Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
a martial compromise on domestic policy, physically and fiscally expanding government institutions and the state by redirecting them in service of Cold War defense.26
These development efforts created spatially decentralized institutions in Austin. A university research campus and military infrastructure, including an airbase that would become Austin’s international airport, topped the list of new projects on the metropolitan periphery.27 Postwar growth was not equitably distributed, in part because the University of Texas did not admit African Americans. While civil-rights activists successfully challenged racial exclusion at the university, in the late 1940s, federal support of suburbanization—a new mode of metropolitan segregation—took the place of Jim Crow in Austin.28 With the development of the research campus that moved job growth, knowledge creation, and economic opportunity far from the city’s center, the University of Texas was part and parcel to creation of the new, decentralized Austin.
As I show in Chapter 3, after World War II, cities and universities scrambled to manage unprecedented federal largesse and the restructured political economy. The Cold War and the growing perception that cities were in crisis were intertwined issues in these decades. Federal highway and mortgage subsidies facilitated suburban expansion and led to disinvestment in the urban core. Slum clearance and urban renewal brought real-estate capital to central cities but disrupted settled boundaries and exacerbated internal tensions within cities. At the same time, political leaders struggling to hold together a fragile global coalition against Communism sought economic dominance and military superiority. The federal government conscripted higher-education institutions to provide domestic economic growth and develop new weapons for fighting a global war.
Here I focus on the University of Chicago on Chicago’s South Side, where administrators panicked when they faced racial transition from the Great Migration’s influx of rural, Southern African Americans to the city.29 City business and political leaders restructured the racial geography by demolishing and redeveloping central areas such as the Black Belt, the African American district on the South Side. Federal policy also drained white ethnic communities and hardened racial animosities by shifting new housing investment to places like Naperville and Downer’s Grove at the metropolitan periphery, putting space between the races.30 The University of Chicago used its position at the knife’s edge of the war effort—leadership in the Manhattan Project that helped create the war-ending atomic bombs—to participate in, and at times lead, this process. University technocrats undermined racial integration in the community by creating local, state, and federal legislation and programs that prioritized the university over racial equality. The university sought to protect its interests and mission but meanwhile created blight, limited opportunity, and concentrated poverty in surrounding neighborhoods. Framing their efforts within the rhetoric of Cold War defense, administrators sought to maintain and expand a physical refuge from the black South Side. They would provide a training ground and experimentation laboratory for the next generation of Cold Warriors. University of Chicago leaders established a policy template that universities in cities around the country would adopt on their own campuses. In the process, they sparked strident opposition both in neighboring communities and within the university. The Woodlawn Organization came together with the help of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation to oppose university urban renewal. The local chapter of CORE, including University of Chicago students, protested and occupied administration buildings at the beginning of the 1960s.
Chapter 4 demonstrates how pioneering postwar expansion efforts were fully institutionalized in the 1960s and found even wider-ranging forms of opposition. Universities were key partners in a system of military Keynesianism, racial inequality, and anti-Communism that attracted a growing chorus of critics by the 1960s. The managed growth of postwar American liberalism preempted all manner of opportunities that American exceptionalist rhetoric seemed to guarantee. Social and economic opportunity for African Americans, varieties of political belief, and a diversity of personal lifestyles and expressions were up for strident, even violent debate, but the overriding system favored corporatism and benefits for white, middle-class nuclear families.
The public machinery of the state of California made the University of California, Berkeley, the center of the vision for economic growth and social progress that took precedence in the 1960s. Academic administrators and state politicians collaborated to coordinate a statewide system of higher education that provided broad access, funded by suburban expansion and defense contracting. The University of California included several campuses where scholars conducted world-leading research; state colleges emphasized undergraduate instruction; and local community colleges gave students their first step into higher education. Berkeley and its science research sat at the pinnacle of the whole enterprise of universal education and statewide investment in communities.31
The student upheavals that followed the expansion of the University of California system were confrontations with the contradictions and failures of liberalism. Berkeley students responded to episodes of university growth with a series of objections that called into question the very nature of their institution. Their school had become, like other universities, a key product of the Faustian bargain of twentieth-century development.32 Mass education, urban renewal, the Cold War, and the promise of racial equality were all threads tangled together in the student and community protests of the 1960s in Berkeley. Campus building and neighborhood redevelopment were the physical realization of these priorities, poured, mortared, and hammered into the landscape of the Berkeley community.
In Chapter 5, we see how cities and universities undertook rapid transformations in response to the political, economic, and cultural tumult of the dissenting 1970s. American universities were centers of new thinking about markets, economic growth, and scientific commercialization, from Chicago School economics to biotech start-ups on the coasts. Economists, intellectuals, and policymakers considered university reforms to be opportunities to reverse the stagnation of the 1970s. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, for example, a mechanism for commercializing federally funded research and knowledge at universities, reflects this model: the marketplace rather than the public domain was the destination for knowledge. At the same time, lower tax rates, decreased regulation of financial investments, and an increased emphasis on philanthropy in American politics and society meant that universities of all types leaned more heavily toward privatization and the private institution model, funded by student tuition or donor gifts to endowments.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University and MIT both helped create the market model that dominates today. East Cambridge, the home of MIT, was heavily industrial and faced the challenges of urban disinvestment. Central Cambridge, site of Harvard Yard, was a genteel setting of expensive residences. MIT pursued a set of new research initiatives and corporate partnerships that would remake its surroundings, especially at Technology Square and Kendall Square, re-creating industrial Cambridge as a high-tech center of just a few dense acres of biotech research and computer services. MIT fought a battle over redevelopment with the Cambridge working class in the 1970s and, after a prolonged stalemate, eventually won. Harvard remade itself financially, expanding its endowment, already the nation’s largest, from $1 billion in 1964 to $36 billion in 2005. But when it sought campus expansion in the 1980s, Harvard bought land across the Charles River, finding it easier to grow in a working-class area of Boston than in affluent central Cambridge.
Taken together, these stories illustrate universities’ roles as both actors and stages in twentieth-century urban transformation, to employ a theatrical metaphor. Institutions of higher education are corporate bodies that function as legal persons, governed by boards and managed by administrators. In this role, they are able to borrow money, issue bonds, and charge fees; buy, sell, and develop real estate; and lobby government to advance and protect their interests. In addition, universities are places, forums where loose associations of people from many parts of society come together (or break apart), ostensibly to engage in, pursue, or facilitate the creation and attainment of knowledge. In the course of those activities, students, administrators, faculty members, and staff may individually or collectively act as political agents, as market participants, or as members of a broader metropolitan