Sender: H-URBAN Urban History discussion list <H-URBAN@UICVM.BITNET> ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1993 19:13:02 CST From: "Burton J. Bledstein" <U28330@UICVM.BITNET>

" A faculty member's reply to the Chancellor's Committee Report: 'Preparing the University of Illinois-Chicago for the 21st Century'"

The Standing Campus Priorities Committee [SCPC] draft report raises many important issues in higher education that are being addressed on the national agenda: undergraduate education, faculty-administration relationship, program priorities, computerization, and so on. In this regard the report is unexceptional. What is exceptional is the vision of the report regarding UIC, its image, character, and mission for the 21st century. Unfortunately, the members of SCPC seem to be speaking to the wrong century. We have seen this future, and it doesn't work.

1. "Land grant mission in an urban setting"! As public policy the land grant college, established by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, was a failure. For the purpose of winning votes, the Republican party romanticized yeoman farmers and republican mechanics, both disappearing groups, and proposed that universities become pretentious trade schools. However, when ambitious children of farmers came to the University of Illinois, for instance, they chose to raise themselves to middle class urban professions, preferring to be professors and professionals rather than plowmen. State institutions took the federal money and ran, building up their popular academic disciplines rather than applied, practical, and outreach ones, for which there was minimal demand. For universities the success of the Land Grant legislation was its reliable source of federal funding. In proposing to embrace the public policy SCPC endorses the failure of the Land Grant Mission while being denied access to the funding. "Urban setting" and urban student is as problematic today as "agrarian setting" and yeoman farmer or mechanic was a century ago.

2. "During the next 10 years, UIC must become the nation's leading urban public research university"! By what measures, what model, what comparison? The University of Berlin in the early 19th century imperial city, the University of London in the mid-century Victorian city, CCNY in the early 20th c. U.S. immigrant city, and UCLA in the post WWII U.S. suburban city: each of these urban institutions succeeded in substantive ways in different times and places. Their academic prestige attracted city people wishing to better their life chances by means of a broad range of solid "careers." The SCPC report shuns both substance and specifics. In an a-historical universe, rhetorically engineered from the top down, Chicago becomes "the city," UIC "the university." The word "careers" seldom appears. Intrinsic connections to the deep historical and cultural resources identifying Chicago--Newberry Library, Art Institute, Historical Society, Crerar Library, Field Museum--are never drawn. Scholars embrace Chicago as a subject of study. This city in particular is more substantive and specific than what SCPC labels as a "laboratory." Phrases like "unparalleled academic experience" in undergraduate education bewilder the reader with an empirical sense of reality. Indeed the concern becomes that this report is a rhetorical cover for a trade school, which is widely regarded as what Urbana and its representatives on campus prefer.

3. The most commonly used words in this report are review, assess, evaluate, oversee, plan, reallocate, manage, function, and of course, report. This is an administrator's point of view, reflecting the careers of the majority of the members of the committee. What will distinguish UIC in the SCPC's image of a university in the 21st century is its feedback mechanisms, necessary perhaps but not sufficient. The best minority students go elsewhere today in part because UIC lacks sufficient prestige in the minds of its potential audience. After 25 years on this campus, UIC appears to the students and the public as more serious about its politics and administrative structures than about its academic disciplines, departments, and missions. Graduate urban and public affairs as a program, committee, or institute made up of a hybrid of disciplines--good idea. To invest large amounts of money in a graduate school is a failed idea; SCPC does not cite one successful model. Invest the money where the students are and will be, where the national reputations have been made, and the job needs to get done, in LAS academic departments for one instance. The history of Chicago and its international importance, from ethnic homelands to finance capitalism, is taught with a depth in the History Department by a range of academic specialists that would not be found in Urban and Public Affairs. SCPC's vaguely worded and de-contextualized report reads more like the ending of the 20th century than the beginning of the 21st.

Burton J. Bledstein Department of History ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1993 07:40:05 CST From: "Burton J. Bledstein" <U28330@UICVM.BITNET>

Each fundamental shift in the direction of American higher education was accompanied by a visionary statement, each reflected significant changes in the meaning of higher learning, each generated serious debate (John Dewey's response to Hutchins) and discussions of conflicting values about the primary meaning of "knowledge." For example, The Yale Report of 1828 Henry Tappan, The Idea of a University (1858) Charles William Eliot, The New Education (l868) Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the U.S. (1910) Robert M. Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (1936) James Bryant Conant, Harvard Report on General Education (1945) Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (1963)

By way of contrast, what I'm hearing from SCPC is sound bytes accompanied by extravagant claims for greatness and accomplishment. In his March 18 appointment of an Advisory Committee the Chancellor persists in accelerating the rhetoric. He speaks of "great cities." The claim is that UIC will "aim at improving the quality of life in Chicago," a focus "around which UIC can shape an identity and establish a unique reputation for itself."

Does this meet the standard of the historical debate in higher education? Are there documents, a literature, an historiography articulating, expanding upon, giving direction to a model for a coherent "great cities" initiative. A bibliography search for a half century yielded nothing of substance. At the moment the discussion about UIC's vision and mission is delivering sound bytes and smoke, hardly the stuff that will improve the quality of life in Chicago. Indeed, the quality of life at UIC appears to be deteriorating.

In order to enlighten an increasingly skeptical professional audience of scholars and educators, I recommend that the Chancellor deliver a series of public lectures in the tradition of Tappan, Eliot, Hutchins, and Kerr. This will be an opportunity in the real world to make sense of phrases such as "land grant university in an urban setting" and "great cities" initiative.

Burton J. Bledstein Department of History ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Mar 1994 13:14:52 CST From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET> Subject: Urban Universities as 20th Century Land Grant Universities?

In 1993, the Great Cities concept was launched at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an attempt to integrate the teaching and research of the university with service to the city of Chicago and urban settings around the world.

The Great Cities initiative involves a major planning effort here at the university to investigate how the academic departments can contribute to the improvement of the city of Chicago and elsewhere. Much of the discussion has focused on the best means of carrying out this goal.

Last year, in a message copied to H-Urban, Burt Bledstein, a faculty member of the UIC history department and H-Urban Advisory Board member, asked the university:

Are there documents, a literature, an historiography articulating, expanding upon, giving direction to a model for a coherent "great cities" initiative[?]. A bibliography search for a half century yielded nothing of substance.

Bledstein also cited several "visionary" statements that had accompanied earlier fundamental shifts in U.S. education, including

The Yale Report of 1828 Henry Tappan, The Idea of a University (1858) Charles William Eliot, The New Education (l868) Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the U.S. (1910) Robert M. Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (1936) James Bryant Conant, Harvard Report on General Education (1945) Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (1963)

and asked for a similar statement to support a new direction for urban universities.

The debate has arisen again about the mission of the urban university. For an urban historian, the following comparison of the urban university and the 19th century land grant university is particularly intriguing:

One of the secondary themes I hear in the Great Cities discussion is the notion that UIC should play the same role in an urban environment that other schools have historically played in rural settings. The land grant concept, as practiced at UIUC, Iowa State, Wisconsin and many other schools involves technology transfer from the University to agriculture and industry. Historically, much of this effort has been focused on the farm and the rural family although work has also focused on specific industrial applications.

To support this transfer of information and technology, the land grant schools have developed an elaborate structure of Extension Divisions, County Agents and other institutions, much of it federally funded. For example, most land grant schools have agriculture experiment stations funded by USDA, which have a fair amount of social science money available.

If the University is to do Great Cities right, we need that kind of infrastructure. Otherwise, I am afraid, what we are talking about is largely a PR exercise. While it is true that we can ask many of our more applied schools and colleges to focus more explicitly on cities, and particularly this one, and while certain faculty can be encouraged to do research work that is of interest and value to the "Great Cities", what made the land grant model work was a basically the transfer of laboratory results to applied settings. That requires skills and organizational structures that are quite different that those found in academic departments.

So, my question is this: what thought has been given to this issue? If we are going to do Great Cities, have we thought about what it really means? It does not mean, at least in my mind, merely increasing the volume of research that might vaguely benefit the city. In the first place, I don't think that will work very well because the gap between basic research and application is large, and the University will continue to reward basic research. And even if it did work, someone has to make the link from discovery to application.

My purpose in posting this discussion is to obtain some historical perspective on the relationship of urban universities and the cities in which they reside. In particular, have public urban universities evolved in a different manner than private urban universities? Is there a parallel between the 19th century land grant universities and the 20th century public urban universities?

And what are the distinctions between the public and private urban university as an institution within the city, with impacts on the tax base and land use, and as a source of education and expertise?

I am primarily interested in historical aspects of the public urban university, its purpose, and its impact on the city, although comments on contemporary urban universities are welcome to augment the discussion. Especially interesting would be to hear about how urban universities in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia differ or are similar.

Wendy Plotkin H-Urban Co-Moderator U20566@uicvm.uic.edu ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Mar 1994 07:33:54 CST From: Steven Diner <SDINER@GMUVAX.BITNET>

Here are a few thoughts in response to Wendy Plotkin's questions about urban universities and 20th century land grant universities. In my book, A CITY AND ITS UNIVERSITIES: PUBLIC POLICY IN CHICAGO, 1892-1919, I quote the University of Chicago's founding president, William Rainey Harper, who wrote in 1905 that "urban universities are in the truest sense national universities" because "the great cities represent the national life in its fulness and its variety." Harper's successor, Harry Pratt Judson, wrote in 1911 that "in a great city with its crowded population the limits of the university duties are to be conceived as coterminous with the limits of the city itself." Eleven years ago, when I was chair of Urban Studies at the University of the District of Columbia, I interviewed for a fellowship in academic administration. I said that I had a deep interest in urban universities, and discovered from the response of my interviewers that this meant universities in big cities with large "minority" populations. I learned that American University, George Washington University, NYU, the University of Chicago and Columbia were NOT considered urban universities. But not all urban universities are public -- Roosevelt in Chicago, the University of Detroit and others of that sort are considered "urban." I have always found this contemporary usage rather strange. Urban now means substantially or predominantly working class and minority. One final comment. The University of the District of Columbia is an exclusively urban land grant university. It was established by Congress in 1968 (originally as two institutions -- Federal City College and Washington Technical Institute.) It was given a modest amount of cash as an endowment in lieu of land. The school does have a network of "county agents" in each city ward that provide a variety of services, and it receives federal land grant money for this purpose. But it is a low profile program, and it is hard to argue that it has made a significant dent on the urban problems of Washington, D.C.

