which allowed their teaching to be more profound.

Boghosian’s assemblages fascinated me. It was how he gently worked on the surfaces of things he would find or buy in antique shops and Italian flea markets, and how he would combine them in his sculptures and give them titles from mythology that taught me. It was teaching by example at its best. One day in class while we were working on our

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own he was very gently sanding sheet metal birds he had cut out of an old store sign that had layers of paint and rust that he watched as the color changed very subtly under his sandpaper. He used Italian wooden church mannequins and antique wooden children’s blocks. An old woodworking bench-top turned vertical became the back of a construction that had a Madonna mannequin and wooden balls and other things he transformed through combining them into his own silent poetry. The delicacy of what Boghosian created stood apart from so much that was talked about in those years when Abstract Expressionism’s Action Painting was still going strong as a force to be influenced by in art schools, and Pop Art and Minimalism were replacing the more lyrical forms of art that I was most interested in.

Teaching art in those days generally didn’t get into techniques and fortunately my teachers didn’t impose their own kind of art on students.

It was a loose approach to schooling that suited me well. It is far better to encourage and stimulate students than to give them formulas for making art, as though art could easily be made by following instructions.

Only in printmaking and typography and calligraphy was technique taught because in those cases one had to know the process. Color was taught in 2-D design classes but color was taught differently by each of the two color teachers at Cooper Union. Color theory didn’t make sense to me at all except as a way to explain one aspect of color to students, and that was about optics. Color is personal. It is something we come to recognize in our tendencies as we work. Art schools are important for how they prepare us to learn later what we need to know, and once we have the knowledge that allows us to learn on our own, learning never stops.

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JOHN LISENKO 1966 | CIVIL ENGINEERING

My parents had it much rougher than I did. As young adults they experienced war and revolution in their native land of Russia and then war again in their second home in Slovakia. They were forced to run from Communist persecution twice, ending up in Germany at the tail end of WWII where I was born under a barrage of American bombs. We lived in the care of American occupation forces as designated ‘displaced persons� for six years until we were allowed to immigrate to the United States. We settled in the East New York section of Brooklyn in a diverse ethnic neighborhood. Our apartment was in the poorest section of the neighborhood.

I spoke no English when I started school at six and learned quickly with the help of my fellow students and by listening to the radio. By the second grade I was doing well, even though my parents, who had learned just a little English and spoke only Russian at home, had their doubts. After graduating from PS 182 I went into an advanced placement program in JHS 149 which involved completing three years of junior high in two. My parents sent me to a church-sponsored Russian school to provide me with an education in our native language in parallel with my public-sponsored education. They still doubted my success in school and hired a tutor to help me. The tutor told them they were wasting their money and my time. I applied and was accepted to Brooklyn Technical H.S. In high school I was motivated to start making a living as soon as possible so I applied for the mechanical engineering option which I thought would help me get a job right out of high school and I could

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start helping get our family out of our neighborhood. My shop teacher informed me that I had little mechanical aptitude (which I had also noted), but given my straight A’s in academic subjects I should probably shift my focus to college. By then my parents’ situation improved as a result of my father getting a job as a draftsman in a company owned by a Russian immigrant. College became a possibility, albeit a remote one.

I applied to a number of engineering schools and was accepted in most of them (including Cornell and RPI) with varying degrees of offers of financial support to supplement my Regents scholarship of $350/ year. I had heard of Cooper Union and its offer of a free education, but I wasn’t sure what my chances of getting in would be. I took all the requisite tests, and my high school average was sufficient in combination with whatever other criteria was being used for admission and I was accepted to Cooper. It was a happy day at home; $350/year would buy books, cover some other expenses and in combination with my summer job and commuting from home would mean I wouldn’t need any family financial support (except room and board!). I wanted to study architecture, but the extra year of school discouraged me and my parents advised me that as a civil engineer I could always find work.

My introduction to Cooper Union was at summer surveying camp.

It was a far cry from East New York. I did well in school my first three years. I enjoyed the camaraderie that developed in a small class setting,

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the diverse athletic program and the practical knowledge of many of the professors from the “old school.” My memories include being out of touch at Green Camp, tobogganing during the weekend Kennedy was assassinated. It was surreal. Galloping through the snow on Long Island as part of the valuable education we were getting in lifetime outdoor pursuits (taught as part of a physical education program that had no pool, gym or fields no less). And of course becoming an expert in ping-pong while strategically cutting class with minimum impact!

Prior to the start of my senior year I got married. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Having gone to an all boys’ high school and all men’s college I had a rather limited exposure to the opposite sex and a somewhat stunted social development. The marriage lasted 34 years and resulted in three kids and seven grandkids. But that’s another story.

About a third of the way into my senior year the Civil Engineering Department Head, Professor Wallace I believe, called me in and asked me if I intended to graduate with my class. I said I did, and he said things did not seem to be heading in that direction. I explained my unique position as the only married student in the class and the new responsibilities that entailed. He helped me see the light and got me the perfect part-time job at Dames & Moore soils consultants doing soils tests off hours on a flexible work schedule.

Somehow I pulled through to the end and graduated on time. I had a job offer from the US Army as a “research translation specialist” that promised to pay more than the engineering offers I was getting. Somehow they had found out I spoke Russian fluently (thanks to my parents).

My parents, staunch anti-communists, nevertheless viewed this as spying (which it probably was based on the tests I was given), in their minds a less than honorable profession when compared to being a civil engineer which is what I had studied four years for. Instead of becoming Ivan Bond I became a junior civil engineer for the California Division of Highways. My career as a civil engineer was off and running.

