Last Tuesday, September 1 — the day before classes started at New York University — there was an extraordinary rally in Washington Square Park to protest Wall Street’s stranglehold on U.S. higher education.
In several ways, this rally was unprecedented. First, it was a massing of communities not only from one threatened university, but several institutions starkly misdirected by their buccaneering boards and pampered managers: NYU, Cooper Union and the New School, three downtown New York City schools severely damaged by their trustees’ serial construction plans and other wild investments.