-- Steven Diner George Mason University (SDINER@GMU.EDU) Professor of History

======================================================================== Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 11:58:43 +1000 Doug Henwood <dhenwood@panix.com>

I have an offbeat qeustion - does anyone have any theories as to why most urban universities - the prestige ones, that is - are often surrounded by rather slummy neighborhoods? (I'm thinking of Columbia, Chicago, Yale, Brown, USC...) Is this just chance, or is there some real mechanism at work?

Doug

Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 212-874-4020 (voice) 212-874-3137 (fax) ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 14:40:12 +1000 Posted by Scott Salmon <SCSALMON@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU>

In response to Doug Henwood's question I would suspect that the usual mechanisms of neighborhood "decline" (or filtering) are at work - as with historically wealthy inner city areas which are gradually transformed into high(er) density low income areas - while the university remains as a relatively constant island of stasis. By the way - I wouldn't describe the College Hill neighborhood around Brown as "slummy" -! SS.

********************************************************************* P.S.

Scott's comment about "slummy" goes to the core of an historiographical problem which I sought to address in my _The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation In Three Cities 1870-1914_ (Leicester University Press, 1993). Professor Henry Binford at Northwestern University, who is a subscriber to our list, is also working on the construction of "slum" stereotypes.

Alan Mayne H-Urban Co-Moderator ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 16:03:42 +1000 Posted by John S Adams <adams004@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU

In reply to Doug Henwood's question:

The explanation lies in the ways that urban housing submarkets work. Blue collar, working class areas along with the neighborhoods of the elite were pretty stable. The former because they lacked purchasing power, access to credit, and a penchant for socioeconomic mobility that would translate into geographic mobility, and the latter because their residents bought what they wanted once and for all, creating stable areas.

The dynamic, upwardly mobile sectors housing the ambitious middle and upper middle classes were the fastest growing and expanding outward. These were typically the areas wherein the schools were established, and these were the same areas abandoned as households moved up and moved out, leaving behind vacancies and soft housing markets that subsequent newcomers (foreign and domestic) to the city occupied.

The slow trickle down of neighborhoods is especially marked in Northeastern industrial cities. For a comparison of cases see my HOUSING AMERICA IN THE 1980s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987).

John S. Adams Dept of Geography University of Minnesota ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 12:20:11 +1000 Posted by John R Stobo <jrs9@columbia.edu>

How about this.

Universities are just too big to move. Most of the schools mentioned were constructed at a time when the neighborhood was lightly settled. They went out there to expand and have room to grow. This was the case for Columbia which for most of the nineteenth century sat at Madison Avenue in the East Fifties. In 1896 it moved uptown to Morningside Heights which at the time was rural/suburban.

A university is a rather unique being economically speaking. Its contacts with the immediate outside neighborhood are relatively minor. It is unable to serve as any kind of locus for economic growth. Hence, when city growth brought "poorer" people to the schools' vicinity, there was little that the school could do. It could not move and it was unable to support a middle-class environment beyond its immediate vicinity.

Most schools responded by "bunkering down." The main campus of Columbia, for instance, is a fortress, surrounded by walls and gates.

As an extra note: The poor neighborhoods that grew up around these schools, in their turn, have not been too happy to have institutions like Columbia sitting amidst them. I know that in Columbia's case, one response to the poverization of their area has been to buy up apartments and SROs in the area and to evict their residents and bring in a suppossedly better class of people.

John Stobo Columbia University ************************************************************************

Moderator's note:

John notes in his message above that: >Most schools responded by "bunkering down." The main campus of Columbia, >for instance, is a fortress, surrounded by walls and gates.

Legislation to establish the University of Melbourne was passed in 1853, at which time its site was on Melbourne's very rim. Land sales did not begin in neighbouring Carlton, for example, until the early 1850s, and Parkville -- whose postcode the university now bears -- was not densely settled until the 1870s and 1880s. As this ring of suburban hamlets was transformed during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries into a solid belt of inner-suburban working-class neighbourhoods, the university's "bunkering down" took the form of providing academic legitimacy to bourgeois representations of these neighbourhoods as "slums". Indeed, one of the university's graduates so deftly fashioned community opinion about these "decadent areas" during the 1930s that he pressured the State Premier of Victoria to tour some of the "slums" around the university in 1935, and to establish the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1937 in order to sweep these "badlands" away.

Alan Mayne H-Urban Co-Moderator H-Urban@uicvm/H-Urban@uicvm.uic.edu ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 12:30:08 +1000 Posted by Michael Ebner <ebner@lfmail.lfc.edu>

My hunch is that if we trace the locational histories of universities back to the nineteenth century, or earlier, we will discover that they located (or relocated) on the periphery of a city, believing they were escaping from congestion as well as the cultural temptations of the city per se. Hyde Park, to cite an instance, was an upper-middle class enclave at the time it became the site of the University of Chicago.

Some institutions self-consciously situated themselves in rural locales such as the College of New Jersey (Princeton Univesity as of 1896) because its trustees and faculty believed students would benefit from a considerable distance from NYC or Philadelphia. As soon as a rail connection linked Princeton to both metropolises, in the 1840s, the faculty lamented that students were regularly using the trains to avail themselves on big-city temptations. Even earlier, in the 1850s, the founders of Northwestern University explicitly wanted their campus to be outside of the boundaries of Chicago in order to isolate its student body.

A final thought. Around 1910, Northwestern University decided it needed a in-city campus to augment its main campus in Evanston. Nor was it alone, I am convinced, in making this decision.

James E. Vance, Jr., in his book THE CONTINUING CITY, offers a pithy observation about why so many major universities have avoided cities.

Michael Ebner Lake Forest College ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 12:53:21 +1000 Posted by Mickey Lauria <MYLUR@jazz.ucc.uno.edu>

There has been some research on this that indicated that often the university is the slumlord -- owning speculative property for future university expansion or other synergistic land uses. At the same, time other landlords follow the university lead and do not reinvest or maintain such property with the expectation of selling the property in the future either to the university or other developers for university expansion or other synergistic land uses that allow a 'higher and better use'. Since the land use change will require the destruction of the existing buildings and since there is a market for low quality low income rental housing in most inner cities, reinvestment and maintanence would be throwing away capital. Thus the slumlords, including universities can milk the property for rental income stream while waiting for the right time for redevelopment and make a good profit -- non-investment also keeps property taxes down during the interum. Universities often buy such property in poor condition at a much lower price than they would have to if they waited and such expansion and development were eminent. Thus there are many incentives for older inner city universities to be slumlords.

Mickey Lauria Director Division of Urban Research and Policy Studies College of Urban and Public Affairs University of New Orleans ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 15:54:58 +1000 Posted by Robert Cherny <cherny@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu>

Mickey Lauria said: > > There has been some research on this that indicated that often the > university is the slumlord -- owning speculative property for future > university expansion or other synergistic land uses.

I had personal experience with such a situation some 15 years ago. We live within a few blocks of the University of California, San Francisco (the UC's flagship medical school). This area is not a slum. UCSF was seeking permission to demolish a block of homes in order to expand. Their environmental impact report charactertized the surrounding area as a deteriorating neighborhood, complete with photographs of poorly maintained homes. Unfortunately for UCSF, every photograph they used was of a building they owned. Their EIR was rejected, and a compromise of sorts was reached with the neighborhood in which UCSF agreed not to expand into areas of existing residential housing and agreed, also, to restore the deteriorated housing they owned and return it to the market.

Bob Cherny History Dept San Francisco State Uni ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 13:53:09 +1000 From: Alan Mayne <amayne@ariel.unimelb.edu.au>

On Wednesday 23 March, David Sucher <dsucher@cyberspace.com> queried an earlier posting by John Adams as follows:

> >> Posted by John S Adams <adams004@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU >> >> In reply to Doug Henwood's question: >> >> The explanation lies in the ways that urban housing submarkets work. >> Blue collar, working class areas along with the neighborhoods of the >> elites were pretty stable. > >What time period are you talking about? > >David Sucher

John Adams replies as follows:

The period I have looked at most closely is the end of the 1930s through the 1970s, and mainly in the industrial metropolises that received the largest influx of immigrants between 1890 and 1914. These cities, as a class, are distinct from Southern cities that did not change much in the period before 1940, and the Sunbelt cities that expanded fast after 1970.

We don't have any generally acceptable taxonomy of major American metropolises, so we have trouble with our generalizations about the internal affairs of our urban areas. If we were to merge successfully the history and geography of American metro development, we could teach more effectively and could contribute something useful to the dialogue on urban public policy. Alas, we don't know as much as we should, and the subject changes faster than we can get a useful handle on it.

Best wishes.

jsa

Dept of Geography University of Minnesota ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 17:00:53 +1000 Posted by Pierre J. Hamel <HamelPJ@INRS-Urb.UQuebec.ca>

Strange ! This discussion seems to me so much "USAnian". Or maybe it is anglo-saxon, for the very peculiar _campus_ form of U we are referring to.

The point seems to be about USA declining inner cities more than anything about "urban universities". When I think of the campus-style XIXth century urban universities that I know -- green and quiet enclaves -- out of USA, they were built indeed on the edge of inner cities of the time. (Of course, I should say: our predecessors were thinking twice before bulldozing.) But when I look at surrounding areas, I see everything but no slum areas.

In Montreal, on the southern hillside of Mont Royal, the marvelous XIX th century McGill U campus has as neighbour the most fashionable parts of the business sector -- McGill College and President Kennedy as well as of the commercial sector. On the east side of it, lies what was known as the McGill ghetto, which is now less and less affordable for students, more and more replaced by their professors. On the west and north sides, stands the "Golden Square Mile" sector, where the "golden" does not refer to a color; after a fading period, it became the unofficial diplomatic city.

On the other side of the mountain, the early XXth century campus of Universite de Montreal has one foot in an upper class residential sector (Outremont) while most of it is bounded by Cote-des-Neiges mixed residential area: "low" rent appartments buildings, middle range condominiums, older middle class "village" nucleus with low rise buildings, commercial main street -- with great cafes and bookstores, Universite oblige !

In a western part of Montreal city (but centrally located as of the island of Montreal), the mid-century Loyola Campus of Concordia U is surrounded by a very typical north american middle class suburb (at least, on its north and west sides).

Other campus-style Quebec universities stem out of the sixties and they are also in middle class suburbs, such as UQTR -- Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres, such as Universite Laval that lifted off from Old Quebec intra muros city (where it was founded in the same time Harvard was) to land in a "modern" and vast campus, nearby commercial centers and the like.

