After I graduated from college in 2002 I lived with a friend in Berkeley for a month and bummed around the city. This summer I went out again for a month of research. In both cases I enjoyed myself immensely. 7 years ago I stayed west of campus about 10 blocks, this time I was about 6 blocks northwest of campus. I can report with a good deal of confidence that the Prius has replaced the Subaru Legacy Outback as the most popular car in Berkeley.

Harvard is in Trouble:

There were no more inefficiencies, Smith said, no loose dollars here and there. “It is extremely important for us to think deeply about how we not only resize our activities…[but] to really start thinking about reshaping these activities.”

The “reshaping” is already more dramatic than the word suggests. The career services office is talking about closing for a month in the summer; other offices are expected to take similar furloughs. The library system, its budget pared by 31 percent, is cutting back on hours and book purchases, and the Quad Library is closing altogether. The college’s “January term,” part of a much-ballyhooed new curriculum, is now dead. Harvard has already halted the hiring of junior faculty and announced an early retirement program for tenured professors, and for the first time ever is considering laying off tenured professors. Funds for housemasters are being slashed by one-fourth, and even the hot breakfasts the houses served on weekdays are out. Meanwhile, idled cranes bow over the pit in Allston, as if in mourning.

Clearly Harvard’s aggressive investment strategy was pure folly. But their dire situation points up the trend nationwide on the increased reliance on endowments and the overall privatization (and donorization) of higher education. Universities, legislatures, and education consumers (ie students) all deserve blame in the problem of the dramatic cost increases of higher education.

I’ve been saying for a few years now that we will see a contraction in higher education owing to our unsustainable revenue model. However, I previously had been thinking about an absolute contraction, but in fact it will probably be a relative contraction because our population keeps expanding, which will keep up demand. Which brings me to my next note –
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Let me pause in my research on campus expansion and eminent domain at the University of California Berkeley to talk about…universities and eminent domain.

Manhattanville property owners had their day in state appeals court Thursday, arguing against the use of eminent domain by the Empire State Development Corporation on behalf of Columbia University. You might remember I touched on this a while back. As a private university, Columbia does not have state-granted powers of eminent domain, which is why they have to work in tandem with the ESDC, a state authority with those powers. Can a private university constitute a “public use,” a fundamental requirement for condemnation? On its face, it looks pretty unlikely — however, “public use” has seen an increasingly broad interpretation up to the Kelo v. New London decision, where turning over property to a private party for economic development was justified as a public use. The judge in this case seems to be skeptical of this idea, so it remains to be seen if she will continue the federal court’s interpretation.

As a note, in the 1950s and 1960s, university leaders around the country were sharing information left and right about their expansion plans and development ideas — is this no longer the case?

Judge Rosalyn Richter questioned the public accessibility of Columbia’s campus buildings and Associate Justice James Catterson asked Casolaro to cite an example of a case in which a “private university was deemed a public benefit.”

Casolaro responded, “I am not able to point to such a case.”

I can’t believe Bollinger and Columbia planners were not ready for this with their ducks in a row. Clearing blight has been one of the key examples of a public benefit and, debatable as the outcomes may be, its legal basis is really pretty solid.

You were awakened by the drunken yelling of your roommate’s girlfriend at 4 in the morning, surfed around the web to find the New York Review of Books excerpt from the NYRB PEN World Voices economics symposium and wanted to read or hear more.

You can. WNYC has an mp3 you can either stream or download with the whole 90 minutes.

I finally got a new computer a couple weeks ago. My old iBook G4 had been acting up (shutting down each time I closed it, running slowly with big programs, etc.) and I attributed it to its advanced age of 3.5 years. So I sprang for one of the new MacBooks with the silver covers. 2.0 gHz processor, 160 GB hard drive, XX GB RAM. First off, let me note that I am not a particularly intensive user. Right now, and at most points, I have Safari, Word, Preview (or Adobe Acrobat Reader), and Stickies open. I make frequent forays into Photoshop, Excel, PowerPoint, iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, and Illustrator. Less frequent but still occasional use includes ArcExplorer, iMovie, Audacity, and Sketchup.

Next, let me say that the MacBook’s main feature is that it is a Mac. I can’t remember why I switched to Apple products 4 years ago after 4 years of owning PCs and probably 8 years of working on other people’s PCs. However, I like to think it was a well-researched and considered decision because it has made my life so much easier, basically eliminating any computing problems since then. I have of course never had a virus, I’ve never had a problem with installing and using new software, and I’ve only suffered one real glitch that the new computer has taken care of. If you use your computer in anything more than an out-of-the-box fashion (ie if you install additional software or end up flicking switches to see if it makes things better or more interesting) you are better of with a Mac if you can afford it. And price is a consideration. I got my iBook for about 1100 dollars and my MacBook for 1200, probably 50% more than what a comparable Windows machine would cost. However, I think I make that up in increased efficiency and not losing time on the phone with tech support. I remember a few months before I got my iBook spending about 16 hours on the phone with Windows tech support over about 3 or 4 weeks for several basic problems — not really anything I had done, just-one-of-those-things types of issues. I don’t think I’ve ever had to make a call to Apple tech support.