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It almost ran off the cliff a few times. After two kids were born on the west coast my wife began to seriously pine for the comforts of home (east coast version) and the proximity of grandparents. We came back after three years and I thought I had a job with a New Jersey engineering consultant. The first day on the job I learned that the last month’s paychecks were late and the firm wasn’t doing so well. I quit and went to look for another job. The Port Authority was looking for engineers and I showed up to get an application. Somehow the engineering manager doing the hiring heard I was a Cooper Union graduate.

He was too. I was hired on the spot. It was the only time in my career that the Cooper degree played such a pivotal role, but it was a critical time…a wife and two small kids and no job! And what a great job the Port Authority was, diverse, exciting and full of opportunity.

Six years later we were back on the west coast. That’s another story.

Suffice it to say I had to start from scratch building a career in a place where Cooper Union was known only by the more sophisticated folks in my field. This was the land of Stanford and Cal. I had to explain the Cooper story more than once. Over the next 30 years I moved from job to job, progressing in the field of public works in both the public and private sectors, finishing my career as public works director for a small city. I was also president of the California Statewide association of Public Works Directors and currently teach management courses for the American Public Works Association (APWA) Institute and write magazine articles and management texts for APWA. My Russian language fluency combined with the excellent engineering education I received at Cooper has resulted in more than a half dozen overseas assignments. My lifetime dedication to being physically active I attribute in part to the eclectic physical education program at Cooper. I am in debt to the legacy of Peter Cooper and his dream of an education for the kids of working class parents. And I’m glad for the current students that the school is now co-ed.

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DAVID CRANE 1968 | SCHOOL OF ART

In 1963-64 in high school, one researched schools of higher learning in the “Guidance Office� where there was a small bookshelf of college catalogs. There was no Cooper Union catalog but there was a catalog of various art schools around the country. When I looked at the Cooper Union entry with a short description of the essentials including tuition fees, I saw that Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was free!! My thinking was that anything that is free could not be worth too much. My knowledgeable high school art teacher soon set me straight. He said the two premier art schools in New York City were Parsons School of Design and Cooper Union. I applied to Cooper, took the entry test in The Great Hall in March and was informed in May or June that I was 25th on a waiting list. Eventually my number came up that summer in time for enrollment in September. I was elated!

My father was also elated because my second choice school was going to be a financial burden.

As time grew close to move to the big city and enroll in Cooper I had half thoughts that maybe a terrible mistake had been made. Why would this prestigious institution bestow such an honor on this 17-year-old WASP country boy and allow him to live in the most artistically vibrant city in the world. As time went on and I met my cohort and settled into NYC; I realized I was giving as much as I was getting. I was a part of the diversity of the student body, the faculty, and NYC, with a point of view and voice to offer that added to the perceptions of every one I met.

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As time went on and I met my cohort and settled into NYC; I realized I was giving as much as I was getting. I was a part of the diversity of the student body, the faculty, and NYC, with a point of view and voice to offer that added to the perceptions of every one I met.

The experiences of my time at Cooper Union were invaluable for the success of my later life, not only artistically but physically and spiritually. I have been ecstatically “toiling in the vineyard” of art for 47 years (stained glass studio) and I doubt it would have been possible let alone sustained for so long without that “terrible mistake” that allowed me to become a part of the Cooper Union family.

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JAY MOSKOWITZ 1970 | PHYSICS

I would like to review a suggestion that I made to former presidents Bharucha and Campbell, the people who run At Cooper and some people who were operating the alumni association. I thought that gathering certain information from our alumni and publishing it could create another document which could potentially excite new students to apply to come to The Cooper Union.

I have suggested that the Alumni Association solicit from each former student (as well as current students) a list of every patent that has been issued under his or her name. The patent number, date, title and even a one-line synopsis/abstract if they wish, would be provided.

Then these can all be reported in perhaps an issue of At Cooper, and then remain as a stand-alone document that could be circulated with other materials about the Engineering School to prospective students.

This would give such potential students and idea of the level of technology that has come out of the students that go to this university.

Besides the existing alumni, it would be even better if someone at the school becomes the Cooper Union patent historian and reports patents issued starting from the first graduating class of the school as well as from Peter Cooper himself. Most alumni don’t even know that Thomas Edison attended some classes at the school.

There is no doubt that this list is going to consist of hundreds or thousands of patents over the history of the school. It will be of interest to learn of the type of technology brought forth by former students of The Cooper Union.

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I have suggested that the Alumni Association solicit from each former student (as well as current students) a list of every patent that has been issued under his or her name.

The solicitation of information could be easily included in the donation mailings that go out a few times a year. Perhaps soliciting the information entry via the web site would even make the information gathering a lot easier to deal with.

Please consider making this another permanent piece of The Cooper Union history.

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ROBERT PIANKIAN 1970 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

I was a lower middle class kid from the Bronx who always knew I would pursue a career in engineering or science. Before I turned ten, I decided upon electrical engineering. During my senior year at the Bronx High School of Science, I needed to find suitable engineering schools to apply to. I thought I knew all of them—City College of New York and MIT, for example. My Dad, with no college education at all, gently asked me if I had heard of The Cooper Union, a private school which somehow provided a high quality education in engineering at no cost to the student. I was humbled and shocked to find I was not half as bright as I thought I was, for I had not. I contacted Cooper, obtained admission materials and awaited the full day battery of tests which would show who was deemed to be qualified for the amazing privilege of a free college education.

Magically, I was admitted to Cooper. The lack of a campus meant nothing to me, for my mind was ready to be filled with knowledge; nothing else mattered. The hour ride on the subway from the upper Bronx to lower Manhattan was simple and even relaxing. In September 1966, I began my four-year education at Cooper, where I thrived. It may even be that the lack of a campus helped, for I had few distractions.