In Canada as well, there are plenty of urban universities not in any slum areas: post-crisis U of Ottawa (close to the federal governement campus) and UBC (Vancouver) and also, of course, older U of Toronto which is close to Ontario provincial government Queen's Park campus (south-east), Chinatown (west), Yonge (? spelling) and Bloor commercial and office area (north and east) and on northern edge, a residential blend of cheap student coops, "modest" but costly small houses and few rental towers.

In France also. XIXth century campuses are uncommon but think of Lyon and its bourgeois setting. Late sixties and seventies campuses, created after Mai 68, are of another kind: the point was to put students away from downtown so U are settled in what was then red working class banlieue -- most of Paris U, Toulouse, Grenoble ... Such as the U out from the center of Madrid, Beijing, etc.

But one should look at what I take as real "urban" universities -- without any green and quiet (and boring) campus. They are embedded in the city, with buildings scatterred in the inner city and, unlike bunker campus, they have a tremendous effect in their sector. Such as most of the French and Italian U. Some also in Switzerland and The Netherlands. Such as in Montreal, the Sir George William part of Concordia U and, obviously, UQAM -- Universite du Quebec a Montreal. Created in the late sixties, UQAM reinvested the traditional "Quartier Latin" that had suffered from the departure of Universite de Montreal to its greener top of the mountain. The Quartier Latin is back and it looks like any other Quartier Latin I know: effervescent.

well, well, such a long posting, such a poor english.

Pierre J. Hamel Institut national de la recherche scientifique INRS-Urbanisation 3465, rue Durocher Montreal Quebec H2X 2C6 telephone: (514) 499-4014 telecopie: (514) 499-4065 HamelPJ@INRS-Urb.UQuebec.ca ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 17:04:10 +1000 Posted by Barbara Sykes-Austin <sykes@columbia.edu>

There are two somewhat recent articles which touch on the discussion of urban universities' location and real estate interests: Nathan Glazer writes in "The lessons of New York City" on the context for the movement uptown not only of universities like Columbia, but of other important cultural institutions at the turn of the century (_The Public Interest_, no.104, Summer 1991, pp.37-49), and "Universities step into the world of corporate real estate", by M. Curzan and R. Lesser in the Dec. 1989 issue of _Urban Land_, pp.2-7.

For a more simple-minded response to Columbia's buying up of the surrounding real estate: I don't think the reason is just to "bring in a better class of people"; it's to provide people who are to teach and attend the graduate schools with a place to live themselves. If the university is going to attract the kind of faculty and (primarily graduate) students that constitute its community, it has to have a community in the first place. Not being sensitive to the surrounding non-academic community in its attempts to expand are what got it into so much trouble in 1968, however. Still, it's not inappropriate for Columbia to use existing residential property which it owns to make sure that its tuition-paying students have a convenient place to live, nor to provide housing for the faculty it hires. Space happens to be at a premium here...

Barbara Sykes-Austin, Avery Library, Columbia University ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 17:14:43 +1000 Posted by John S Adams <adams004@maroon.tc.umn.eduU>

In reply to Michael Ebner:

I was told some time ago that there was an old tradition in Europe, exported to the USA, of local law enforcement authorities permitting colleges and universities to establish their own rules of conduct and enforcement mechanisms independently of the established governmental order.

It is the case that colleges and universities were frequently located outside of town, for a variety of reasons, some social, some educational, some legal. The traditions began, of course, when the schools were residential and male dominated. Of interest to geographers is the pattern of location of these campuses and their residence halls. Since the prominent colleges and universities in the USA were almost all founded with religious affiliations and support, the locational patterns would certainly be related to the distributional patterns of the congregations that supported the schools, that sent students to them, and that drew graduates from them.

One could start with the colonial map of America and identify the locations of the Ivy League seminaries/colleges. In the cases I'm aware of, they were remote from the centers of the colonial centers that they served. The Methodist, Episcopal, Congregational, and Presbyterian colleges have locational patterns that seem to resemble one another. The Dutch Reformed schools are another. Lutherans another. The Jesuits founded schools within cities to serve the academic and professional ambitions of immigrant Catholics. The state normal schools had a patterns of geographical dispersion, depending on the population distributions they were meant to serve. The land grant universities have a different pattern, and so on. Maybe there is an historical atlas of colleges and universities in the USA. It sounds like an interesting project. In my experience, most students (and most faculty) know little of the history of their own institution, let alone others in their neighborhoods. jsa

Dept of Geography University of Minnesota ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 17:22:40 +1000 Posted by Michael J. Simon" <mjsimon@wam.umd.edu>

In response to Mickey Lauria, who wrote:

>There has been some research on this that indicated that often the >university is the slumlord -- owning speculative property for future >university expansion or other synergistic land uses.

I thought Universities didn't have to pay property taxes. Therefore, they would not be interested in keeping them down. What you said about rental income and holding down values by non-investment pending better use still holds true, however.

Michael J. Simon U. of MD ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 16:36:54 +1000 Posted by Mark Kornbluh <Hteach@artsci.wustl.edu>

In reply to John R Stobo's earlier suggestion: > How about this. > Universities are just too big to move.

The main campus for Johns Hopkins is not in a depressed area, but the medical campus is. In the late 60s, the university took out options on land in the county and seriously contemplated moving the whole hospital and med. school complex. Instead, the decision was made to stay. Slowly, money is being used to buy out the neighborhood to attempt to force gentrification. In the meantime, the fortress mentality has held sway.

Mark

Mark Kornbluh Mark Kornbluh Hteach@artsci.wustl.edu Department of History Box 1062 Washington University 314-935-4256 St. Louis, MO 63130 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Mar 1994 06:57:37 CST From: Marshall Feldman <MARSH@URIACC.URI.EDU> Organization: The University of Rhode Island

On Tue, 22 Mar 1994 07:33:54 CST Steven Diner said:

> Eleven years ago, when I was chair of Urban Studies at the >University of the District of Columbia, I interviewed for a fellowship >in academic administration. I said that I had a deep interest in >urban universities, and discovered from the response of my interviewers >that this meant universities in big cities with large "minority" >populations. I learned that American University, George Washington >University, NYU, the University of Chicago and Columbia were NOT >considered urban universities. But not all urban universities are >public -- Roosevelt in Chicago, the University of Detroit and others >of that sort are considered "urban." I have always found this >contemporary usage rather strange. Urban now means substantially or >predominantly working class and minority.

I think this usage is common but also controversial. Just as when I started graduate school at UCLA, I was told it was a "commuter school" meaning graduate students and many undergraduates did not live on campus. I was told the same thing about Cleveland State University when I started teaching there, but the underlying message was "we draw our students almost exclusively from Greater Cleveland. The idea of an urban grant university no more implies a low level of scholarship than being a land grant university is incongruous with Cornell or Wisconsin. There are those, however, who want to muddy the waters and prefer to call their institutions "urban" rather than "third tier", "teaching university", or the other euphemisms used to describe less prestigious institutions. As far as the question of minority and working class goes, I'd also challenge that. Although many so called urban universities have large proportions of students in these categories, they also often have large number of white suburban kids who, for one reason or another, could not get into or decided not to attend schools further away from home. Where I grew up (Queens, NY) it was common for middle-income parents of "B" students [to offer them] the choice of attending a CCNY campus with a new car or a trip to Europe VS going away to Syracuse or similar institutions. Certainly when I taught at San Francisco State and Cleveland State there were more Porsches and BMW's in the student parking lots than in the faculty lots. So, I'd be careful abouut accepting the rhetoric about "urban" universities being anything more than johnny-come-latelies that are unable to compete with the likes of Ohio State and Berkeley for the state's dollars.

Marsh Feldman Community Planning Phone: 401/792-2248 204 Rodman Hall FAX: 401/792-4395 University of Rhode Island Internet: marsh@uriacc.uri.edu Kingston, RI 02881-0815

======================================================================== Date: Sat, 26 Mar 1994 07:03:46 CST From: Marshall Feldman <MARSH@URIACC.URI.EDU> Organization: The University of Rhode Island

On Wed, 23 Mar 1994 11:58:43 +1000 Doug Henwood said:

>I have an offbeat question - does anyone have any theories as to why >most urban universities - the prestige ones, that is - are often >surrounded by rather slummy neighborhoods? (I'm thinking of Columbia, >Chicago, Yale, Brown, USC...) Is this just chance, or is there some >real mechanism at work?

Brown? It's surrounded by one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in Rhode Island (OK, maybe the whole state's slimy, but that's the politics not the places).

Marsh Feldman Community Planning Phone: 401/792-2248 204 Rodman Hall FAX: 401/792-4395 University of Rhode Island Internet: marsh@uriacc.uri.edu Kingston, RI 02881-0815 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Mar 1994 07:05:36 CST From: Joseph A Rodriguez <joerod@csd4.csd.uwm.edu>

A recent issue here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee applies to the discussion about why many US universities exist in poor neighborhoods. In general the area around UWM is a well-maintained residential area. Yet recently several UWM students have accused a UWM professor of being a" slum lord." Evidently the professor (who shall remain nameless in this e-mail message) owns a duplex near campus and was renting to students. The house has a leaky roof, poor heat etc. and the city inspector has made several visits and cited the owner for numerous violations. So this may suggest an answer to why the areas around universities decline--professors buy up the property, rent to students, and flee to the suburbs. It's all the fault of the professors!

Joseph A. Rodriguez Assistant Professor History Department University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee joerod@csd4.csd.uwm.edu ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 26 Mar 1994 07:08:10 CST From: peter c holloran <pch@world.std.com>

This discussion of urban universities in so-called slum neighborhoods brings to mind the question of college or university police who have police powers outside of their university campus. City police departments give the college cops law enforcement powers in many cases. When and why did this begin? Did the expanding "crime-ridden slums" threatening the college campus promote this practice? I would be interested to learn more about this practice, which is common in Boston and Cambridge.

