BY JOHN K. WILSON
Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College and the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021). John K. Wilson interviewed Baldwin via email about his new book. Baldwin will be speaking online about his new book at the following events:
April 20, 2021 at 4pm ET, “Good Neighbors? Charlottesville & UVA”—A conversation between Davarian Baldwin, Ang Conn, and Laura Goldblatt, Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures.
April 23, 2021 at Noon ET, “Do Black Lives Matter to the University?”—Teach-in with Davarian Baldwin, Darrin Johnson, and Audrey Beard, Purdue Critical Data Studies Collective.
April 23, 2021 at 5:30pm ET: The AAUP chapter at the University of Pennsylvania presents “Community Justice & The Ivory Tower: A Conversation with Davarian L. Baldwin.”
John K. Wilson: How can universities work to improve the community around campus without falling into the dangers of colonizing or gentrifying the area? Are there any models of universities you think are doing the right approach?
Davarian L. Baldwin: There are a number of ways that universities can serve as egalitarian neighbors to the communities where they sit. In my knowledge there are few examples of universities doing this work where this structural approach to equity is part of their institutional DNA or at least school mission but we can glean anecdotal or incremental examples that could serve as part of a broader vision.
I discuss the example of the University of Winnipeg in my book. The major import of this example is that the leadership embraced an institutional vision of sustainability that addressed not just environmental issues but also social, economic and cultural matters. Now it should be highlighted that this vision was a response to longstanding outrage over campus building objectives that displaced residents and emphasized enclosure instead of accessibility. But to its credit, the school started changing course to first address the needs of its increasingly Indigenous and New Canadian (immigrant) surroundings. UWinnipeg has built housing that is LEED certified and is open to both students and local residents at income levels ranging from premium to affordable and rent-geared-to-income. Most of the units are purposefully interchangeable regardless of cost, spots have been made available at the university daycare center, and the common areas include free wi-fi while ventilated for Indigenous smudging practices.
Outside of housing, access to the university recreation center is governed by a community charter where at least a third of the operation hours “during critical time” are reserved for community organizations. The university also ended their contract with one of the well-known multinational food service corporations that control higher education and created their own Diversity Foods. All meals are made from scratch and 65 percent of the supplies from small family operations within a 100-kilometer radius. At least 65 percent of the workers come from “marginalized” communities, whether that be new Canadian, Indigenous, nongendered, or formerly incarcerated.
But for Professor Jim Silver, the downtown campus model still wasn’t good enough. He realized that most residents of the largely Indigenous North End community would never go downtown so he brought educational services to them. After receiving no support from the main campus, he raised funds to move the Urban and Inner Cities Studies program to the North End. With community partners, he helped convert the Merchants corner hotel from an active drug-shooting den and illicit single-room occupancy dwelling into a stunning educational and residential hub. The new interior is all circular in design to coordinate with indigenous cultural principles. The complex includes classrooms for both high school programs and UWInnipeg courses, a kitchen, and housing units all priced at rent geared to income levels with an additional elder unit for culturally appropriate support. Silver is clear that his vision is an effort to run “against the neoliberal tide of universities today.”
While not nearly as comprehensive, there are other universities that are addressing pieces of this more comprehensive vision. Many schools are offering Payments in Lieu of Taxes to at least help compensate for all of the community needs that are not met due to higher education’s property tax exemption. Boston area schools are starting to place food products from small, mostly minority-owned startups in the dining halls. Northeastern has built mixed housing for students and residents. Marquette University students launched their Neighborhood Kitchen, which turns unused food from dining halls into healthy meals for Milwaukee residents I need. Wayne State University has instigated a free tuition scholarship for any resident that graduates from a Detroit public high school and is accepted to the college. Portland State University recently announced the disarmament of campus police two years after an officer shot and killed Jason Washington. We must be clear, that every one of these developments has been a result of concerted and continued social movement protest from students, residents, and sympathetic public officials and university administrators. It will be interesting to see if all of the university calls for anti-racism and DEI will align with these material conditions where higher education prosperity is a direct product of extracting wealth from largely Black and Brown communities.
John K. Wilson: What is the role of campus police in turning communities into fiefdoms of the elite universities? Some activists have called for abolishing campus police–will that improve accountability, or will universities simply increase their influence over the city police (or lose the ability to make reforms of the police)?
Davarian L. Baldwin: Campus security plays a vital role in securing neighborhood blocks for various forms of campus expansion by surveilling and policing residents in ways largely dictated by the university interest. As schools build out “off campus” housing, commercial and recreational corridors, and for-profit innovation districts, the ramping up of campus police signals to parents, potential researchers, and companies that areas are safe for investment. And we must be clear that first, nearly all campus police carry guns and about nine in ten have arrest and patrol jurisdiction off campus, sometimes policing powers over entire cities. Second, private school police are not subject to Freedom of Information Act stipulations. So, in most cities, we have private security forces, with public authority, free from public scrutiny.
Because these are predominately white institutions in working-class Black and Brown communities, the racial consequences are horrifying. UChicago students have identified a “two-tiered” policing system. The largely white student crimes of sexual violence, substance abuse, and property damage largely go decriminalized because public exposure would undermine the university brand. Community residents are overpoliced. And when a student and a resident commit the same infraction, we find that the former sees the Dean while the latter is run through the criminal justice system. I spoke to youth living in campus areas with no criminal records that were stopped multiple times a week in the name of “public safety.”
