One night last week the square, bare, whitewashed auditorium in the basement of a dingy old brownstone building on Manhattan's Astor Place was jampacked with friends, families and seniors of Cooper Union. Watching them from the old-fashioned wooden platform sat the school dignitaries. Abraham Lincoln had stood on that platform to deliver his famed campaign speech in 1860. Now another tall, bearded man, Robert Fulton Cutting, 82, potent industrialist and president of Cooper Union's Board of Trustees, uprose to warn the seniors to work hard and be modest. Then he started...
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