Peter Holloran Pine Manor College ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 26 Mar 1994 07:09:18 CST From: Susan Garfinkel <sgarfink@sas.upenn.edu>

the original location of the university of pennsylvania, an "ivy league" college though never a seminary, was fourth and arch streets, which, even in 1752, was in the most developed area of the city of philadelphia. lack of room for expansion led to a move to the west, and eventually a second move (c. 1870) to west philadelphia, on the far side of the schuylkill river (we're still in the middle of the city, today). i don't know enough about the history of the other ivy league campuses to comment definitively, but it strikes me that yale is on the edge of the new haven common, as is harvard on the edge of cambridge's (perhaps you would argue that cambridge is in itself remote?). is columbia (king's college) at it's original location? what would have been the center of the center in east new jersey (eg. princeton, then the college of new jersey)? william and mary (not "ivy league" but just as old) is in williamsburg, the colonial capitol of virginia...

susan garfinkel sgarfink@mail.sas.upenn.edu ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 28 Mar 1994 19:24:47 CST From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET>

From: David C. Hammack <dch3@po.cwru.edu>

Two additional notes on the relations between urban universities and their neighborhoods, both concerning Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio: Like the other universities cited in this discussions, CWRU (or rather its antecedents, Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University) built a new campus on the edge of a city from the 1880s on; the surrounding neighborhoods were upper-class and upper-middle-class and middle-class until the 1950s. In the wake of the "Hough" and "Glenville" riots in what had become African-American communities and of vigorous student protests in the wake of the Kent State shootings, the trustees thought, I understand, about moving to a new site in a distant suburb, but decided to remain in large part because the cost of replacing the plant seemed prohibitive. CWRU shares its larger campus area with Cleveland's largest medical and cultural institutions, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Western Reserve Historical Society, University Hospitals, and about 40 other institutions. All these institutions are served by a special nonprofit organization, University Circle, Inc., which not only provides police service, etc., but also serves as a redevelopment agency for all the institutions. UCI buys up properties, holds and manages them, clears land, and makes sites available as needed by individual institutions. It serves, in effect, as a private municipal government. I've wondered how common this arrangement is.

-- David C. Hammack, dch3@po.cwru.edu, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.

======================================================================== Date: Mon, 28 Mar 1994 20:22:07 CST From: Eric Mumford <MUMFORD@MITVMA.BITNET>

On the locations of Ivy League universities:

Princeton began as The College of New Jersey (Presbyterian) in 1747 in Elizabeth, NJ, then an important seaport, and moved in 1756 to a point halfway between NYC and Philadelphia, the town of Princeton. That town's financial incentives of land and money were better than the other contender's, New Brunswick (today home of Rutgers).

Columbia began as King's College in Manhattan in 1754 and was non- sectarian from the outset, though classes were first held in the schoolhouse of Trinity Church (then Church of England, now Episcopalian) and Trinity provided the first campus, on the Hudson River between Barclay and Murray Sts., near today's World Trade Center. Renamed Columbia after the Revolution, in 1814 the college took over a former botanical garden in a then-rural site where Rockefeller Center stands today. In 1892 the need for expansion caused the college to move a third time, to the site of a former orphan asylum, and McKim, Mead and White designed the present Beaux-Arts campus at 116th and Broadway in Upper Manhattan.

Harvard (Congregationalist) was founded in 1636 in Newtowne, renamed Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1638 and has remained on its original site, which was surrounded by the small town of Cambridge (today's Harvard Square).

Eric Mumford MUMFORD@MITVMA Princeton/Columbia/UMass-Boston ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 28 Mar 1994 20:23:03 CST From: Eric Mumford <MUMFORD@MITVMA.BITNET>

On the issue of why areas around some city universities are "slummy":

In fact it usually the university area that has been "stablilized" while the surroundings have spiralled downhill. At Columbia the university owns most of the immediate neighborhood (along with other big non-profit insititutions like Union Theological Seminary, Riverside Church, Jewish Theological Seminary, St Luke's Hospital, etc) and this insures a large middle class population (in aspirations if not--these days in NYC--in income). I imagine something similar has happened in Hyde Park around the University of Chicago. The whole city of Cambridge, MA (with Harvard and MIT) as well as the area around Brown and RISD in Providence are similarly desirable, largely middle-class or better areas. A counter-example is Camden, NJ, where the presence of Rutgers-Camden (perhaps because it came too late?) has not kept the neighborhood around it from severe decline.

This is not to suggest universities always make good neighbors (hah!--look at MIT's record!) but if anything they tend to improve property values in urban areas, not create slums. Slum creation has more to do with insurance and real estate "redlining" (refusing mortgages in largely minority areas) and the whole complex of American attitudes about density, cities, and race.

Eric Mumford MUMFORD@MITVMA Princeton University/Columbia Univ/UMass-Boston ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 29 Mar 1994 21:47:05 CST From: Charlie Nilon <SNRNILON@MIZZOU1.BITNET>

With the exception of the discussion of University of the District of Columbia no one has mentioned historically black colleges and the urban neighborhoods that surround them. I'm familiar with the neighborhood surrounding the Atlanta University Center (Clark-Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Morris Brown College, Spelman College, Interdenominational Theological Center).

My mother was a student at Atlanta University in the 1940's and told me that the neighborhood was black, and working/middle class. The residents included college professors and folks living in John Hope Homes, one of the original public housing projects. She remembers it as a pleasant neighborhood. During this period the AU Center was involved in a variety of projects designed to improve the lives of local residents.

I was an undergraduate at Morehouse from 1974-1978. The area around the center had changed. Few professors lived nearby, the center institutions were buying property, and the neighborhood looked "slummy." It wasn't pleasant and wasn't safe. This trend has continued.

Did similar things happen around other historically black institutions in urban areas (Howard, Tennessee State / Fisk / Meharry, Texas Southern)? Is this pattern related to the black middle class leaving inner city neighborhoods?

Charlie Nilon The School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri-Columbia snrnilon@mizzou1.missouri.edu ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 31 Mar 1994 19:38:24 CST From: "Loomis Mayfield, PRAG" <LMAYFIE@LUCCPUA.BITNET>

On urban universities:

Eric Mumford is accurate about the stabilization of the immediate area around the Univ of Chicago (Hyde Park). But the "slummy" aspects of the area around Hyde Park are a direct result of the policies U of C pursued. See Arnold Hirsch's fascinating study, _Making the 2nd Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Universities may stabilize or increase the value of land in their immediate surroundings, but land values are not an appropriate measure of the strength of a community. They are an appropriate measure of the strength of real estate developers in influencing public policy for their personal benefit, in my opinion.

See essays in Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel,eds., _Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods: Progressive City Government in Chicago, 1983-1987_ (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

-- Loomis Mayfield Policy Research Action Group 264s Granada Centre Loyola Univ Chicago 6525 N. Sheridan Rd. Chicago, IL 60626 312-508-8112 ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 31 Mar 1994 20:33:52 CST From: "David J. Koistinen" <koidavj@minerva.cis.yale.edu>

In the discussion of universities located in declining parts of town, several correspondants have mentioned institutions that thought about moving out of the city, but I know of one that actually did it.

After World War II, Pepperdine University in Los Angeles decided that South-Central was getting a little too scary and acquired some property up the coast in Malibu. Now their heavily fundamentalist Christian and exceedingly blonde student body looks out past Spanish architecture and acres of manicured lawn to the azure Pacific.

From their point of view, the decision was a good one. I remember during live coverage of the L.A. riots that reporters spotted particularly heavy indendiary activity around "the old campus of Pepperdine University."

David Koistinen Yale Univ. koidavj@minerva.cis.yale.edu ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 1 Apr 1994 11:12:01 CST From: james richard grossman <g726@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>

To call the slum conditions in and near Hyde Park "a direct result" of University of Chicago policies is an oversimplification to say the least. Certainly, as Hirsch demonstrates in _Making the Second Ghetto_ the univ. contributed to the destruction of good housing and to segregation in the area. It also affected the area surrounding Hyde Park when it adopted a fortress approach to "saving" its own piece of the neighborhood. And the university's earlier record with regard to support for restrictive covenants and it's refusal to treat black patients in its clinic also contributed to what has become of that part of the South Side. But as the fate of the rest of the South Side suggests, there are many other factors at work.

Jim Grossman The Newberry Library g726@midway.uchicago.edu

======================================================================== Date: Sat, 2 Apr 1994 09:45:11 CST From: peter c holloran <pch@world.std.com>

Boston University is, I think, a recent example of a large urban university that used its financial clout to preserve its neighborhood by preventive real estate purchases of deteriorating property in the Kenmore Square area. As I recall, BU press said Kenmore Square and the Fenway Park area was its frontyard or gateway and property was purchased not for direct university use but to save it from becoming an undesirable neighbor to the campus. Are there other examples of this defensive practice?

Peter Holloran Pine Manor College pch@world.std.com ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 4 Apr 1994 12:28:21 CDT From: HISTP@Jetson.UH.EDU

Houston, Texas has a situation where both the University of Houston and Texas Southern University (which was built specifically for the black population) were built very close to each other on the edge of the traditional black community in town. Amilcar and Shabazz have written an article which I believe is called "One for the Crackers and One for the Coons: the Origins of University of Houston and Texas Southern University."

The community seems to have suffered a general decline despite the efforts to encourage black gentrification. Again the universities are functioning as slum property owners in some cases as they gradually perform their own variation of urban renewal and widen the buffer zone between their students and professors and the dangerous neighborhood. Cleared greenbelts become property available for either new university expansion or student parking lots.

Jan S. Rosin University of Houston HISTP@jetson.UH.EDU ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 9 Apr 1994 16:07:34 CDT From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET>

In this note, I'd like to offer a brief personal perspective on Boston University's relationship to the Fenway neighborhood, in response to Peter Holloran's earlier posting, and to suggest some sources on the history of "urban universities." In his posting, Peter mentioned Boston University's attempts to improve the neighborhood in which it is located. As a Fenway resident from 1974-1989, and a member of the Fenway Community Development Corporation, I was aware of an opposite opinion on the effect of Boston University on the neighborhood. Its acquisition of rundown, but livable housing removed affordable housing from the neighborhood, and replaced it with dormitories aimed at those from outside of the neighborhood. Its development of Kenmore Square primarily included retail shops of interest to university students, and not necessarily to the blue-collar, high school educated long-term residents of the neighborhood.

As a side note, I am reading Jon Teaford's _The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U., 1990). In his chapter, "Hitting Bottom", Teaford describes the efforts of neighborhood groups to offset the decline of the cities, and is almost as cynical about their effectiveness as is Nicholas Lemann in "The Myth of Community-Based Development", the New York Times Magazine article discussed earlier on H-Urban.

Most of the discussion on urban universities on H-Urban to date has been about these types of personal experiences and/or opinions. As an emotionally charged and contemporary issue, it is easy to be drawn to one side or the other. However, I'd like to turn this discussion in a more scholarly direction: to look at what scholars have said about urban universities and their history, who is working on it in the social science community, and, what the major issues are.

