Why I’m Talking Up ‘In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower’

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Metropolitan areas by Davarian L Baldwin

Printed in March of 2021.

The guide I have been conversing up to my higher ed network is Davarian L Baldwin’s In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. Baldwin, an American Experiments professor at Trinity School, has created a devastating critique of the city college.

Opposite to the traditional wisdom that universities are universally area web positives, Baldwin builds a scenario that establishments of larger finding out all way too typically damage as a lot as make improvements to the communities in which they are embedded.

Baldwin’s argument on the problematic partnership concerning people and city universities is grounded in many scenario research. The e-book contains in-depth chapters on Trinity (Hartford), Yale (New Haven), U. of Chicago (Chicago’s South Aspect), NYU and Columbia (NYC), and ASU (downtown Phoenix campus). Learners of better education and learning will find out a great deal about the institutional historical past, expansion, and issues of these universities in all of these chapters.

Among the the urban city/robe themes that Baldwin explores, three stand out. The 1st is the heritage of the urban universities profiled to try to wall on their own off from the small-income and mostly nonwhite populations of the city cores in which they reside (or have expanded into).

Even though acknowledging that the current development among the college leaders has been to embrace city group/campus connections, Baldwin concludes that rhetoric and steps rarely line up. In his estimation, wealthy city universities keep on to construct actual physical and cultural limitations concerning on their own and the communities in which they are situated.

A second topic Baldwin identifies as popular throughout wealthy universities in racially and economically diverse towns is the at any time-current danger of gentrification. Universities rarely prioritize funding or creating lower-money housing for non-college students, non-faculty, or non-staff (everybody else) in their money budgets.

As urban universities broaden into their cities, community rents inevitably go up, and the offer of affordable housing diminishes. Spouse and children-operate firms, some of which had been present for decades, can no longer afford to pay for the rising rents. Minority-owned stores and dining establishments get replaced by company chain companies.

The development of university policing into university adjacent neighborhoods is a 3rd concept explored in In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. In initiatives to beat fears of crime amid students, dad and mom, and college employees, a handful of city faculties have obtained expanded policing powers. College law enforcement are attaining arrest powers not only on the standard campus core but on blocks in which college students reside, or universities have expanded their business office house.

Even though expanded patrols are welcome by some neighborhoods, there is also the notion that campus law enforcement can be large-handed and tone-deaf when interacting with local community customers.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a guide that I really a lot want to examine with my buddies in greater ed. This is a single of individuals books that largely goes in opposition to what I assumed I recognized and believed about the job of universities in society.

If you experienced asked me about the effect of city universities on their towns prior to examining In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, I would have given an upbeat assessment. I would have told you that universities deliver vibrancy, careers, and tradition to the areas in which they reside.

Certain, I would have maybe stated worries about the possible destructive affect of non-income universities getting exempt from residence and other taxes on area revenues and products and services. But I would have argued that the decline of some tax dollars is almost often completely outweighed by the neighborhood rewards that universities carry.

Now I’m not so sure. Not that I’m totally persuaded by In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. I consider the e-book would have been stronger if it had extra completely explored the positives, as properly as negatives, of urban universities in university cities.

However, this guide has me questioning some of my core assumptions.

I want to discover a lot more.

What are you looking through?