Ultimately, university policing is a practice of brand management for university-based economic development. The broken windows or “quality of life” policing, embraced by campus security, then opens the door to gross racial disparities in how university affiliates are policed differently that community residents. Policing is simply the most visible expression of a broader violent confiscation and control of local communities for building out a “university lifestyle” that can attract tuition payers, workers, and private investors. When Johns Hopkins pushed to create its own private security force, Maryland State Senator Mary Washington derided it as “akin to establishing a Vatican City within Baltimore.”
Campuses are the perfect places to consider abolishing the police. They fail at their official primary job, which is to police sexual violence, substance abuse, and property damage because doing so would undermine their actual job of protecting the university brand. First, any policing unit, public or private, must be subject to FOIA laws, especially those that claim to work in the public interest. At the same time, most schools have a medical center or public health department. If any policing institution could shift funds from armed security forces to unarmed community safety units with trauma and health supports, its higher education. But any decision that is made must be governed by a community oversight board with prosecution power, not just advisory capacity.
John K. Wilson: How does real estate influence the role of universities? Should the goal be to have universities sell off some of their property to private owners, or to use the property they own in ways that are better for the community?
Davarian L. Baldwin: Real estate is critical for understanding how university prosperity is built from extracting wealth from surrounding communities while also excluding those very same communities from higher education benefits. First, colleges and universities are one of the largest real estate holders in both major cities and college towns all across the country. Second, because schools are identified as 501c3 non-profits, most of their land holdings are exempt from property taxes. No one argues that properties holding classrooms, dormitories, or other educational facilities should be taxed. But we have entered a primarily “knowledge economy” where academic research is now being sold on the private market and generating millions in royalties for universities. Private industry now targets universities for research and development because “educational” property serves as a lucrative tax shelter that benefits schools and these corporate investors. Arizona State University provides tax shelter to State Farm Insurance’s regional headquarters, the largest commercial development in the state. These arrangements what created what I call elsewhere a “public good paradox.” Nonprofit status is precisely what creates a real estate benefit that allows for an easier transfer of public dollars into higher education’s private developments with little public oversight or scrutiny.
The other side of the story is that while for-profit research on school grounds creates property tax “gray areas,” it also financially devastates host cities. These university facilities raise the land values of the surrounding neighborhoods which increases the property taxes of residents with fixed incomes and raises the price for rental housing above affordable means. Also, the same property taxes that are withheld by schools would serve as a direct benefit to struggling public schools and the deteriorating infrastructure of public works, like the roads and the electrical grid that actually benefit universities. The Penn for PILOTs campaign in West Philadelphia, among other movements, makes this exact point. Schools raise the amorphous category of “economic impact” that point to job creation, income taxes, investment dollars etc. But no one has conducted a forensic investigation to see what degree this “impact” is actually a product of the tax abatements extracted from the neighborhoods they claim to benefit.
If schools want to continue to maintain property tax-exemption, then campus facilities and resources must be made directly accessible to residents. The point should not be to further privatize land. There is actually a long and storied history of calls for turning campuses into community “commons” with regards to classes, housing, recreation, and research. At its root, this is a socially-embedded real estate issue but it is also an issue of urban democracy. As we enter the urban century, where more people will live in cities across the world, both students and residents would benefit from a more integrated “town-gown” experience.
John K. Wilson: What can faculty do to reverse the dangers you identity? Should they demand that universities be more open to the community (access to the library, parking, and campus events)? Should they demand greater campus funding to support the community? Should they seek to organize events and groups that bridge the campus/community gap? Or is that just another form of controlling the community?
Davarian L. Baldwin: Yes to all of the above. It’s an odd but predictable irony that it’s the more secure senior faculty that largely remain silent on these issues while those who are most precarious (adjunct and non-tenured) are vocal from a shared, though uneven, position of exploitation. But along advocacy from within the ivory tower, faculty can more securely embed universities in the neighborhoods where they sit. So as faculty organize and imagine their place in these institutions, they must expand their frameworks of labor and solidarity to include the support staff workforce, and the neighborhoods from where they come. Faculty “advocacy” but also even self-interested labor organizing fails when the work is done isolation and allows the institution to shape the terms of values, rights, and conditions. Faculty need to turn away from appealing to the administration and turn towards building community with others. This is critical for a number of reasons. University administrators hate transparency and to lose public control over defining institutional values. Building with community helps generate values that can directly challenge the traditional ideas about what higher education is and what it can do in ways that align with a more democratic vision of governance. This kind of solidarity building can also challenge the popular university response of “austerity” in the face of social justice or equity-building demands. When we look at the university beyond the gates, it becomes clear very quickly that teaching classes is a very small aspect of what schools do and where their budgets lie. By embedding universities in their communities, faculty can begin to develop both organizing and analytic frames that bring into conversation departmental budgets and faculty governance with things like big-data police contracts, technology transfer departments, the real estate office, school lobbying projects, and of course the endowment.
History has shown that when under siege, campaigns that align with all workers and residents prevent isolation and benefit from local networks of solidarity and resource support outside the control of university leadership. The history of community colleges like Merritt College in North Oakland, Chicago’s Malcolm X Community College, City University of New York, or the social movement origins of SUNY-Old Westbury demonstrate the power of community-based campus building. Campaigns like New Haven Rising, Community Benefits Coalition in Chicago, or the national Cops off Campus Coalition work to build this kind of vision now. And again, with all of these projects there must be equitable governance, budget transparency, shared benefit, and enforceable public oversight. Because colleges and universities have become the largest employers, real estate holders, health care providers, and policing agents in cities and towns, the structure of the campus community speaks to the future of our urban democracy.