Many of the issues discussed to date on H-Urban on urban universities are discussed in Maurice R. Berube, _The Urban University in America_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978). The Table of Contents of this book is:

1. The Rise of the Urban University 2. The Search for Equality 3. The Urban University as Neighbor 4. The Impact of Urban Studies and Urban Research 5. The Controversy Over Black Studies 6. National Policy and the Crisis in Education 7. A Scenario for the Future: The Urban-Grant University

Berube asserts that an anti-urban bias has affected the urban university in the U.S., in contrast to the favorable attitudes towards cities in Europe. He observes:

The city was not conducive to the rarefied atmosphere of learning. "Who can study in Boston streets," John Adams queried. For Adams, the humanity of the colonial city concocted a cacophony that filled his ears with "the rattle-gabble of them all" so he could not "think long enough in the street upon any one thing, to start and pursue a thought. (45)

[From: Frank Friedel, "Boosters, Intellectuals, and the American City," in _The Historian and the City_, eds. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963, p. 119.]

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some state governments, when granting their charters, went so far as to forbid new universities from locating in cities. (46) [From Frederic Rudolph, _The American College and University_, New York: Knopf, 1962, p. 92.]

As late as 1878, a popular collegiate guide deplores the university in the city: "If Yale were located at Williamstown, Harvard at Hanover, Columbia at Ithaca, the moral character of their students would be elevated in as great a degree as the natural scenery of their localities would be increased in beauty. (46) [Rudolph, p. 93]

According to Berube, the creation of the land-grant colleges only deepened the distrust of the city as a location for learning, as they furthered the "pastoral myth" of country colleges.

Interestingly, Berube points to the exception of Catholic colleges, which were specifically located in the cities to serve their ethnic clientele. (He seems to ignore the African-American colleges to which Charlie Nilon referred in an earlier posting, the subject of a separate posting in the next week or two). As their constituents have migrated to the suburbs, so have some of these colleges.

Berube notes the change in college education in this century. After World War I, the U.S. urban university increased in significance:

By the middle twenties, urbanization began to make itself felt, so that 145 out of 913 colleges and universities were located in the city, and nationally four out of every ten students attended urban universities.

In his 1928 _Urban Influences in Higher Education in England and the United States_, Parke Kolbe argued that only 34 of these 145 universities were "true" urban universities, in that they included urban studies programs and charged low or no tuition. These 34 were all members of the Association of Urban Universities, in existence from 1914 to the 1960s.

By 1930, nine cities had major municipal universities, of which New York's City College was the pioneer in 1847.

Many of the private universities that located in the city in the 19th century have expressed antagonism to their 20th century urban locations. Jacques Barzun, as Columbia University provost, is described by Berube as asserting that the community around Columbia was "uninviting, abornal, sinister, dangerous...the relationship of students and faculty to the community requires the perpetual *qui vive* of a paratrooper in enemy country." New York housing official Roger Starr wrote that Columbia was doing the city a service by purchasing "buildings for rehabilitation... to get rid of `undesirables'...goals---less crime, less slumminess-- which respectable neighbors treasure...." (46)

Berube goes on to describe the types of tensions that have existed between communities and colleges, especially expansion into the surrounding neighborhood. He constrasts this with the European experience:

Urban universities have been created using the existing natural habitats of the city, without the need to tear down and reconstruct the environs. The European university employs the natural beauties of the city, so the urban university is but a collection of varied buildings blending into the landscape. [48]

He constrasts the university at Heidelberg to those of most U.S. universities. Unfortunately, Berube does not offer any of his sources on European universities.

Of special interest in Berube's chapter on the gown-town tensions is his description of the expansionist federal legislation under Eisenhower -- Section 112 of the 1959 U.S. National Housing Act.

Under the terms of that provision, universities would receive three dollars of federal urban-renewal assistance for every dollar spent on "acquisition of land, building or structures within, adjacent to or in the immediate vicinity of, an urban renewal project, for demolition...for relocation of occupants and for rehabilitation of buildings" used for educational purposes. [50]

Berube also reports on a variety of responses to Section 112 -- J. Martin Klotschke's positive outlook in _The Urban University and the Future of Our Cities_ (1966), and the negative outlook of a report by William Deane Smith of the Center for Urban Studies at Detroit's Wayne State University.

Berube describes successful opposition to the proposed expansion of Temple University, University of Pennsylvania, Tufts University, Boston College, and the University of Pittsburgh. After detailing the Columbia and Harvard Universities disturbances over expansion, and similar situations at Berkeley and the University of Chicago, Berube describes a variety of reports on university expansion by Professor James Q. Wilson, the Ford Foundation (about urban universities in general) and the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Many of these reports were ambivalent or silent about the universities' land policies.

Berube's book is as much an advocate's position as a history of the urban university (he was an educational consultant at the time of this book) and is almost 20 years old. Also, it is a study of urban universities in the U.S. alone.

[For the earlier conversation on this topic on H-Urban, including Pierre J. Hamel's interesting survey of urban universities in Quebec, Canada and Europe, send a note to Listserv@uicvm or Listserv@uicvm.uic.edu with the message: GET URBAN COLLEGE]

Obviously, the university shares similarities to other urban institutions such as medical centers; sports centers; city, state and federal governments; and transportation centers, all of which are still contending for urban land with the residents. On the other hand, as an educational institution, it has some unique issues. Seymour Mandelbaum has suggested a good source on the university as a provider of expertise on urban problems is Peter Szanton's _Not Well Advised_ (New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Ford Foundation, 1981), a critical examination of universities' and think tanks' attempts to advise municipal governments.

It is likely that the topic has been covered in the British periodical, _History of Universities_, published since 1981, and that many other sources on the subject are available in Linda Sparks' _Institutions of Higher Education : An International Bibliography_ (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

Another recent historical work on higher education is Sheldon Rothblatt and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.) _The European and American University Since 1800 : Historical and Sociological Essays_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Finally, an article on universities in Europe is Vassal, Serge, "Geography of Universities In Western Europe," _Ekistics_, Jan. 1, 1988, V. 55, n.328/329, p. 146.

In addition, there is a wealth of material on community colleges.

It would be interesting to hear of other scholarly studies on urban universities and their evolving relationship to their urban locales.

Wendy Plotkin H-Urban Co-Moderator U20566@uicvm.uic.edu ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 9 Apr 1994 22:33:46 CDT From: Dennis McClendon <dmcc@UHURU.UCHICAGO.EDU>

I think it's pretty common. Certainly the Univ of Chicago's involvement in the stabilization and renewal of Hyde Park is well known, and it continues to quietly own and manage apartment and commercial buildings and even the Hyde Park Shopping Center--far from the campus proper.

I think you would find similar patterns around USC and Columbia, to >mention only a couple of prominent examples. > >Boston University is, I think, a recent example of a large urban >university that used its financial clout to preserve its neighborhood by >preventive real estate purchases of deteriorating property in the >Kenmore Square area. As I recall, BU press said Kenmore Square and the >Fenway Park area was its frontyard or gateway and property was >purchased not for direct university use but to save it from becoming an >undesirable neighbor to the campus. Are there other examples of this >defensive practice?

>Peter Holloran >Pine Manor College >pch@world.std.com

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Dennis McClendon, American Planning Association, Chicago dmcc@uhuru.uchicago.edu CompuServe 76247,634 ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 23:48:21 CDT From: "Pierre J. Hamel" <Pierre_J._Hamel@INRS-URB.UQuebec.CA> Subject: U of Chicago and Hyde Park

For those of you who can read French, I would recommand an article about the way U of Chicago "pacified, cleaned" and rules Hyde Park in the current issue (avril, 1994) of the excellent _Le Monde diplomatique_.

Pierre J. Hamel Institut national de la recherche scientifique

INRS-Urbanisation 3465, rue Durocher Montreal Quebec H2X 2C6

telephone: (514) 499-4014 telecopie: (514) 499-4065

HamelPJ@INRS-Urb.UQuebec.ca ======================================================================== ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 10:37:22 +1000 Sender: Urban History discussion list <H-URBAN@UICVM.BITNET> From: H-Urban <amayne@ariel.unimelb.edu.au> Subject: urban amenities

The following message, cross-posted from ECONHIST, continues the urban amenities discussion begun by co-moderator Martha Bianco.

If you need more information on working with econhist, send the message "info econhist" to lists@cs.muohio.edu. Econhist is a mailing list operated by

The Cliometric Society Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056 (513) 529-2850 (csociety@cs.muohio.edu)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

On the subject of urban amenities and disamenities: Historians generally think of anomie, isolation, and the loss of a sense of community as the strongest disamenity associated with urban life. I'm sure the sociologists have models for that. But along those lines, there's an interesting book, been out a while, by Gunther Barth called City People that reverses this stereotype and talks about the urban institutions that created community. He unfortunately misses ethnic and religious organizations, but he includes public spaces (parks and museums), professional sport, popular intertainment (vaudeville), newspapers, bars, and retail stores downtown [this is pre-1950 city]. Today TV and suburban malls would be both cause-effect in shift in direction of urban community. My point is you might want measure of LOW culture amenities that create a sense of community -- Broadway's okay, but only for those who can afford it. Have fun measuring it. Along same lines: personally, I have noticed that the presence of a university spins off positive externalities in terms of cultural amenities.

Second point: Clearly for many city residents the presence of ethnic clusters or enclaves represents a major amenity available through urban life.

Third point: Regional factors and the costs of migration will also be important in terms of why people come to cities or stay there, and how they feel about different cities.

Good luck. Mary Schweitzer, Villanova University -- SCHWEITZ@UCIS.VILL.EDU

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= See Gunther Barth, _City people: the rise of modern city culture in nineteenth-century America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

And check out J.H. Mollenkopf (ed.),_Power, culture, and place: essays on New York City_ (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).

Alan Mayne H-Urban Co-Moderator H-Urban@uicvm/H-Urban@uicvm.uic.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 19:37:46 CDT Sender: Urban History discussion list <H-URBAN@UICVM.BITNET> From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET> Subject: History of Universities

The following program from the conference "Computing Techniques and the History of Universities" was posted on the University History discussion list STUDIUM@CC1.KULEUVEN.AC.BE.

A longer set of abstracts of the sessions will be posted tomorrow.

I am posting these to H-Urban because many of the most important universities in history have been located in (and in some cases, comprised the major institution) within cities. For an earlier discussion on H-Urban about urban universities, send a note to Listserv@uicvm.uic.edu with the message: GET URBAN COLLEGE

In addition, many of the techniques discussed are relevant to research in the history of urbanization and urban institutions.