I worked hard at Cooper, absorbing knowledge and trying to understand what my chosen profession of electrical engineering had in store for me. I forged friendships with my classmates and was inspired by my professors. In December 1968, two years into my Cooper experience, I was selected for membership in honor societies Eta Kappa

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Nu and Tau Beta Pi. I felt humbled and somewhat overwhelmed, wondering if I truly deserved this recognition. At one of the formal induction ceremonies, an Elder of the society delivered a very deep speech about the responsibilities of success, explaining a concept I had never been exposed to before, Noblesse Oblige. As I loosely understood it, those who have are morally obligated to help those who have not. More to the point, I saw from his words for the first time that to merely accept the free Cooper education and hopefully become successful in engineering fell far short of what was required and expected of me. Again, I was just a middle class kid from the Bronx, fairly naĂŻve, what did I know of such worldly things? I was highly impressionable, and the words of the Elder had a huge and immediate impact on me. I silently vowed that I would make the journey to achieve success a wonderful and joyous mission to embark upon, one I would happily share monetarily with Cooper Union if I met my professional goals. To do this would be neither duty nor burden, but instead, a source of fulfillment and happiness, a provider of personal joy. It was akin to a solemn wedding vow. To be able to do this would be an honor, a privilege. My promise to give back to Cooper may have been made silently, but with a powerful conscience, I might as well have shouted it to the world.

I graduated from Cooper, was admitted to MIT with two of my Cooper classmates, with whom I shared an apartment in Boston, and after graduating from MIT, I performed research there and taught a laboratory design course, where I luckily met the love of my life, and my partner for life, my student Esther, who I married thirty eight years ago. I took a job at the Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital, increased my knowledge of computers, and when my MIT officemate and friend asked me to start a high-technology company with him, I pondered the matter for less than a second before saying yes. I knew that cofounders of high-tech companies can achieve considerable success if these companies go public, but personal wealth

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was not on my mind, only the unimaginable excitement of an uncharted professional journey and the chance of making my dream of helping Cooper come true. Eight years of hard work passed. Many people contributed to the success of this startup, and we went public.

That day, the day we went public, was one of the happiest days of my life, for it meant that upon my passing, I would be able repay my beloved alma mater in a small way for the wonderful, free education they had somehow decided I was worthy of receiving. I did not celebrate by going out to a fancy restaurant, I did not buy a fancy sports car, for I had decided long ago that I would always be that kid from the Bronx for whom “things” had little value. As I write these words in March 2016, my wife and I drive 2002 and 2005 Pontiac Sunfires, inexpensive small cars with lots of miles on them. I would be no happier with a fancy, expensive sports car, and perhaps very stressed, worrying about such a pretty “thing” getting damaged!

I wondered over the years, as have many, if in these changing times Cooper could maintain its no tuition policy. When, inevitably, it could not, I was not surprised, merely disappointed that this lofty dream and mission had to be somewhat altered. It did not alter my feelings for my beloved alma mater in the least.

I always felt honored, privileged, and humbled, never entitled, walking into the buildings and classrooms at Cooper, fully aware that I was only there due to the generosity of others. I often wondered why I had been given this incredible opportunity while others had not, and finally, after much contemplation, accepted my good luck. My silent pledge to help Cooper aided me considerably in getting to that state of mind. That I have suitably taken care of Cooper in my will helps give me inner peace and reassurance as to the meaning of life as I pass through my golden years.

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JACK KERSHAW ARI RABINOWITZ ALAN MARDER MARK PENDROCK 1971

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING PHYSICS

Most of the memories from our Cooper Union days are of things that actually happened outside the classroom. Certainly those are all our best memories (and a couple of our worst). Here’s a few of them, dredged up over dinner and two pitchers of beer.

Freshman Gym Class: Sound Minds and So-So Bodies Learning to ski in Van Cortland Park. Trying, without success, to hold on to the tow rope long enough to be pulled to the top of the beginner’s slope. Bernie Greenberg EE’71 successfully holding onto the tow rope long enough to break his collar bone.

Skating—but mostly falling— first thing in the morning at Rockefeller Center before the rink opened to the public. Cutting class (a calculus lecture) with some classmates so we could continue skating after the rink opened to the public. Early morning horseback riding in Prospect Park. Getting a seat on the subway ride back to Cooper because no one wanted to be anywhere near somebody who smelled like horse sweat.

Having to run the mile— 20 laps around the track at the McBurney Y—in under six and a half minutes. Cleaning up after a classmate who had lasagna for lunch right before running the mile.

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And for those of us who had trouble keeping our heads above water at Cooper, remedial swimming in the basement pool at the Church of All Nations.

The Cooper Pioneer Newspaper: Four Years Before the Masthead Typing editorials—and a humanities term paper—on the world’s oldest manual typewriter located in the Pioneer office across from the cafeteria. That’s, of course, if you could call a room with some tables, a soda machine and a machine that dispensed sandwiches and pieces of fruit a cafeteria.

While editing the paper, deliberately misspelling a classmate’s name in a movie review byline because it had been written just so very badly (even by engineering student standards).

Travelling out to Brooklyn on the L line to edit final copy on site at the Pioneer’s printer, which was also the printer for the only Polish language newspaper in New York City. Correcting typos that only a Polish language printer could have made. In senior year, staying late with the editor-in-chief, Howie Krauss EE’71, to put to bed the last edition of the Pioneer that we would ever work on. Then afterwards prying open the petty cash box to buy ourselves a celebratory dinner.

Living on Campus: No Room in NYC, But Plenty of Bunks in NJ Freshman orientation at Green Camp the week before classes started.

