Introduction

      The Landscape of Knowledge

      Harvard University was on top of the educational world. In January 2007, administrators announced the plan for expanding their campus in the Allston neighborhood of Boston.¹ The nation’s oldest institution of higher education had the largest endowment in the country and was financing a bold move to build scientific laboratories and an art museum across the Charles River from its traditional Cambridge campus. At that time, Boston was one of the centers of the new economy, with researchers, graduates, and entrepreneurs from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) composing much of its creative class. The New York Times pointed out that Harvard amenities would replace nothing more than “a gas station and a Dunkin’ Donuts” at Barry’s Corner, an industrial site and working-class neighborhood in Allston.² Mayor Thomas Menino hailed the 2007 announcement for the Allston campus as the first step in making Harvard “the future of Boston.”³ Harvard’s ambition was central to the growth of the region. Contractors began clearing the site at the end of 2007.⁴

      The fall was steep. Two years later, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust sent a letter out to the university’s deans in the midst of the economic crisis, announcing that the endowment, once $36 billion, had lost nearly a third of its value. There would be budget cuts. The university instituted a faculty hiring freeze and halted construction on the new campus, leaving a hole in the Boston landscape. The nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious university had been laid low, its signature efforts to lead the nation in biological research were in embarrassing disarray, and a three-decade-long expansion initiative had stalled.

      The proposed science and art complex in Allston represented the volatile potential of this new direction for growth in higher education. The increasing reliance on philanthropy to compensate for shrinking public support had paid off handsomely in boom times. Harvard and universities across the country could buy more land, conduct more research, enroll more students, and provide more financial aid than ever.⁵ Residents of Allston, upset by the halt to construction, felt the promise had been empty. Harvard had bought their property, forced their businesses out of the neighborhood, promised them jobs and entry into the tech economy, razed their community, and then parked bulldozers and stacked leftover materials on a nearly vacant site. A casual observer might have thought that the federal government had authorized a new wave of urban renewal: the results looked strikingly similar to slum clearance and redevelopment efforts in Boston a half-century before.

      The Harvard case reflects an important moment in a transformation more than a century in the making, as universities of all types became central to American economic growth and key drivers of urban development. They made the creation of knowledge a foundation of economic growth—through education, research, and cultural production. This production of knowledge required