Wendy Plotkin H-Urban Co-Moderator U20566@uicvm.uic.edu

************************************************************************** Computing Techniques and the History of Universities

An international workshop

Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London 1-3 July 1994

hosted by the Humanities Computing Centre, QMW in collaboration with Association for History and Computing and History of Universities

This workshop evolved as a project of tripartite cooperation, between the AHC, the journal History of Universities, and the Humanities Computing Centre of Queen Mary and Westfield College which acted as host to the first meeting. The aims of this initiative were slightly different from those of other AHC workshops. While most of these involve international "leading-edge" research or comparative work specifically on aspects of historical computing, in this case the intention was specifically to examine computing techniques as applied in a definable area of historical research. The number of historians of universities who use computing techniques to handle and analyse large quantities of information, mostly prosopographical, is undoubtedly growing. However, it could not be said that the computing techniques they are using display a coherent or directed approach, and the participants of the workshop were the first to point out that the field is marked not only by healthy variety and eclecticism but also by considerable haphazardness and "reinvention of the wheel".

The stated agenda of the workshop was to bring together international scholars working in this area in order to

D examine the typology of university sources, with particular regard to computing considerations.

D compare methods of handling and analysing large databases of university history which have been or are being created.

D explore prospects of, and methods for, the accessing of such databases by other scholars, and the possibilities for collaborative work afforded by technology.

In the event, over thirty people from eight different countries attended the workshop, at which 21 papers were given. The event was certainly highly useful at an individual level; clearly many scholars came away having learnt a great deal about practices elsewhere, and having made valuable contacts. The three central themes were also addressed effectively, though perhaps also inconclusively D which is unsurprising in a sense, given that this was the first meeting of the workshop. One practical proposal which emerged specifically from among the many medievalists present was for the creation of a corpus of electronic editions of university statutes, for lexical and comparative analysis. This and other developments will be presented for discussion when the workshop reports to the AHC.

The present booklet includes the conference programme, the list of participants and the abstracts of the papers given. Three of the participants were in the event unable to attend, but in two cases their papers were presented in absentia, and will be published. The proceedings of the workshop will be published later this year in the Halbgraue Reihe zur historischen Fachinformatik. As with the other AHC workshops, participants of the International Conference will receive copies free of charge. A full report will also appear in the 1995 volume of History of Universities. Plans are also in hand for a further meeting of the workshop, to be held in Vienna in 1995. For further information, contact Dr Albert M ller, Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institut f r Historische Sozialwissenschaft, Heinrichsgasse 4/2/8, A-1010 Vienna, Austria.

Peter Denley Department of History/Humanities Computing Centre Queen Mary & Westfield College University of London

.....................................................................

Programme

Friday 1st July

5.00-6.30pm Session 1. Prosopography and Medieval Universities Chair: Jacques Verger (Paris) Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris), "A Computerized Paris Biographical Dictionary: a Project" Elisabeth Mornet (Paris), "The Peregrinatio Academica in the Later Middle Ages: a Scandinavian Database" Virginia Davis (London), "Ordination Lists as a Source for Membership of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges in the Later Middle Ages"

8.30-10.00pm Session 2. Source-Oriented Data Processing and Medieval University History Chair: Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris) Thomas Maisel & Albert M ller (Vienna), "Interpreting Social Information: Design and Management of Source-Oriented Databases on the History of the University" Ingrid Matschinegg & Annemarie Steidl (Vienna), "The Recruitment Area of the University of Vienna in the Late Middle Ages: Computer Supported Handling of Spatial Information" Peter Denley (London), "Italian Renaissance Universities: a Source-Oriented Prosopographical Data Bank".

Saturday 2nd July

9.00-10.30am Session 3. Medieval Universities, Intellectual History and Textual Analysis Chair: Virginia Davis (London) Dino Buzzetti (Bologna), "Fourteenth-Century Bolognese Philosophy and Medicine: Images and Editions" Stephen Livesey (Paris), "Unique Manuscripts and Medieval Productivity: How Shall We Count?" Jacques Verger (Paris), "Fourteenth-Century University and College Statutes as Source for Systematic Lexical Study"

11.00-12.30 Session 4. University Databases: Design Methodology Chair: Albert M ller (Vienna) Peter Lauf (Cologne), "As Important as Problematic: Coding" Uwe Alschner (Osnabr ck), "Local and social Origins of cives academici at the University of Helmstedt 1576-1809/10. Sampling as a Method of Analyzing Matriculation Registers" Jeroen Nilis (Leuven), "The Development of a Relational Database for Prosopographical Research of Institutions, in particular Universities (Twelfth to Eighteenth Centuries)"

2.00-3.30pm Session 5. University History: Major Database Projects Chair: Carroll Brentano (Berkeley) Anne Crowther, Marguerite Dupree and James Bradley (Glasgow), "Micros and Medical Students: Sources and Methods for Exploring the Completion Rates and Careers of Scottish Medical Students in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" Alison Gaukroger and Leonard Schwarz (Birmingham), "Historians versus Databases: the Birmingham Experience"

4.00-6.00pm Session 6. The Modern University: Case Studies in Database Design Chair: Marguerite Dupree (Glasgow) Carroll Brentano (Berkeley), "Designing a Database: A Case Study of the 1915 University of California Faculty" Marjory Harper (Aberdeen), "Students at the University of Aberdeen from 1860 to the 1920s" June Barrow-Green (Open University), "Mathematics in Britain 1860-1940: the Creation of a Source- Oriented Database"

6.00-7.30pm Demonstrations

Sunday 3rd July

9.00-10.30am Session 7. Creation and Dissemination Chair: Dino Buzzetti (Bologna) Michael Cook (Liverpool), "University Archives: Standards for the Retrieval and Exchange of Data" John McLoughlin (London), "Creating New Sources: Alumni Databases in the United Kingdom" Marc Nelissen (Leuven), "STUDIUM, University Discussion List: a First Evaluation".

11.00-12.30 Session 8. In Progress: the Computerisation of Major Historical Resources Chair: Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris) Luciano Floridi (Oxford), "The Egg, the Needle and the Compass: from the Iter Italicum to the Iter Electronicum". Discussion: "The re-computerisation of Emden's Biographical Registers?"

Concluding discussion ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 17:49:09 CDT Sender: Urban History discussion list <H-URBAN@UICVM.BITNET> From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET> Subject: Conference on History of Universities/Computing Techniques

[This is the second of two postings on this European conference on "Computing Techniques and the History of Universities," held in early July. In the previous posting the conference as a whole was described and the titles and authors of the papers listed.

Below are some of the abstracts of the papers offered. If you are interested in the entire program and full set of abstracts, send a note to Listserv@uicvm or Listserv@uicvm.uic.edu with the message:

GET HISTORY COLLEGES

As described in the previous posting, many of the medieval universities were located in or created great cities, the relationship between localities and universities is in itself important, and many of the social history techniques described are applicable to urban history as well. For an earlier discussion on this topic on H-Urban, send a note to Listserv@uicvm or Listserv@uicvm.uic.edu with the message: GET URBAN COLLEGE

-- Wendy Plotkin, H-Urban Co-Moderator]

Computing Techniques and the History of Universities

An international workshop

Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London 1-3 July 1994

hosted by the Humanities Computing Centre, QMW in collaboration with Association for History and Computing and History of Universities

Abstracts

The Recruitment Area of the University of Vienna in the Late Middle Ages: Computer Supported Handling of Spatial Information Ingrid Matschinegg & Annemarie Steidl (University of Vienna)

This paper will discuss a few problems and possibilities of computer supported mapping in the context of the history of universities. It is generally known that matriculation lists of universities usually contain spatial information on a large scale. In order to examine the migration of university attenders it is also helpful to visualise the geographical information, because describing mobility by means of graphs is more illuminating than conventional listings. In the ongoing project on the `Attendance at the University of Vienna', we decided to apply KLEIO's mapping feature. The places of the students' origins had to be identified on maps and to be digitised. The `location' feature is able to add the numerical information gathered by the digitizer to the database and to transform this information into draft-maps of geographical distributions. In comparison with Geographical Information Systems, maps produced by KLEIO are of lower optical quality, but in combination with other possibilities offered by KLEIO advantages prevail. They could prove to be a powerful tool during the process of research. With the support of commercial presentation software it is easily possible to prepare these maps for further use in demonstrations or publications. As well as covering the technical aspects, this paper will try to show some of the findings concerning the recruitment area of the University of Vienna.

[Ed: For information on KLEIO, send a note to Listserv@uicvm or Listserv@uicvm.uic.edu with the message: GET KLEIO INFO ]

Italian Renaissance Universities: a Source-Oriented Prosopographical Data Bank Peter Denley (Queen Mary & Westfield College, London)

Intellectual historians of the Renaissance have undervalued the wealth of biographical information available about the teachers and students of the Italian universities. The project described here involves the creation of a data bank of these individuals, based on the immensely rich and detailed administrative sources of the Italian universities (which give us lecture lists, contracts, salary payments, degrees, records of teacher and student mobility, college records and disciplinary records D the building-bricks of university prosopography). As a `source-oriented' data processing package, KLEIO has permitted the creation of a structure which makes possible the retention of the original text alongside the exploitation of the structures implicit within that text. The paper will discuss appropriate methods of organisation of such prosopographical data, record linkage issues, and future plans for (1) the integration of transcripts with images of the sources, and (2) the collaborative development of the project.

Local and Social Origins of cives academici at the University of Helmstedt, 1576-1809/10. Sampling as a Method of Analyzing Matriculation Registers Uwe Alschner (Graduiertenkolleg "Bildung in der Fruehen Neuzeit", University of Osnabrueck)

Analyzing matriculation registers can be very promising with regard to new insights into the history of universities. In all cases, one will at least gain information on the local origins of matriculants, i.e. which states, regions or even towns students of one particular university predominantly came from. The ratio of enrolment by the nobility will be easily deducible, too. At best, the source will also contain information on the age of the students, their exact social status, their subject, and whether or not they had stayed at other universities before. One and, in some circumstances, possibly the only way to get the desired results is to conduct the survey by using simple random sampling. This method proves less costly as well as time-saving while supplying results which do not differ substantially in reliability.

