For the last couple of weeks, I have been plowing through three books on universities and their built environments: Paul Venable Turner’s classic tome Campus: An American Planning Tradition, two recent works on universities and cities: Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century by LaDale C. Winling, and In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin, both dealing primarily with urban universities in the United States (though the latter has some Can-con). It is an interesting way of approaching not just the history of universities, but their future as well.  

Turner’s Campus, first published in 1987, is narrowly about the way American institutions develop themselves.  His basic insight is this: in England, from whence all early American thinking about higher education came, there were two universities (Oxford and Cambridge). They were organized in colleges where students and masters lived together, invariably in settings consisting of stone buildings forming an enclosed quadrangle.  America kept the colleges but rejected the quadrangles.  I mean come on, there’s so much space here – why not keep things as open as possible?  This tendency was evident even in the earliest urban colleges such as Harvard and Yale, but America quickly took it a step further by putting colleges out in the middle of nowhere (Dartmouth, anybody?), partly out of some ideas concerning the benefits of sylvan nature, but also because siting a university 100 miles from the nearest major town actually achieves exactly the same thing those English walled cloisters did – keep students sheltered from vice and sin.   

And that’s the book, really.  300 pages of gorgeous plates showing how the idea of colleges as simulacrums of coherent villages evolved over three and a half centuries.  Some of the pictures and examples are truly spectacular- I had no idea about the experimental nature of Illinois – Chicago Circle or Tougaloo college in Mississippi, and I definitely did not know how batshit wild SUNY Albany was (effectively, the worst bits of Carleton four time over), or that Florida Southern was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (put Lakeland, Florida on my list of potential holiday destinations).  It lingers over different waves of architectural styles – neo-gothic, classical revival, beaux-arts, modernism, etc. – and how institutions struggled to integrate buildings from different eras and styles into a coherent whole.  Some tried to impose consistent styles (in Canada, this was the approach taken by Western) while other just said “the hell with it, we’ll just permit a riot of styles” (e.g. Manitoba, big time). 

It would be hard to write a Canadian equivalent, mainly because we had so few universities with multiple structures consisting of an actual campus until the 20^th century.  Arguably, we really only had four serious ones in 1900: Dalhousie, McGill, Queen’s and U of T. Instead, it would probably have to focus on the architecture of individual buildings, of which Canadian universities have plenty of great examples (even Manitoba).  But boy, I’d love for someone to give it a try. 

The two “Ivory Towers” books have a slightly different focus, both in the sense that they are exclusively looking at urban universities (with Baldwin looking mainly at events in the 21^st century and Winling the previous one), and more specifically the ways that universities interact with city planning and how they consequently end up shaping those cities.  Winling’s story starts, surprisingly (to me anyway), in Muncie, Indiana to tell the story of Ball State University.  Basically, the Ball family, having made a fortune in the jar-making business, wanted to invest in Muncie real-estate. They sought to maximize land values, which meant having the “right” sort of neighbours.  To that end, they purchased a failing for-profit normal school, held on to it for a few years, made some improvements and then donated the whole thing to the State of Indiana, provided they turned it into a state college.  Hey presto, the value of their adjoining land parcels began to rise.   Philanthropy pays.

Winling’s stories are not unfamiliar: UT Austin’s expansion and the way it solidified the colour line in the city’s housing, University of Chicago’s plans for “urban renewal” using federal money and legislation and how it clashed with the south side’s expanding Black population, MIT’s development of Kendall Square, Harvard’s take-over of Allston.  And they all generally focus on how universities can bulldoze (both figuratively and literally) their surrounding communities.  Winling’s narrative is more neutrally toned; Baldwin, on the other hand, is explicitly on the side of communities, calling out universities (mainly but not exclusively Columbia, NYU, Chicago and Arizona State) for their major real estate grabs and various crimes against inclusive urbanism. 

What makes the Baldwin book disorienting for a Canadian reader isn’t the fact that there are super-rich global universities parked smack in the downtown of major cities – we have at least two of those in McGill and the University of Toronto.  No, it’s two things.  First is the fact that these super-rich global universities are parked in the portions of major cities which are both majority BIPOC and economically challenged – that is, the very opposite of the wealthy white populations catered to by the universities themselves.  We don’t really have any situations like Columbia/Harlem or Hopkins/East Baltimore, where a super-rich university is even in a position to take advantage of a poor community.  And the second is the fact that cities are allowing these universities to possess their own armed police forces which patrol not just the campus but in some cases the surrounding area as well, and which not infrequently shoot people (see here, here and here). 

This is genuinely some wild stuff.  Say what you want about U of T and McGill: they aren’t annexing huge swathes of local real estate and they don’t use private militias to sweep the Ghetto and the Annex.  The closest analogies in Canada are, arguably, Ryerson and the University of Winnipeg, and neither of them could fairly be called a mega-rich bully.  Compellingly, Baldwin chooses to use the University of Winnipeg as a stellar example of how an urban university can benefit its local community.  I would agree with him about the job U of W has done in inner-city Winnipeg, but also wonder whether this is a question of disposition or of finances.  As in: if you gave the University of Winnipeg the financial clout of a Columbia or a Johns Hopkins, would it be quite so community-minded?  An interesting but unanswerable question.

Anyways, one of the things which struck me in this reading is how little most Canadian institutions actually liaise with local urban communities.  In practice, Canada is what America would be if America had located all its land-grant universities in the suburbs of major towns rather than in the middle of big cities (e.g. MIT) or out in the middle of nowhere (e.g. Champaign, Illinois).  Most of our universities have a big enough land footprint that they can satisfy their space needs by using their existing lots more effectively rather than having to annex adjacent urban territory, or in the odd case where that’s not the case they can do it by buying commercial properties (the Delta Hotel in Montreal, Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, etc.) rather than encroaching on scarce housing stock. 

That’s mostly to the good.  But I would note one drawback: because Canadian universities have so little cause to engage in urban planning, they have far fewer connections to municipal governments than they probably should.  And one obvious resulting planning failure that we are seeing very clearly right now has to do with international students.  Mike Moffatt of the Smart Prosperity Institute at the University of Ottawa has recently been making a very persuasive case (see here and here) that the boom in housing prices in Ontario over the past few years in Ontario has a lot to do with the increase in the number of international students that institutions have been recruiting.   I would be willing to be good money that not a single university or college in southern Ontario has ever communicated its medium-term plans for international student recruitment to their local municipal authorities.  Which means not a single municipality in Ontario has ever really had the chance to craft a housing and transportation plan in a way that accounts for university and college intentions.

This is arguably still a case of institutions putting their own needs ahead of those of the community they ostensibly serve.  Less blatant than a University of Chicago perhaps, but damaging in its own Canadian, passive-aggressive fashion, nonetheless.

Have a good weekend, everybody.