Realizing as newly oriented freshmen that college was going to be a lot more fun than high school.

Green Camp weekends throughout the school year. The feel of the grass under bare feet on the slope where the Penn Station eagle stood.

The smell of the pine trees when walking along the path between main camp and Erskine and Burdell. The clinking of the flag pole in front of the main building whenever the breeze picked up. The feel of squeezing chopped meat between our fingers while making meat loaf for 50.

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Racing lobsters, then eating them, on the Food Lovers’ Weekend.

Chinese Club trips led by Ari Rabinowitz and Nancy Prusinowski A’71.

Their being asked by Professor Knapp what their names had been before they were Americanized.

Halloween at Green Camp with costume parties and midnight ghost stories told in the cemetery at Ringwood Manor Park. On a less pastoral note, moving “on campus” in junior year to an apartment on 7th Street and Avenue C. Moving back home to the Bronx a month later after the apartment got cleaned out by two neighbors carrying really big knives.

Social Life at Cooper: Five Fraternities, No Waiting Pledging one of the five fraternities that existed at Cooper in the late 60’s, early 70’s. Spending freshman pledge year on our hands and knees scrubbing the fraternity floor before the big Friday night parties.

Staying on our knees to pray that someone, anyone, would show up for the big Friday night parties.

Water gun fights rapidly becoming buckets-of-water fights at the ODP frat house. Burning out three fuses and then the stereo itself before realizing that the AMS frat house still had DC as well as AC circuits.

During pledge week, dressing as a farm boy—complete with overalls and straw hat—and “fishing” for several hours out of a sewer on the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. But cheating by bringing along my own fish. It was smoked.

Being lucky enough not to be the pledge made to parade along 42nd Street dressed as a baby—in oversized diapers and not much else.

Cooper Holiday Traditions: Light or Dark?

Turning 18 years old in freshman year just in time to legally attend the humanities class that was held at McSorley’s on McSorley’s Day (the last day of school before Christmas vacation).

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At that class, learning from Professor Bowman what “IITYWYBAD” on the sign hanging on a wall at McSorley’s meant. That lesson costing 35 cents when we had to buy Professor Bowman a round. A Cooper education being a lot cheaper back in those days.

Sneaking ales out to Judy DeVincent EE’71 because McSorley’s was still males only back then. One of McSorley’s bartenders going outside periodically to collect Judy’s empties.

Political Upheaval at Cooper: Every Tuesday at Noon Anti-Vietnam war rallies at Cooper. But held only on Tuesdays because that was the day we had a two-hour lunch break in our class schedules.

Attending the rally in DC as part of the Cooper Union contingent protesting the shootings at Kent State. But getting there almost too late for the speeches because our bus couldn’t get above 50 mph.

Organizing a series of anti-war lectures that only a couple of art students ever attended. Until student deferments were eliminated.

Then the entire senior engineering class showing up for a lecture on conscientious objection and emigration to Canada.

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ALAN SINGER 1972 | SCHOOL OF ART

I couldn’t have afforded college if it were not for the no tuition policy in place in the late 1960’s when I was accepted into the School of Art. I made many friends at Cooper, and I still feel connected to Cooper Union and in many ways my experience there helped me find my own direction in life. As an artist, Cooper Union represented a growing community that I finally felt I was an active participant in, and the teachers I met during my years at Cooper greatly influenced what I would become today—as a working artist and professor also in a school of art. So, there is continuity here, between what I learned and put into practice, and what I can now offer my students—many years later.

The positive experience of Cooper Union WORKS!

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MICHAEL REICH 1972 | PHYSICS

I was very fortunate to gain admission to The Cooper Union. I grew up in Upper Manhattan (Washington Heights). My father’s older brother, Oscar, went to The Cooper Union. My father and my uncle came to the United States from Poland in the early 1920s. Uncle Oscar went to The Cooper Union at night and became a civil engineer. There was always great respect in the home for The Cooper Union.

There was a member of my Boy Scout Troop #704, Tommy Lee, who went to The Cooper Union. He was one year ahead of me. His parents ran a Chinese laundry in our neighborhood. I believe that he attended the Bronx High School of Science and the word was he received 800s on his college board exams. He was very bright.

I grew up with parents who came of age during the Great Depression, and I took in their values. I was honored to gain admission. I worked hard, was surrounded by very bright classmates, enjoyed many weekends at Green Camp and remain appreciative of my time there. Today’s young people, my children included, have a difficult time imagining going to college and remaining at home. For many, a large piece of the college experience is going away to school. Fundamentally one gets out of college education what one puts into it. This is regardless of a large or small school, public or private, urban, suburban or rural, living at home or going away.

The Cooper Union provided an excellent education with excellent professors and very bright classmates. I remain grateful for the time spent and the education received.

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CLAUDIA GIORDANO 1976 | ART

Admission into The Cooper Union was the last thing on my mind when I took the in-house drawing exam in the gloomy Great Hall along with just about every other art major from my cohort at the High School of Music and Art. I was not unfamiliar with competing for entrance into programs—I’d spent the best part of the NYC teacher’s strike in the autumn of 1968 happily working on my portfolio for the art entrance audition for M&A—now known as LaGuardia High School, named for Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia who’d established the Music and Art and Performing Arts High School. In fact my senior year at M&A was marked by our protest and march to Save Our Schools which were threatened with devastating budget cuts that would have effectively eliminated the mandate of an arts education within a specialized high school. So activism, along with education, was also an important part of my lexicon. Growing up in New York City, in the Bronx, in a comfortable and modest middle class environment, afforded me many advantages. I attended good public schools, and was always in classes with the highest performing students, so I did not think I was “all that.” My first grade teacher predicted I would attend Music and Art High School because she could tell that my artwork was advanced for my age. Luckily both my parents appreciated the arts in many forms— classical and popular music, film, museums, musicals, Shakespeare, and opera—of course—which they’d grown up with as children of Italian immigrants. Education was always a priority, and there was never any doubt that my younger sister and I would go to college. I had art and