Micros and Medical Students: Sources and Methods for Exploring the Completion Rates and Careers of Scottish Medical Students in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Anne Crowther, Marguerite Dupree & James Bradley (University of Glasgow)

The rise and development of the medical profession in Britain has been the subject of several important studies, both at the national and local levels which have concentrated mainly on the early and mid- nineteenth century. Although there are partial exceptions, the history of the subsequent period has been more concerned with medical politics surrounding the National Insurance Act of 1911. Thus, there is scope for examining the changing nature of the medical profession in this later period, which saw not only major legislation, but also the development of new medical specialities, the continued growth of hospitals, the arrival of medical women, and changes in the nature of medical education. We are examining aspects of the history of the medical profession by means of biographical studies of two cohorts of medical students from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow centred on the years 1871 and 1911. This involves approximately 1,000 students for 1871 and 1,000 for 1911 from each university, a total of 4,000 students. We are collecting information on their social origins, university studies, postgraduate qualifications and experience, and career patterns in Britain and abroad. The two selected years will enable a comparison of medical careers of students in the later nineteenth century, approximately a decade after the passing of the Medical Act, with those of the first generation to experience the 1911 National Insurance Act. This is the first systematic investigation of a substantial section of the profession at all levels within the profession and over their entire careers. The chief tool of the study is a machine-readable database which we are creating to hold a wide range of biographical material from sources which are particularly informative in Scotland, including university matriculation records, General Council records of graduates, university marriage registers, the Medical Directory, the Directory's MS records of deaths, and published obituaries. University sources are central to our project, as are issues of completion rates and educational careers of medical students. The matriculation records enable us to identify our cohorts in the first place. Linking these with graduation lists and non-university sources enables us to explore completion rates and what is emerging as the mobile educational careers of many of the students in our cohorts. In our paper we shall focus on the 1871 cohorts from Glasgow and Edinburgh universities and discuss: first, the university and non- university sources available to examine completion rates and the educational careers of medical students; second, the design and construction of the relational database we are using to hold the information; and finally, the solutions we have adopted to problems of record linkage encountered when linking matriculation and graduation records and to problems of analysis involved in determining completion rates and patterns of educational careers.

Designing a Database: A Case study of the 1915 University of California Faculty Carroll Brentano (University of California, Berkeley)

A prominent American historian, author of an essay on the coming-of- age of the University of California, has said of faculty life during the period 1900-1920: `[it is] a culture that deserves its historian.' My proposal is to begin a history of that culture, while exploring the potential of the computer in compiling a `profile' of this group. The University of California is well documented on the `gown', or official, level with information about its some 220 faculty members of 1915, their addresses, married states, courses taught, committee work, salaries and sabbatical leaves. On the `town' side, I expect to use membership lists of not only the usual men's campus clubs, but also of an unusual women's club, Town and Gown, founded in 1898, and the Hillside Club, organized to promote a living-with-nature architectural style, closely involved with the campus. Novels, unpublished letters and other, sometimes unpublishable, commentaries on faculty behavior, are available for anecdotal embellishment, as well as two remarkably incisive pictures of the times D one by a frustrated and demeaned faculty wife and one by a rich, young, gifted, pioneering first Dean of Women. With these sources and the opportunity to employ them in experiments with various types of database management systems, I hope to present an entrance into an area of university history, the society of an elite, if you will, of a large, but provincial, American public university just after the turn of the century.

Students at the University of Aberdeen from 1860 to the 1920s Marjory Harper (University of Aberdeen)

The computerised study of Aberdeen university's student population from the Fusion of King's and Marischal Colleges to the years after World War I was envisaged as an integral part of the Quincentenary History Project which will culminate in the celebration of the University's quincentenary in 1995. The major challenge lay in devising a system flexible enough to cope with the different needs of a variety of users. It was to be, first and foremost, a repository of easily accessible information about the student body as a whole, which would provide the raw material for a statistically-based study in changing patterns of student life. But it was also to be a useful working tool for the University Archivist, as well as a source of information for a variety of scholars working on quincentenary monographs, requirements which dictated that each record should provide as comprehensive a dossier as possible about individual students. In short, what was required was a system which would provide maximum information in an accessible and flexible format for analysis at both individual and global level. The system chosen was Cardbox- Plus, and my paper will aim to demonstrate the extent to which our expectations have been fulfilled or disappointed. ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 15 Jan 1995 17:48:24 CST Subject: University and city Posted by Pierre J. Hamel <hamelpj@INRS-URB.UQuebec.CA>

Maybe some of you remember when we discussed about universities' campus and their urban environment ... ? Well, 3 titles on these questions have been published in France few months ago:

A compendium of ongoing research apparently distributed by L'Harmattan: _Universites et Villes_ and special issues of _Annales de la recherche urbaine_, nos 62-63 (juin 1994): "Universites et territoires" _Diagonal_, nos 108-109 (aout-octobre 1994): "Urbanisme universitaire: entre licence et maitrise" /// which could be translated either by between B.A. and M.A. or between disorder and control (mastery) Pierre J. Hamel Institut national de la recherche scientifique

INRS-Urbanisation 3465, rue Durocher Montreal Quebec H2X 2C6

telephone: (514) 499-4014 telecopie: (514) 499-4065

HamelPJ@INRS-Urb.UQuebec.ca ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 11:20:17 CST From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET> Subject: Urban Universities: Bender, ed. THE UNIVERSITY & THE CITY (1988)

In his reference to new research on urban universities (of which H-Urban would welcome an abstract) Pierre J. Hamel referred to an earlier discussion of the "urban university" on H-Urban, available by sending a note to Listserv@uicvm or Listserv@uicvm.uic.edu with the message:

GET URBAN COLLEGE

Not included in that discussion was reference to a collection of essays, THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY: FROM MEDIEVAL ORIGINS TO THE PRESENT (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) edited by Thomas Bender. In the Introduction, Bender introduces the topic and observes that

Anglo-American tradition, based on the model of Oxford and Cambridge and nourished by an Anglo-American tradition of antiurbanism, is a major deviation from the central theme of the history of universities. Since their inception they have been identified with cities, sometimes second-order cities but often those great cities that dominate the political, economic, and cultural life of nations." (3)

Bender relates the topic of urban universities to the New York City in which he lived in 1988, and an awareness of "how fragile is the civility that makes urban life and academic life possible."

In articulating the close relationship of city and university in history, he writes:

At times the university in crisis has been rescued by the urban dynamic surrounding it, though at other times urban developments have threatened to undermine the stability of the academy. Conversely, the university has at times successfully provided a focus and a principle of coherence for the cultural life of a city, though at others it has withdrawn from the city and undermined urban culture. (4)

In his introduction, Bender outlines the major themes of the essays, of which the titles and authors (of whom three are from the University of California at Berkeley) are:

I. Medieval Origins

2. Universities and Cities in Medieval Italy J.K. Hyde, Professor of Medieval History, University of Manchester (died, 1986) 3. "Parisius-Paradisus": The City, Its Schools, and the Origins of the University of Paris Stephen C. Ferruolo, author of THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSITY: THE SCHOOLS OF PARIS AND THEIR CRITICS, 1100-1215 (1985)

II. Early Modern Revitalization

4. Renaissance Florence: Who Needs a University? Gene Brucker, U. of California, Berkeley 5. Civic Humanism and Scientific Scholarship at Leiden Anthony Grafton, Princeton U. 6. The Geneva Academy in the Eighteenth Century: A Calvinist Seminary or a Civic University? Michael Heyd, Hebrew University in Jerusalem 7. Commerce and Culture: Edinburgh, Edinburgh University, and the Scottish Enlightenment Nicholas Phillipson, Edinburgh University

III. The Metropolitan University

8. London: A Metropolitan University? Sheldon Rothblatt, U. of California, Berkeley 9. Preparing for Public Life: The Collegiate Students at New York University, 1832-1881 Louise L. Stevenson, Franklin & Marshall College

IV. The Modern University and the Modern City

10. "To Live for Science": Ideals and Realities at the University of Berlin Charles E. McClelland, U. of New Mexico 11. Science as Vocation in Burckhardt's Basel Carl E. Schorske, Princeton U. (Emeritus) 12. The University, the City and the World: Chicago and the University of Chicago Edward Shils, University of Chicago 13. Urban Flights: The Institute of Social Research Between Frankfurt and New York Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley 14. Two NYUs and "The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order" in the Great Depression David A. Hollinger, University of Michigan 15. Facing Three Ways: City and University in New York Since World War II Nathan Glazer, Harvard University 16. Afterword Thomas Bender

The Afterword is an intriguing summation and analysis of the essays. Among the insights I found most interesting are Bender's discussion of the meaning of the location of the university and the role of the university as a conveyor of an "urban" public culture. About the first he writes

If one of the assumptions of this volume is that the city--a place--provides a focus for the actual enactment of the relationship between university and society, it remains only an assumption, and it will remain so until more social and cultural detail (description) is provided. . . . we may have to ponder the cultural meaning of other locations for the university--in the central business district, in an elite neighborhood, near other cultural institutions and parks, in a suburb.

He continues

Urban culture, of course, is not merely the geographical configuration of cultural institutions. Yet one would err seriously in underplaying the practical and symbolic meaning of location. That, too, constitutes university and city culture. (291)

About the "city" and public culture, Bender writes

The notion of the public sphere as we understand it derives from the early-eighteenth-century writings of Joseph Addison. What he called politeness was urbanity, and it was enacted in the public sphere. The notion of a public sphere, in other words, is inextricably associated with the actual experience of urban life.

Bender closes by drawing on the thought of cultural critic Randolph Bourne, who

insisted that culture was not simply an inheritance from the past but something constantly enriched by new participants, including the poor, immigrants, women, and others excluded from the original bourgeois vision of the public. With such an expanded notion of the public, it is possible to historicize both the making of urban public culture and the university's role in that process. (295)

The essay upon which Bender draws for Bourne's ideas is "Trans- National America" in Carl Resek, ed. WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS: COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RANDOLPH BOURNE, 1915-1919 (New York, 1964).

Any comments on any of these issues would be welcome.

Wendy Plotkin H-Urban Co-Moderator U20566@uicvm.uic.edu ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 8 Apr 1995 02:39:35 CDT Subject: Urban Universities: Effect on New York City economy Posted by Hugo Lindgren <Greatjones@aol.com>

The recent exchange over the relationship between universities and cities tended to focus on political and cultural ties and community flare-ups ...

For the purpose of an article I am writing on Columbia and NYU, I am interested in what contributions these institutions have made to the economic development of New York.

The NY Times recently ran a highly laudatory front-page article on NYU and its emergence into the top ranks of national universities--without mentioning what impact, if any, NYU has had on creating new industries in the city.

