New Book
In times of meager state funding, colleges and universities have had to find new ways to shore up their fiscal stability. Urban development is higher education’s latest economic growth strategy. And building profitable UniverCities helps schools offset a drop in state funding. Campus-expansion projects meet the increased demands for upscale housing, high-tech laboratories, and plentiful retail options that will attract world-class students, faculty, and researchers. These university developments also reorganize their host cities for new private investments in the bioscience and information-technology industries. As urban campuses continue to grow, all city residents will be living in the shadows of ivory towers.
Indeed, urban universities and their medical centers—the “meds and eds”—stand as one of the most central yet least examined social forces shaping today’s cities.10 In today’s knowledge economy, universities have become the new companies, and our major cities serve as their company towns. But unlike Amazon, Microsoft, and other info-tech industries, higher education claims responsibility for our public good. It’s time we investigated that promise, asking whether a school’s increased for-profit ambitions can undermine the interests of the public. In fact, the presumption that higher education is a public good has for too long distracted critics and urban residents from getting to the heart of the matter: what makes universities good for our cities? We need fewer assumptions and more analysis. When most of the United States had abandoned cities in the mid-twentieth century, higher education was one of the only institutions that remained. A core group of colleges and universities used public urban renewal money to bunker themselves behind the walls of campus buildings or demolished city blocks—and away from the growing “invasion” of Black and Latinx residents. But starting in the 1990s, young professionals, empty nesters, and the children of suburban sprawl began to seek a more urbane lifestyle. And municipal politicians and real estate developers from different cities started competing with one another to capture the potentially lucrative new tax base and its consumer dollars. At the same time, colleges and universities were looking for new revenue streams in the face of tight state budgets. The interests of university and city leaders converged when the college campus was reimaged as the palatable and profitable version of a safe urban experience.
