art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

64 art / vision / voice
Over the years, the ethnic composition of the communities
surrounding Cooper changed significantly. The immigrant European
communities of New York City were joined by African American migrations
from the South and later by populations from Latin America and Asia. By
the 1960s, few students from the city’s public schools or the surrounding
Lower East Side community attended the increasingly competitive, tuitionfree
Cooper Union. In the political ferment of 1968, New York City
underwent an intense political struggle over education. Massive strikes
for and against community control closed down parts of the public school
system and briefly spawned informal alternative schools across the city.
In the midst of these events—inspired by the original vision of Peter
Cooper—a group of Cooper undergraduates realized that the public
school system was not adequately preparing the city’s diverse ethnic and
racial population to become competitive college candidates. In response,
these undergraduates organized a Saturday Program, teaching classes
themselves, for students recruited directly from local public high schools.
The relationship between the undergraduate-run Saturday Program
and the larger Cooper academic community was complex from the
beginning. Though the college eventually funded the program, factions
within the institution heatedly questioned its value. Detractors believed
that untrained undergraduate college students were incapable of serious
teaching and that the program’s philosophy of open enrollment ensured
an inferior outcome. Supporters considered the program a unique
reciprocal learning experience for both college and high school students,
a worthy extension of Peter Cooper’s original vision, and a resource for
urban candidates to the college.
“[The Saturday Program] started out as a program based upon
critique,” suggested Robert Rindler, former dean of the School of Art
and a Cooper alumnus of the late 1960s, who also observed that the
program was seen simultaneously as a form of good work and as an
indictment of society and the institution for not doing all they should.
Rindler noted that this context challenged “the institutional relationship
between authority and responsibility.”
While controversy at Cooper over the Saturday Program was partially
fueled by competition for limited space on campus and the absence of an
art education department at Cooper Union, it was exacerbated by the
tension generated by two intersecting realities. On the one hand, Cooper’s
admissions policy was becoming more competitive and gradually more elite.
On the other hand, like many colleges, Cooper struggled to confront a
lack of diversity at every level—from administration, to faculty, to student
body. The Saturday Program survived through active support from both
inside and outside Cooper, and it continued to serve a student population
reflecting a true cross section of the city beyond the college’s walls.