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music lessons, and attended a summer arts day camp called Usdan, which we were bussed to from Bronx House, where we took our piano and my art classes. The bus ride was the best part of the day as we strummed folk songs on our guitars and sang. It was a great, exciting time to be a young person in the 1960’s, and we were also activists protesting the escalating Vietnam War wearing black armbands at our 9th grade graduation. Getting into M&A seemed to be the highlight of my life and I absorbed and reveled in every microsecond of my three years at that school. When it was time to apply to colleges I had this great fantasy about attending the Rhode Island School of Design. I wanted to go “away” to college, and the location in a quaint, small New England city, versus a remote, insular campus appealed to me. I’d visited a few college campuses with a friend and was frankly grossed out by dorm life. I did not want to stay home for college, however. I was determined to go somewhere, away. My application for early admission to RISD— despite my portfolio, and our pleasant visit to the campus with my parents, and all that, was denied—so I was crushed. I also applied to the brand-new SUNY Purchase College, which was basically at that time just a bunch of signs on empty fields of grass—along with just about everyone else from my high school cohort. I was treated to a particularly unpleasant, perfunctory “interview” where a very impatient and rude man looked at my slides, seemingly for the first time, through the light of a window, asked me some hostile and disorienting questions, and dismissed me. I was crushed again, this time in person.

Last on my list was Alfred University, which had a ceramic school. We also visited that campus, which was away, and rural, and seemed pleasant enough. I was accepted and my father paid the $400 fee to secure my place. Which, for my father, was like pulling teeth—we were hedging our bets. Because guess what? I’d gotten a letter from Cooper saying I was on a wait list for admission. OY VEY! Yup, that was where things stood—so we turned to my Uncle Anthony B. Giordano, PhD,

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and the Dean of the Graduate School of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute of New York—who had a contact at Cooper, Dean Tan. I don’t know if Dean Tan pulled any strings (I doubt it), but he told my uncle that I should not worry, as I suppose my admission was probably a sure thing—most likely because not every student who is admitted to Cooper chooses to accept. In fact one of my high school cohort who was admitted to Cooper decided to go to Tyler School of Art, so I believe that was how I was given a place at Cooper. PHEW! Of course this meant I was NOT “Going Away!” to school. But it also meant something else: FREEDOM. Financially, at least. Money was absolutely NOT an open topic at that time, at least not in the way it seems to be now. My parents were not comfortable discussing money. We had to “read the signs” and use our powers of clairvoyance and basically hope for the best, when it came to getting cash in hand. I’d worked babysitting, and also won a Regents Scholarship which meant four years at $250/ year which paid for my art supplies—the least expensive oil colors at Utrecht—which was a saving grace. My father gave me a whopping $10 weekly to be used for transportation (subway tokens), and the little leftover to eat, which was not much. My pal Susie P. and I pooled our coins and would buy a couple of Dannon yogurts and a hunk of cheese that we’d share. Painters learn to subsist on very little. In August 1975, just before my senior year I moved into my own place, a 6th-floor walkup on St. Marks Place, and have been self-sufficient and self-supporting ever since. Cheap rent has helped for sure. After graduation from Cooper in June 1976—the “Bicentennial Year”—I took a “gap” year. I went to Europe that November for a month, then worked as an office temp, posted to the World Trade Center a few times. I applied to two grad schools, Columbia University, and Brooklyn College. Columbia rejected me in the second phase of the process, but Brooklyn College accepted me, without drama. Lucky for me because I hadn’t thought out exactly how I would have paid for Columbia. A CUNY school was

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easy to handle financially and the classes were at night. I worked full time at NY Central Supply Co. and then zoomed out to Flatbush Avenue on the subway. After a few years post-grad school I figured out that teaching in the pubic schools would be a good way to put my master’s degree to some use. I took the necessary courses at Hunter College and in 1983 was certified to teach fine arts, K-12. Twenty-nine years later I retired from teaching, in July 2012. Since I (still) live a block away from Cooper it seems like I’ve never left. Daily I walked by the Foundation, the (now gone) Engineering, and the equally disappeared Hewitt Buildings, which each held vivid memories for me of my four years at Cooper. The people I was in classes with and the professors who impacted me have all moved on as well, to another sphere. My last conversation with Don Kunz, who I’d bumped into on 9th Street, telling me unsolicited, in his measured way, how important my work as a teacher was; also often seeing Reuben Kadish, who had his studio and residence on the same street, and was his usual curmudgeonly yet nice self. My other profs, Charles Seide and Deborah Remington, continue to speak to me in my memory. When the financial crisis at Cooper started making news I got involved. I was basically upset that the students had to deal with this while being students, which was unfair. Having taught a fair number of young people from mostly disadvantaged backgrounds I know how trauma is not at all helpful for the developing brain and that high-functioning, creative young people who feel and sense—and take in—so much, need to be supported and protected from tumult and chaos, which seemed to be escalating. I started attending meetings, and eventually was nominated by a fellow Cooper grad for election to the Alumni Council. I’m glad to do my part in supporting Cooper in these critical times.

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ALAN FORTIER 1979 |

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Cooper Union changed by life by offering me an education that I would not have been able to afford at any other university. This education, plus the elite credential of Cooper Union on my resume helped open doors and aided in my professional success. Now that I am significantly better off financially than when I attended Cooper, I am very pleased to make significant donations so that others may have the opportunity that the school gave to me.