When I lived in New Haven, local people complained that because Yale was run by liberal-arts types, the city hadn't been able to create the kind of high-tech and bio-tech industries that have flourished in and around Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton. Professors at Yale were supposedly discouraged from interacting with the private sector. I don't know if this is true ... it's just what I heard said. Apparently steps have been taken to change it.

I'm interested in any thoughts people have on this subject.

Hugo Lindgren Metropolis Magazine New York NY Greatjones@aol.com

======================================================================== Date: Sat, 8 Apr 1995 02:50:46 CDT From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET> Subject: Re: Urban Universities: Effect on New York City economy

As a start, Hugo Lindgren might want to take a look at the HUD Secretary's January, 1995 report: The University and Urban Challenge. It is available by gophering to HUD at:

huduser.aspensys.com

and selecting HUD USER/Policy Development & Research (PD&R) Publications/ Housing Policy.

The report includes the following footnoted claims about employment, purchasing and tax effects of a variety of urban universities, including Princeton, George Washington U., and University of Pennsylvania:

Many institutions of higher education have become potent generators of jobs and taxes in their communities. They are growing in importance as centers of local and regional economic development and stability.

Colleges and universities are major employers. Yale University is, with some 9,400 employees, the largest employer in New Haven. Similarly, The George Washington University is the largest nongovernmental employer in Washington, D.C. In Philadelphia, the three largest private employers are the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Thomas Jefferson University. The University of Pennsylvania alone has approximately 20,000 employees and, through its activities, supports another 24,000 spinoff jobs in Pennsylvania.20 The indirect employment effect of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is equally impressive. The university, with about 9,500 employees, is responsible for the indirect creation of an additional 12,600 jobs in North Carolina.21

Purchasing figures are equally impressive. In FY 1990, the University of Pennsylvania spent more than $936 million for compensation and the purchase of goods and services, as well as an additional $42 million for construction projects, and contributed an estimated $2.5 billion to Pennsylvania's economy.22 Throughout the State of Connecticut, including the New Haven region, Yale's purchases exceeded $170 million in 1991-92. To illustrate the magnitude of university purchasing power, while the Federal Government placed orders with 11,000 vendors from 1992 to 1993, The George Washington University dealt with more than 24,000 vendors during this same period.23

The purchasing power of student bodies is significant. A visit to most urban campuses will find hotels and inns, computer stores and bookstores, clothing and music shops, restaurants, and entertainment establishments serving student needs and tastes. Demand for these goods and services does not come just from students. Yale University, for example, in 1991-92 attracted to New Haven more than 550,000 visitors who spent an estimated $38.5 million.24

Although they are largely tax-exempt institutions, universities still make substantial contributions to local tax coffers. In 1992-93 Yale University paid $4.6 million to the city in taxes on noneducational property and motor vehicles and in fire, sewer, landfill, and other fees.25 The George Washington University generated $13.7 million in local property, retail sales, hotel, parking, and personal property tax revenues in 1992-93.26 And because the University of Pennsylvania is the largest employer in Philadelphia, its employees pay more to the city in total wage taxes than their counterparts at any other single institution or business.27

The relevant citations include:

Karen A. White, "Metropolitan Universities: Models for the Twenty-first Century," Metropolitan Universities, Spring 1990, p. 9.

The University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Economic Impact for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1990 (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania) p. 11.

Association of Academic Health Centers, Washington, D.C. Information obtained by telephone, Nov. 10, 1994.

Harvey Goldstein and Michael Luger, Impact Carolina: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State's Economy (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina, 1992) p. 1.

Goldie Blumenstyk, "A 40% Increase in Income from Inventions," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 9, 1994, p. A37.

Harvey Goldstein, Gunther Maier, and Michael Luger, "The University as an Instrument for Economic and Business Development." Paper presented at the Symposium on University and Society: International Perspectives on Public Policies and Institutional Reform, Vienna, Austria, June 8-10, 1994.

Office of the Secretary, Yale University, Economic Impact: Yale and New Haven (New Haven, CT: Yale University, December 1993) p. 8.

Wendy Plotkin H-Urban Co-Editor U20566@uicvm.uic.edu ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 8 Apr 1995 09:27:32 CDT From: Wendy Plotkin <U20566@UICVM.BITNET> Subject: Re: Urban Universities: Effect on New York City economy

As a follow-up to the earlier posting about urban universities, the 1988 THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY: FROM MEDIEVAL ORIGINS TO THE PRESENT (New York: Oxford University, 1988), edited by Thomas Bender, [with a Table of Contents available in the file URBAN COLLEGE] includes several chapters about New York University and one about Columbia University and City College of New York.

These will be of no help to Hugo Lundgren in his search for answers about the economic effects of urban universities. The essays in THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY address other aspects of the relationship between urban universities and the cities in which they are located --

o the founding of New York University in 1832 as an institution devoted to the preparation of middle-class men to participate in public life, with a classical curriculum and attention to "republican" values, and the evolution by 1881 into into an institution devoted to the provision of professional education and personal upward socio-economic mobility.

o the dual impulses of NYU in the Depression, one promoting Progressive technological and bureaucratic solutions to the problems of capitalism, and another promoting a conservative and religious return to spiritual values

o a comparison of NYU, City College and Columbia U. in the post WWII period. Nathan Glazer discusses the effects of the changes NY city experienced in these years -- racial and ethnic turnover, decline in the manufacturing sector, and the creation of a large underclass and crime problem -- on these universities.

Each of the universities responded differently, based in part on their geographic location inside the city, and the expectations of the public in dealing with the city's ills. Columbia faced the consequences of a de facto policy of applying quotas on Jewish admissions and controversial attempts to upgrade the neighborhood using urban renewal powers; City College adopted an open admissions policy which allegedly lowered the quality of the university, although Glazer asserts that the new immigrants of recent years have renewed hopes for quality; and New York University benefited from the problems of these other two universities, its location, and the lack of expectations faced by City College and Columbia.

Any comments on these issues or additional sources on the urban university are welcome.

Wendy Plotkin H-Urban Co-Editor U20566@uicvm.uic.edu

======================================================================== Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 23:27:15 CDT Posted by Mary Schweitzer <SCHWEITZ@UCIS.VILL.EDU>

The big moneymaker for both universities and cities (as I understand it) is teaching hospitals.

-- Mary Schweitzer History Villanova University ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 23:29:30 CDT Subject: Re: Urban Universities: Effect on New York City economy

The Coalition of Metropolitan and Urban Universities has established a WWW site at: http://www.ualr.edu The site includes links to the home pages of many of its members, as well as information on the Third National Metropolitan and Urban Universities Conference held last month at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (it is my understanding that synopses of the sessions are to be posted, although I did not find any there).

Is there a comparable organization in Europe, Australia or elsewhere, or is the organization of this special set of urban institutions a U.S. phenomenon?

Here's the announcement:

U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley will join university presidents from several states, state, federal and city officials, and noted writers and journalists at the Third National Metropolitan and Urban Universities Conference at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock March 19-21.

"New Realities: Challenges & Responses for Metropolitan Universities" is the theme for a conference that examines the role of higher education in responding to the challenges facing metropolitan areas. Participants will come from throughout the U.S., some Canadian provinces and Great Britain.

Those who have already confirmed to participate in conference sessions include the following. * _U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley _ is a former governor of South Carolina who spearheaded a reform of the state's school system and has served in his current post for two years. He will speak on challenges facing American cities and higher education at a dinner meeting on Sunday, March 19. * _Gwen Ifill_ is NBC news correspondent in Washington, D.C., a "Meet the Press" panelist, and former political correspondent for the New York Times. She will speak Monday evening, March 20, on "Clinton, Congress and Cities," discussing the political transitions in Washington and impacts of federal power shifts on states, cities and public institutions. * _Neal Peirce _ is author of "Citistates: The True Economic Communities of Our Times," a columnist, writer and analyst on state, urban and regional affairs who has done studies of several major cities. He has written about how universities could mobilize talent to deal with mounting race and class divisions in society. He will speak on "The Power of Our Cities," during a luncheon Monday. * _Joel Garreau _is a futurist and a journalist, a five-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, author of "Edge City: Life on the New Frontier," and a principal in Edge City Group Inc., a network of thinkers and practitioners focusing on how to make 21st century urban cores more profitable communities. He will give the closing address in a pre-luncheon session on Tuesday, March 21. * _Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer, Fort Worth Mayor Kay Granger, and Johnson City (Tenn.) Mayor Jeff Anderson_ will discuss "Forming the Future of Cities," touching on the emerging role of American cities and the unique challenges of leading them. * _Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker _will discuss the most challenging issues facing state governments, higher education's place among the challenges and roles colleges and universities can play in assisting state governments.

In addition to sessions on how cities and universities can work together to solve problems, there will be displays and discussions of campus/community strategies that have worked.

Participant will also join in an interactive high-tech "town meeting" in which they can vote electronically on several issues and options before the conference.

The conference is sponsored by the Coalition of Metropolitan and Urban Universities, American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.

For conference and registration information - * _Telephone: _Call Joni Lee at 501/569-3186 * _World Wide Web: _To see 4-color brochure, access UALR home page (http://www.ualr.edu) and open the page titled The Coalition of Metropolitan and Urban Universities and click on the box marked Program. * _e-mail:_ jclee@ualr.edu

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For comments or questions about this web page please contact Wayne Singleton at _wasingleton@ualr.edu_ ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 17:15:56 CDT Posted by Joseph M. Komljenovich <jmk1506@is2.NYU.EDU>

Another book that contains a discussion of Columbia, NYU, and (I think) CCNY is Thomas Bender's NEW YORK INTELLECT (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). It is an overarching survey that covers two centuries of New York's intellectual life. It has been a while since I read the book, but I believe there are only a few pages dealing with the aforementioned universities. In effect, the book describes the pecking order that developed amongst the three universities during the early twentieth century as Columbia positioned itself as a university of national importance while City College catered to the children of immigrants. NYU was an interesting case, for it had two campuses: University Heights, in the Bronx, had buildings designed by McKim, Mead, & White, and was designed to prepare young men for careers as professionals; Washington Square Campus, located in downtown New York, had a "less prestigious" student body consisting of the children of immigrants (mainly Eastern European Jews) and a considerable number of part-time students. Owing to financial difficulties, NYU sold the University Heights campus during the 1970s. It is currently the home of Bronx Community College.

Joseph M. Komljenovich Department of History/ Program in Archival Management and Historical Editing New York University JMK1506@is2.nyu.edu