Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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fears of government expansion.
Tangled in the web of federal relationships, universities increasingly faced criticism from within and without, beginning in the transformative middle decades of the twentieth century. Mid-century urban policy—urban renewal, suburban development subsidies, and unequal community investments—maintained racial segregation even after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, providing opportunity and security to whites at the expense of blacks. Political dissent over race emerged from and found homes in universities, from chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This dissent and fragmentation eventually undermined the fragile foundation of the New Deal coalition. When this political chaos combined with economic stagnation in the 1970s, the liberal policy edifice also crumbled, including the commitment for affordable, democratic access to higher education. Urban crises wrought university crises in a long feedback loop between policy and politics.
Urban leaders, education administrators, and economic thinkers responded to the crisis by embracing the logic and rhetoric of the marketplace and, with it, neoliberalism. Universities became laboratories for developing and adapting this market rhetoric in economics seminar rooms and administrative offices. According to this market logic, academic research had to be made profitable. University investment returns had to be maximized in the increasingly complicated and diffuse financial marketplace to take over for dwindling public support. Nonprofit universities had to compete with private enterprise for employees and, by the end of the century, students. Similarly, cities had to unfetter real-estate markets and entrepreneurs from regulations and tax burdens to regain urban vitality.
The market era of neoliberal policy meant fundamental changes for universities and cities.21 Two key changes in higher education characterized this era, one external and one internal. First, the equalizing potential and redistributive nature of higher education was on the wane. The emphasis on markets, deregulation, and low taxes meant less economic redistribution from the wealthy to provide affordable higher education to the poor and working classes. Thus, universities increasingly relied on philanthropy and their endowments, as well as tuition, to meet their goals. Second, this shift meant that universities changed their structure and curricula to become more vocational, to serve job markets more directly, and to emphasize discoveries with commercial potential and industry support.
This policy transformation did invigorate a number of cities, especially those home to major universities, by making them more attractive to an affluent generation popularly dubbed the “creative class.”22 The children and grandchildren of postwar suburban knowledge workers sought residence, employment, and entertainment back in cities at the end of the twentieth century. In some cases, they preferred the decrepit signs of central city disinvestment over the new, verdant infrastructure of the metropolitan periphery. But just as their parents had enjoyed suburban subsidies, the new creative class rode a wave of tax breaks and federal policy that starved the state and scavenged the postindustrial urban landscape. The promise of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, for example, was funded by defense contracting and suburban expansion. Market-oriented tax incentives, such as historic preservation tax credits and enterprise zones, and tax policy including Proposition 13 starved California cities of traditional lines of revenue and channeled development in new directions. They facilitated the back-to-the city movement by whites in the 1980s and 1990s, helping to reinvigorate and gentrify neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland.
By the end of the twentieth century, the importance of universities in U.S. society was incontrovertible. No city could be great without a great university, and a college degree now vies with home ownership among the key symbols of class status and means of solidifying upward mobility across generations. Education and community politics intersect at universities; at this intersection, we find powerful battles over the nature of urban life and the future of metropolitan America.
This book lays out several periods in the twentieth century and the varied settings for higher education that prevailed over each period. Each chapter presents a case illustrating a moment or period of transformation that rendered changes in American society and political ideology spatial. University administrators extended the spatial ideology of their institutions in order to translate that economic and political logic into new educational spaces. My intent is to give a sense of the diversity of U.S. institutions and their relationship to urban development as well as to illustrate commonality among universities or continuity across eras. Each institution described here faced issues and transformations that affected a wide range of institutions.
In Chapter 1, we witness regional leaders favoring white-collar jobs, workers, and neighborhoods over their industrial and working-class counterparts in reorganization of regional political economy. Over the course of the twentieth century, higher education expanded to serve the growing needs of a developing industrial society by defining and providing the training of skilled professionals.23 This shifting mission led to a building boom. A growing middle class sent their children to college in increasing numbers, philanthropists gave to colleges and universities, and city boosters incorporated universities in their development plans. What they chose to build gave physical form to an institutional ideology of aspiration and the bourgeois values of civic leaders.
In Muncie, Indiana, the Ball brothers, makers of glass jars for fruit and vegetable canning, scavenged a four-times-failed for-profit teacher training school and donated it to the state. Thus they turned a private enterprise into a public endeavor and fused philanthropic and entrepreneurial efforts in the Indiana State Normal School (later Ball State University). The Balls leveraged their economic and political power to promote the development of Muncie, including a hospital, a museum, and an airport, in addition to the college. At the same time, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, with their best-selling book Middletown and follow-up study Middletown in Transition, made Muncie’s name and helped it stand in for industrial cities around the country. Muncie was America, from its industrial history to the economic transformation accelerated by investments in higher education.
The establishment of the normal school helped create a new racial, class, and economic geography in the burgeoning industrial city. The school was part of a speculative real-estate gambit. The Ball brothers’ initial investment and subsequent influence illustrate what I call the gravity of capital—investment drawing additional investment toward itself. The Balls led the Muncie business class to build a new city that would have been almost unrecognizable to nineteenth-century eyes, with white business families at the northwestern edge, intense industrial development to the south, and a new economy on the rise.
By the middle decades of the century, as detailed in Chapter 2, local boosters found in the New Deal and wartime programs a new partner for supporting higher education—the federal government. Through its resources came the ability for dramatic reconfiguration of education communities and their surrounding cities. The New Deal provided stimulus and structured new markets for agricultural products, housing, and the circulation of capital. At the same time, the federal government invested in colleges and universities through student aid and investments in physical plants, remaking higher education. In the process, Roosevelt gave priority to investments in the South above all other regions. Political leaders built on these successes, which the federal government continued and amplified during World War II and through the 1950s, to make higher education central to the midcentury liberal agenda.
No university or American city flourished without federal backing, and no university or city eclipsed the growth of either the University of Texas or Austin in this period. Early in the twentieth century, Austin had been a small, racially segregated southwestern city: through the 1920s, it was smaller than Muncie.24 Prominent politicians in the city, including a young Lyndon Johnson, lobbied for PWA grants, wartime research, and training funds that enabled the university to expand its physical and intellectual capacity and leap to national stature. When wartime mobilization and postwar prosperity reached the once-impoverished state, enthusiasm for the New Deal waned. Resurgent conservatives forced liberal retrenchment and abandonment of redistributionist policies that aided the poor and began to address racial and ethnic inequality.25 Co-opted by this postwar realignment, figures