When I graduated high school I had ambition, potential and energy, but no money. My college options were New York City schools, state schools, or, if I could get accepted, Cooper Union. Over 40 years later I still vividly remember my joy in learning that I’d been accepted to Cooper Union. I graduated in 1979 at the top of my class with a BS in chemical engineering, and went to work for DuPont. I later went back to graduate school at the Harvard Business School. I went on to join a prestigious management consulting firm, and in 1988 started my own consulting firm, which has been highly successful.

As indicated, I believe my Cooper Union education, and the noteworthy Cooper credential, helped me land each of these positions, and get accepted into Harvard Business School, versus stiff competition.

Again, it’s fitting that I am paying back Cooper now, when I am able, for helping me at a time when I could not afford the education.

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JIM LIUBICICH 1983 |

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Cooper Union was a no brainer for me to attend after being accepted by all the schools I applied to after graduating from high school. CU aligned with my NYC heritage as a grandson and son of eastern European immigrants who made their new home here. It aligned with the democratic and merit based principles of my family, that you worked for what you attained and you worked everyday to contribute not only to yourself but also for others less fortunate than you.

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KIRSTEN STEINORTH LONG 1984 | SCHOOL OF ART

In 1980 when I was looking to attend art schools for college, I had never heard of The Cooper Union, even though I lived a short train ride away in Connecticut. One day I got a call from my Dad to say I should hop on the train right away, so I could make it to a tour and information session at CU that afternoon. He knew about CU from when he had applied to the engineering school in the 1950’s. He didn’t get in but I am so happy that he kept it in mind for me.

I had been accepted to several top fine arts schools, but they did not speak to me. The minute I entered the CU art building that afternoon, I knew it was the right place for me. It felt like home and I could not wait to apply and do my at home portfolio assessment.

That spring I was accepted and in the fall started on my journey to becoming a graphic designer. I am so thankful to have received an exceptional education from the finest and most talented leaders in the art and design fields. Because entrance to CU was based on merit, not finances, I was also able to study with some of the most talented students in the country. For that, I feel so lucky to have been able to attend. And my dad felt lucky for not having to pay a huge tuition bill.

I will always be thankful to my dad for that call. It changed my life.

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ALLEN DEUR 1991 |

CIVIL ENGINEERING

I am happily travelling through life with more than a few years behind me built on a foundation in large part provided to me by my education at the Cooper Union. I feel it was exactly the type of head-start that Peter Cooper had envisioned for a family like mine who tasked themselves with establishing a life in the United States. Life will try and knock you over before you can look around and without a firm footing you can easily lose your bearings. Education provides one of those cornerstones. I was the oldest of three brothers who were part of a first generation family of immigrants from Croatia. My parents firmly believed that all of the mischief in the world comes through a lack of employment. And the best employment could be delivered through a solid education—unless one has the talent and luck to become a rock star.

My father’s training included waking me up on Saturdays as well as my days off at 5:30 am in order to first and foremost work. I was introduced to the physical work of carrying sheetrock, delivering tools to various job sites, and building things. The world of exceedingly high decibel communication became a normal way of receiving instructions for me. And even though I thought my name was “idiota” until I turned twelve, I did learn a few things. Earning a living is hard, and I enjoyed construction. My enjoyment was not only relegated to the physical aspect of constructing things, but figuring out what to do and how to do it. The colorful people I would meet in the field only added to the appeal. I chose civil engineering as a major, and exponentially expanded my understanding of what construction meant with some

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Cooper Union was a small school with many smart students. This confederacy of brains was funneled through a grinder of rigorous educational training. remarkable teachers. I specifically refer to them as teachers and not professors because of the personal touch that many of them had displayed. Cooper Union was a small school with many smart students.

This confederacy of brains was funneled through a grinder of rigorous educational training. I reminisce of my humbling experience of getting an absolute zero on a physics test (not even credit for spelling my name correctly was given)! I shamefully relate this to my oldest son’s amusement when consoling him during his personal journey through an engineering curriculum. Nevertheless, through the life-line thrown to me by Professor Constantine Yapijakis, I persevered and with his help was fortunate enough to secure a master’s degree in five years.

My brother would be a future victim of his six years later.

Fellowships were formed amongst the students—like grunts at a boot camp that culminated in close friendships, a few of which I personally maintain to the present. The campus at that time, far from a traditional one, was another education in and of itself. A tour around campus included: hurdling homeless people to and from the subway station; playing softball in Tompkins Square Park and hoping not to land a ball onto a vagrant’s tent; trying to “be good” at McSorley’s Old Ale House; joining revelers during the Halloween Day parade; shopping at Unique Boutique and vinyl record stores; attending concerts at CBGB’s and Blue Man Group performances; learning about what the latest street protests were about; eating pizza in at least a half dozen “Original” Ray’s; visiting Washington Square Park to enjoy street-performers…One learned that the world could be a hornets nest of instability, discomfort and distress while simultaneously evoking the ability

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Fellowships were formed amongst the students— like grunts at a boot camp that culminated in close friendships, a few of which I personally maintain to the present.

to form its own beauty. There was a pulse that forced you to accept and appreciate the world on an earthier and more sympathetic level. One such personal experience came when I watched in amusement as an oblivious and grizzled artist fashioned a beautifully tiled mosaic onto a sewer manhole whilst honking cars and buses drove around him. A Michelangelo lost in his work on the street instead of a ceiling, creating his brightly colored flower in the desert. The balance of schedule and drive against playfulness and downtime—the architecture of engineering and art‌ What The Cooper Union gave to me during those formative years is a blessing. I have carried this gift with me in terms of strength, service to others and my desire to be a man of worth. Peter Cooper was truly a man amongst few. He left behind a tangible legacy that propagates an energy of goodness. It is an honor to be part of this amazing heritage.

