Voices from the Great Hall

Since its opening in 1858, The Cooper Union’s Great Hall has provided a platform for social activism, education, culture, and electoral politics. The largest open space designed for public gatherings and civic functions in New York City below 14th Street when it was built, the Great Hall has hosted lectures and debates that include the earliest workers' rights campaigns, the birth of the NAACP, the women's suffrage movement, the founding of the Red Cross, and Abraham Lincoln’s February 27, 1860 “Right Makes Might” address, which propelled him to the United States presidency. Prominent thinkers from every field, including 11 aspiring, sitting, and former Presidents, have spoken from the Great Hall stage.

Programming in the Great Hall has been the responsibility of both The Cooper Union and external groups over time. During the late nineteenth century, The Cooper Union hosted public lectures on government, political economy, and the American Revolution, which evolved into the Free Saturday Evening Lectures, coordinated by Abram Hewitt. In 1893 and 1894, Columbia University and the New York City Board of Education added additional lectures. The People’s Institute took over programming in 1898, providing free lectures until 1934. Subsequently, The Cooper Union resumed programming responsibilities by creating the Division of Social Philosophy, naming its event series “The Cooper Union Forum" and holding programs several nights per week. This programming body was renamed the Division of Adult Education in 1955, and in the 1980s, the Office of Continuing Education began hosting Great Hall events. Today, programming is coordinated through the Office of Communications, which produces events and often hosts those of outside organizations.

Beginning in 1949, when Johnson E. Fairchild started his tenure as the chairman of the Division of Social Philosophy, Forum programs were recorded and broadcast locally on the radio by WNYC on Thursday nights at 9pm as “The Cooper Union Forum.” Selected lectures were syndicated nationally on educational radio stations through the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). Additionally, in 1962, the Monday night “Great Issues” lectures were broadcast on local television channel WUHF. Since the late 1970s, recording of the lectures has been carried out primarily by technicians and students working in The Cooper Union’s AV/Multimedia Services department, with some programs recorded for broadcast by networks such as C-SPAN and PBS.

This collection was compiled from multiple sources during the Voices from the Great Hall Digital Access Project, funded by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation from 2018 to 2021. In the decades previous to their transfer to the Library, most recordings were stewarded by the AV/Multimedia Services department, in particular due to the efforts of one long-time staff member, Winston Wilkerson. The bulk of textual and photographic materials were assembled by the Office of Public Affairs and Office of Continuing Education during the course of their creation.