Update, 6:56pm EDT: Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha has resigned, according to a spokesperson for the college. His resignation, effective at the end of June, was apparently tendered at today’s board meeting and announced in a statement by the board and in an email to the Cooper Union community. (Both letters are repoduced in full at the bottom of this article.) A spokesperson for Cooper Union confirmed the departure in a brief telephone interview with ARTINFO this evening. William Mea, vice president for finance and administration, will serve as interim president, and a search committee will be formed in the fall, another spokesperson told ARTINFO in an email. The move follows Tuesday’s five trustee resignations originally reported in the story that follows.

Bharucha, who began his tenure as the 12th president of the Cooper Union in July 2011, said in his email to the Cooper community that he will be a visiting scholar at Harvard's Graduate School of Education beginning in the fall. A board statement thanked Bharucha for his service and noted that “the financial exigencies with which he was confronted upon his arrival were not of his making and he deserves credit for sounding the alarm about the need to take urgent action to ensure Cooper Union’s long-term financial sustainability.” Student, alumni, and faculty activists have long called for Bharucha's ouster over alleged financial mismanagement, with the first such demand taking place during a December 2012 student occupation of his office.

Five of the Cooper Union’s 24 trustees have resigned ahead of a board meeting scheduled for today, including real estate investor and chairman emeritus Mark Epstein and architect Daniel Libeskind. Three of the five resignation letters were published <http://cscufcscu.com/2015/06/five-cooper-union-trustees-resigned-today/> on a blog maintained by a pro-administration group called the Committee to Save Cooper Union from the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCUFCSCU), a reference to the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU), the student, faculty, and alumni coalition that has filed a lawsuit against the board of trustees over alleged financial mismanagement leading to the 2014 implementation of tuition at the historically free institution. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman initiated an investigation into the Cooper Union’s finances earlier this year, prompting trustees to vote <http://www.wsj.com/articles/cooper-union-board-offers-not-to-renew-contract-of-president-jamshed-bharucha-1428626336> in April not to renew Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha’s contract, which is set to expire in late 2016. Libeskind had publicly opposed <http://www.wsj.com/articles/cooper-union-board-offers-not-to-renew-contract-of-president-jamshed-bharucha-1428626336> Bharucha’s ouster.

In acrimonious missives to their board colleagues published on the CSCUFCSCU blog, Epstein, Libeskind, and investment banker and securities lawyer Monica Vachher variously express their “disappointment” and lack of support for the current direction of the board. “As a donor, I am withdrawing my financial support for the college,” Epstein wrote, while Vachher and Libeskind limited their proscriptions to characterizations of the board, which Vachher said was “unwilling to make or support often difficult decisions that would be in the long-term best interests of the institution”; Libeskind said its decisions were “not in the best interest of Cooper Union.”

A representative for Libeskind confirmed that his letter was authentic in an email to ARTINFO, but declined requests for further comment. The Cooper Union did not respond to a request for comment regarding the remaining letters and the apparent resignations of the other trustees — Vassar College president Catharine Bond Hill, on whose board Bharucha also sits, and the architect François de Menil. All five have been deleted from a Cooper Union Web page <http://cooper.edu/about/trustees/> listing members of the board.