How appropriate it is that The Cooper Union is located in NYC. Few other collective masses of flesh are as an enduring a monument to the ability of mankind to pull together for the greater good. The world thirsts for this type of balance. If such gifts are not nurtured, we will surrender our humanity to the language of nothingness.

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MICHAEL MONAGHAN 1991 |

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

My first day at Cooper Union in 1987 consisted of an all-freshman meeting in the basement auditorium of what was the old engineering building where physics lecture were held. What I was expecting at the time was the dreaded freshman talk about how hard engineering school was and the inevitable, “Look to your left and look to your right.

One of you will not be here in four years.” Dean Lucchesi entered the auditorium and welcomed us all to our first year at The Cooper Union.

What he said next has stayed with me all these years to now. He said, “Look to your left and look to your right. ALL of you will be here in four years.” I was astounded but after experiencing undergraduate and graduate work at Cooper Union, I can honestly say that I have never felt more part of a team than those five years. All of my classmates worked together to complete projects, research and collaborate. We worked together to graduate.

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GUS BLOCK 1994 |

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

I matriculated at Cooper Union in 1990 at the age of 33, after spending my twenties as a wooden boat builder and teacher in Maine, the National Maritime Museum in San Francisco and as a UN Volunteer in the Maldives. Boat-building is arguably the granddaddy of all the trades and, I believed (along with Buckminster Fuller), an excellent foundation for the artful practice of engineering. My interest was to become involved in creating alternative energy solutions in response to climate change, the effects of which were coming to be recognized in low-lying island nations like Maldives.

I had moved to New York in the late eighties with my partner, a physician who wanted to tackle the AIDS crisis at one of its epicenters.

Having made the decision to study engineering, I had also set my sights on Cooper. From my research on engineering schools I knew that the caliber of the education was unsurpassed, and I also was enthralled by the concept of a “union for the advancement of science and art.” The free tuition made this opportunity one I could realistically grasp—IF I was able to get in.

To prepare, I spent a year studying math and science at the City College of New York. I did well on my SATs, spent more time on my admission essays than I had on any other writing assignment until then, and was overjoyed when I received my letter of acceptance from Cooper Union.

The years at Cooper were as challenging and engaging as I had anticipated. I enrolled as a mechanical engineering major and was

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introduced to courses and topics I never knew existed, like vector calculus, and had excellent instruction in Japanese. Being in a class of mostly 18 to 22 year olds certainly kept me on my toes, and I immensely enjoyed the friendships that were forged in crucible of team projects and daunting coursework. I also appreciated the talent of the superb faculty—not only in the School of Engineering, but in art and architecture as well. Several professors, including Jean LeMée, Alan Wolf and Ellen Lupton, shared my passion and appreciation for interdisciplinary investigation, and I was thrilled to occasionally peek in on the amazing work going on across the street in the Foundation Building.

During my senior year I was lucky enough to be accepted by Joel Hollenberg into his laboratory. Professor Hollenberg had a reputation for being an extremely demanding instructor, which he was—setting the bar high not only for academic excellence but also for the quality of weekly oral presentations which his junior year students had to prepare (and dreaded). Not only did I survive the ordeal, but I found I wanted more.

Professor Hollenberg’s main field of interest was hydrogen energy.

He believed in the concept of a ‘hydrogen economy,’ in which hydrogen—the most abundant element in the universe, but never found in a free stat—is produced by the splitting of water through electrolysis or by other means, compressed, stored, then used in a fuel cell to power electric vehicles (or pretty much anything else). He patented a Photovoltaic Energy Conversion System (PECS), assigning the patent to Cooper Union, which harnessed solar power to electrolyze water, storing the liberated H2 in metal hydrides, and ultimately using it in a fuel cell to generate electricity, with water and heat the only by-products. To me, this was the penultimate vision of a technology that could have a major effect on reversing the course of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and I was hugely energized by it.

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I put my senior year project knowledge to work the following year as a Fulbright Scholar in Sri Lanka. My yearlong project was to construct a wind-powered electrolyzer at the National Engineering Research and Development (NERD) Centre near Colombo. Upon my return to the States, I joined the Advanced Energy Systems group at Arthur D. Little, a contract research organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was focusing on hydrogen production for fuel cell automobiles.

My group was spun off several years later into a company called Nuvera Fuel Cells, where I still work as Director of Corporate Development.

On my office wall is a brass plaque, in the shape of Sri Lanka, from the NERD Centre in appreciation for my contribution to the field of hydrogen energy.

Cooper Union has an unusual method for choosing its student commencement speaker. Rather than awarding the valedictory honor to the student with the highest grade point average, a competition is held for anyone who wants the privilege of addressing her or his classmates, teachers, family and friends at the culmination of four or more (grueling) years of studies. I was honored to be selected as the 1994 commencement speaker. My topic was “The Erotic Life of Cooper Union,” in which I discussed Lewis Hyde’s exploration of gift exchange, and how all of us had received the gift of a free education at Cooper which had consequences we might not have imagined. Gifts, unlike consumer purchases, create bonds between people—the domain of Eros—and the receiver is necessarily beholden. One is not obligated to pay back what has been given, but an impulse to “pay it forward” inevitably arises in proportion to the gift’s magnitude.

Peter Cooper bestowed an extraordinary gift to me and to countless others, and I will gladly suffer gratitude, a state that is most effectively healed by making gifts to others.

That’s the story of what this remarkable institution has meant to me.

