The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union offers a five-year NAAB accredited program established by John Hejduk. The school ranks among the top five architecture programs in the United States. The philosophical foundation of the school was directly committed to the "Social Contract" and dedicated to education as "one of the last places that protects freedom, and teaching as a sociopolitical act, among other things." among those other things were principles of free debate and theoretical discourse which drew source from deep wellsprings of lost histories such as the Bauhaus school of Architecture founded by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.