Prior to the controversial decision, a 2009 article in The Wall Street Journal had reported that the school would sidestep a crisis.

[8] Despite this and other reports, on October 31, 2011, Bharucha announced an insurmountable deficit that allegedly could not keep the institution sustainable without tuition.

In May 2013, former Board of Trustees investment committee chair John Michaelson admitted the school could have continued to use the endowment to cover deficits and would have survived until 2018, when the higher payments from the Chrysler lease start.

[9] In an investigation of Cooper Union's finances released in a cross petition on September 2, 2015, New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman found that "President Campbell misinformed the community as to the strength of Cooper Union’s finances, when they had sufficient information to know the truth of the school’s increasingly dire condition."

[1] He has been married since 1968 to Mary Schmidt Campbell,[15] who is the former president of Spelman College and dean emerita of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.