A leading urbanist, historian and cultural critic takes us on a journey from Hartford to Chicago, from Phoenix to Manhattan, using the stories of every-expanding campuses to illustrate the increasingly parasitic relationship between higher education and our cities. 20,000 first printing.
"American higher education is in crisis-costs continue to climb skyward while public funding is in decline. In response, university administrators have aimed to enrich their campuses and the surrounding areas with amenities to attract students and faculty, especially in urban areas where students can explore cities from the safety of the ivory tower. But what, then, becomes of the communities and cultures surrounding these campuses? In In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, historian Davarian L. Baldwin argues that urban universities have been key forces behind the gentrification of America's cities; in fact, urban planners have used the profitable high-tech high-density model of the university campus as a blueprint for the city as a whole. As a result, the Black and Latino communities that largely surrounded campuses are left especially vulnerable, at the mercy of skyrocketing property values, discriminatory campus police forces and the need for low-wage high education labor. Universities are treating citiesas their company towns, and catering to the whims of students for the sake of profit means that these longstanding communities are bulldozed over, metaphorically and literally. Despite these implications, everyone from New York to Arizona wants to build a UniverCity. Baldwin takes us on a journey from his own university in Hartford to Chicago, from Phoenix to Manhattan, using these case studies to illustrate the increasingly parasitic relationship between higher education and urban planning. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be, and an urgent call for a more equitable relationship between American cities and universities"--
Across America, universities have become big businesses&;and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow.
Urban universities play an outsized role in America&;s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages.
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students&; needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power&;and who is made vulnerable.
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.
