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

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

Posted in March of 2021.

The e book I’ve been conversing up to my better ed community is Davarian L Baldwin’s In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. Baldwin, an American Research professor at Trinity School, has composed a devastating critique of the urban college.

Opposite to the typical wisdom that universities are universally area web positives, Baldwin builds a case that institutions of greater finding out all too typically hurt as significantly as make improvements to the communities in which they are embedded.

Baldwin’s argument on the problematic romance in between people and city universities is grounded in several circumstance studies. The ebook includes in-depth chapters on Trinity (Hartford), Yale (New Haven), U. of Chicago (Chicago’s South Facet), NYU and Columbia (NYC), and ASU (downtown Phoenix campus). College students of bigger education and learning will learn a great deal about the institutional history, growth, and troubles of these universities in all of these chapters.

Among the city town/robe themes that Baldwin explores, a few stand out. The very first is the historical past of the city universities profiled to attempt to wall them selves off from the low-profits and mostly nonwhite populations of the urban cores in which they reside (or have expanded into).

When acknowledging that the the latest craze amid university leaders has been to embrace urban local community/campus connections, Baldwin concludes that rhetoric and steps seldom line up. In his estimation, wealthy town faculties carry on to construct physical and cultural boundaries concerning by themselves and the communities in which they are situated.

A second theme Baldwin identifies as widespread throughout rich universities in racially and economically varied towns is the at any time-existing danger of gentrification. Universities seldom prioritize funding or creating lower-income housing for non-learners, non-college, or non-team (every person else) in their cash budgets.

As city universities grow into their towns, area rents inevitably go up, and the supply of very affordable housing diminishes. Spouse and children-run organizations, some of which had been present for a long time, can no longer find the money for the climbing rents. Minority-owned outlets and restaurants get changed by corporate chain companies.

The expansion of university policing into university adjacent neighborhoods is a 3rd theme explored in In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. In efforts to battle fears of criminal offense between learners, mothers and fathers, and college staff, a handful of urban educational facilities have acquired expanded policing powers. College police are attaining arrest powers not only on the common campus main but on blocks in which college students dwell, or universities have expanded their workplace room.

Although expanded patrols are welcome by some neighborhoods, there is also the notion that campus law enforcement can be heavy-handed and tone-deaf when interacting with neighborhood associates.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a ebook that I quite significantly want to explore with my buddies in larger ed. This is a single of individuals textbooks that generally goes from what I assumed I recognized and believed about the part of universities in modern society.

If you had requested me about the affect of city universities on their towns prior to studying In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, I would have specified an upbeat assessment. I would have told you that universities provide vibrancy, careers, and lifestyle to the areas in which they reside.

Absolutely sure, I would have most likely pointed out issues about the possible damaging effects of non-financial gain schools staying exempt from assets and other taxes on regional revenues and companies. But I would have argued that the decline of some tax dollars is almost normally solely outweighed by the regional advantages that universities convey.

Now I’m not so guaranteed. Not that I’m absolutely persuaded by In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. I imagine the book would have been more robust if it had much more thoroughly explored the positives, as very well as negatives, of urban universities in university cities.

Still, this reserve has me questioning some of my main assumptions.

I want to learn extra.

What are you reading?