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Cooper Union will officially start charging its undergraduates tuition, after the Board of Trustees rejected a 54-page report compiled by a Working Group of alumni, staff, students and trustees that outlined a plan to keep the school free.

In a statement yesterday, the Board of Trustees announced they had voted against the Working Group's report [pdf], which, among other things, suggested the school reduce faculty's salary expenses, sell the school's sole resident hall and slash the president's salary. The report, which was submitted to the Trustees last month, offers a sobering look at Cooper Union's already lean amenities, but those who worked on it hoped it would be a last ditch effort to keep a school founded on the principle of free education from rejecting that fundamental purpose. "If the vote goes one way, a new, lean, careful Cooper Union will tiptoe forward, tuition-free," Kevin Slavin, a Cooper Union alumnus and one of the Board's 23 Trustees, wrote on Thursday. "If it goes the other way, all of that will disappear. Not just the free tuition, but everything that was built on it. In its place we’ll find a tragic fraud. A joke. A zombie."

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Perhaps this is why bricks and mortar bookstores are having trouble staying in business?

My neighbor Joyce just sent me this listing for a Deck House for sale down the street. It's in Montclair, a train town 45 minutes from Manhattan by train (30 minutes by bus or car in off hours). I can't say enough about Montclair. It has good schools, it is diverse in race and income, there are few chain stores, it is community and neighborhood oriented, there are huge numbers of parks, and the food is good. The house is on Highland and you're on the highest point west of Portugal (not counting midtown's skyscrapers which may or may not be visible from this house), sort of the Hollywood Hills of the east.

There aren't many Deck Houses left that haven't changed hands and there's not a lot of modernism near the city.

http://emailrpt.gsmls.com/public/show_public_report_rpt.do?report=clientfull&Id=85723821_496080

It needs some restoration, but we can go over that. The house is on a half acre of land.

July 16, 2013

Dear Rem Koolhaas,

we have never met, or so it seems. We are a non-relevant group. We are about half of the humanity, maybe more. We are also about 20% of our and your profession, maybe less. We are architects, yet female.

We have seen you signed the retroactive campaign about Denise Scott-Brown’s spoliation of the Pritzker Prize. That made us feel better about the fact that again, a white male in his late 60′s has been given power, this time over the Venice Bienniale. We thought you might help. Maybe not.

We have scrutinized the 2012 edition by your predecessor David Chipperfield and found the number of female participants appallingly low. We though you could do better. But then, someone said you appointed Hans-Ulrich Obrist for the Swiss Pavilion.* **

“Women are the ghosts of modern architecture, everywhere present, crucial, but strangely invisible,” says Colomina. Please make sure we are not side-lined, invisible, marginalized once again at the 2014 Architecture Biennale.

We would like you, for next year’s edition, to say F*ck Old White Men and give space to women in architecture: the talented, unjustly ignored architects, that happened to be female.

Through positive action and representation, we believe gender equality to be fundamental and hope you do too.

Hopelessly yours,