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JOHN LEYLEGIAN 1994 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

My time at The Cooper Union opened my eyes to a vast array of opportunities I never knew existed. From the very first day of class in my freshman year, I was challenged to think like an engineer, like a problem solver. It was daunting, to be sure, but also very exciting. In fact, all of my classes challenged me intellectually.

Not only was the rigor of the program second to none, I could not have asked more in terms of the quality of the faculty. Their teaching abilities were matched only by the depth of experience they exhibited.

In addition, I was challenged to come out of my shell and learn to write and speak like an engineer in front of audiences.

I found this inspiring, so much so that when I left Cooper I had the opportunity to undertake graduate studies at Princeton University, where I earned my doctorate. I took the lessons I learned about good practical engineering and tempered them with the ability to conduct scientific research.

After completing my graduate work, I had the good fortune to end up working with one of my former Cooper Union professors and several of my fellow alumni at GASL in Ronkonkoma, NY. In the eight years I spent there I was able to tackle problems in aerospace and propulsion most people only see on television. It was a time that I grew so much on a professional level.

It was during my time at GASL that I realized that my calling was to teach future generations of engineers. I had the good fortune to land

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NAME 19XX |

DISCIPLINE

From the very first day of class in my freshman year, I was challenged to think like an engineer, like a problem solver. It was daunting, to be sure, but also very exciting.

an academic position at Manhattan College. I have been there for eight years now, and in that time I have been able to work on the kind of research that interests me, as well as teach and perform research with hundreds of students. I regularly think back to my Cooper professors, especially when I’m trying to figure out how to teach a particular concept. I credit the engineer, researcher and teacher I am today ultimately to my experience at The Cooper Union.

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TROY KREINER 2014 | SCHOOL OF ART

I grew up in Long Island, New York, and somehow it took me 20 years to figure out that an amazing school like the Cooper Union existed so close to me. I first went to college in Philadelphia for two years at the University of the Arts on Broad Street. I was thirsty to get out of my parents house and live on my own; I didn’t get opportunity to do college visits with my family. I applied to maybe three colleges; I didn’t want to spend so much money on the damn applications. I applied to SUNY Purchase and I think MICA—I didn’t get into Purchase because I think I was late on something and MICA accepted me with a scholarship, as did University of the Arts, but UArts gave me more. I was actually the first person in my immediate family to finish college. As long as I worked hard and got a job, that was the old New York mentality I grew up around. A job and hard work was not enough for me, I wanted an education—learn how to write and formulate a position in life!

I quickly realized University of Arts was not for me and ultimately I could not afford it and neither could my family. I decided to move back to New York and “figure it out.” This time I ended up in Brooklyn, working freelance design gigs left and right, combined with working at restaurants, juggling four to five jobs at a time, doing the ‘New York City grind.’ I was talking to a friend and told them how much I missed school and how badly I wanted to go back but they were all too expensive.

This friend told me about Cooper Union, which I had no idea existed prior to this conversation. He told me it was free... I remember telling him, ‘bullshit, nothing’s free.’ He quickly responded, promising me that

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it was free! I couldn’t believe it so when I got home I went online and did my research; sure enough, it was free. I was thrilled to find the Cooper Union, I told myself I had to get in—it’s perfect for me.

I signed up for a portfolio review did all the applications I possible could and anticipated the take home test: I was so excited to do the take home test, it was the first assignment I got in a year and I was going to nail it! I went to my first portfolio review, at 41 Cooper Square, I was waiting on a long line, carrying all the best work I ever made, professional work and also student work and personal projects. I remember Day Gleeson giving me a huge smile and showing me which professor I was going to meet with—I won’t mention her name even though we laugh about this story now and I think she is wonderful. My first portfolio review at Cooper went horribly, the professor I met told me I shouldn’t apply and that I shouldn’t even go back to school, that Cooper was not for me. I was appalled. She told me that because I was already getting professional work there was no reason for me to come back to school, that people went to school so they could get professional jobs after. She literally made me sick to my stomach during this meeting. I told her I wanted to go back to school and finish learning.

We didn’t see eye to eye. I left that meeting infuriated. I told myself that it was not enough, her criticism was not enough for me. I decided I needed to meet with someone else. I had to come back for a round two. Cooper was for me and I wouldn’t really accept any other answer.

I came back for a portfolio review and this time, it went fantastic. I met with Mike Essl who is to this day one of my best mentors. We spoke for at least an hour, he had so many questions, we were hitting off like a bomb first date! (minus the romance, but maybe some bromance) He ended up showing me the Herb Lubalin Center for Typography, which BLEW me away, showed me the original brand guidelines for the NYC Subway system by Massimo Vignelli, showed me their impressive archive and library...I was weak at the knees, and at the very end he

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gave me a teacher referral. I literally floated out of 41 Cooper like a cool-tween on a hover board. That was my golden ticket into the Cooper Union and the next three years (since I was a transfer student) totally transformed my life, my character, my politic, my education, my network, my passion, EVERYTHING about my identity, it didn’t change me, it incubated me. Cooper gave me all the resources to grow into myself, to run with every bit of abundance that it provides—and it is 100 percent because it is free, the Cooper Union I know is FREE! I love the Cooper Union, I am the Cooper Union, Cooper Union is for me and needs to be free. As far as I’m concerned the Cooper Union has been on a sabbatical ever since it stopped being free. It’s something else...It pains me to think of how many potential students should be at Cooper right now, igniting their potential, but can not because of the new paradigm, the new half-tuition, need-based-blind-half-bakedfinancial-scheme. Its not the answer and we ALL know it. Anyone who truly benefitted from Cooper knows that the current model is not the answer, was never the answer and can’t ever be the answer. We have to get Cooper back from it is egregious vacation.

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