That said, there are a couple things Macs can’t do that PC’s can. Most of this has to do with software. A few old timers might still use Word Perfect, which I don’t think makes versions for Mac. In my line, ArcGIS and AutoCAD are PC-only products that I might otherwise like to use on a Mac (especially ArcGIS). However, since Apple started using Intel chips, their computers are increasingly compatible with formerly PC-only software. It’s more or less just a matter of time. OK, I guess that’s just one thing.

Something Macs can do that Windows machines can’t: the iLife/iWork suite. Listen — anything starting with an “i” works and integrates pretty frigging seamlessly on a Mac, so you can drop digital images from iPhoto into a digital video created in iMovie, then lay on a soundtrack from iTunes. Makes you look like a genius without hardly trying. If you’ve got an iPod of any kind, it’s also crazy easy to use. Maybe Windows has a comparably easy suite — my experience and informants indicate otherwise.

Upgrades from the iBook: the shell is good and doesn’t get stained with my filthy, sweaty hands like the other one did; the LED screen is brighter and has an auto-dimming function so it retains the apparent contrast in a darker setting (eg if the sun goes down or you turn the lights off) so it saves energy. The battery seems to last longer. The cord is magnetic and automatically pulls away from the computer so you don’t knock your computer off the table if you step on it while it’s plugged in. The keyboard is better, with nice, flat block keys rather than those trapezoidy ones where junk falls under the keys (I have no idea how easy or difficult it will eventually be to clean the keyboard if it becomes necessary). The trackpad is now both all trackpad and all button, which I think works well. I think the built-in speakers are a bit louder and less tinny.

Downgrades: There’s no six-pin Firewire input, dagnabbit! The little scoop-open thing is still a bit weird for me — I had really gotten used to the opening button, but it wouldn’t make sense with the full glass screen. Both of these are relatively easy to deal with, though. The only thing that is indisputably worse is the wireless reception, which is probably due to the new pseudo-metallic shell rather than the porous, thin white plastic shell of the old iBook and the older version MacBook. It’s not noticeable for a wireless source in your building, it’s only on fairly distant, neighbory kind of wireless sources that this becomes an issue. You know what I’m talking about, amirite?

The glitch I had warned about earlier. On my old computer, iPhoto was in some kind of mortal feud with Firefox. It took forever to download photos from my digital camera through iPhoto when Firefox was open (like an HOUR for 100 1/2 meg images). If I ever forgot and left Firefox open with iPhoto when I connected my camera I was assured of plenty of leisure time to curse myself and the two programs. iPhoto was slow downloading even when the browser was closed. The two just didn’t like each other. This may have been a Firefox problem, though, as I’ve had a couple non-iPhoto issues with the latest versions, which is why I have switched over to Safari. Now a 100 MB download takes about 5 minutes.

Bottom line: as an architectural and urban historian, I give the new MacBook 4.5 out of 5 Pritzkers.

NYT:

Fast is fine, but slow can be much better.

Digital photography and the ascent of the Web have quickened our jobs. Instead of one deadline a day, we now have continual deadlines, bringing exponentially increasing speed to what we do at The Times.

One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualize what you want.

When doing portraits, it enables the photographer to talk and listen to subjects, to observe their behavior. A camera can trap a photographer sometimes. You can look so intently through a viewfinder that you are unaware of the picture in front of you. When I use an 8-by-10 camera for portraits, I will compose the picture and step back. Using a long cable release, I will look at the subject and wait for the moment. It’s very liberating.

According to the author of this blog post (and several terrific shots) at the Times’ new photography blog, Lens, the Times’ new headquarters does not have an actual darkroom. This seems stupid to me. But the Times is making a good choice in starting up this new blog and seems to be doing well in engaging new media on their site (hell, between this and Krugman’s blog I’ll probably read their blogs more than I read any of their articles).

But I don’t think it’s right to call film photography “slow” photography, like slow food. I think of it as just straight photography and the digital version as the modified, exception to regular photography.

One of the most annoying things about the Times is their fealty to New York real estate. You can see the way it shapes their content in showing off working architects in Sketchpad, their profiles of architecture students, overpriced apartment features, and the highly annoying writing of Nicolai Ourosoff. Of course it is understandable not from a news standpoint but from an economic one — people in New York make money off real estate and the Times to a certain extent depends on those businesses, that clientele, and that part of the economy.

However, there is an exception that I regularly find interesting — Streetscapes, written by Christopher Gray. Just a good, regular set of features helping understand the built environment, from design to planning to real estate.

From the beat sweetener on Antonin Scalia by Adam Liptak:

One was from a student who wanted to know what she had to do to become “outrageously successful” without “connections and elite degrees.”

Her law school, according to U.S. News & World Report, is the 45th best in the country.

Justice Scalia gave a general answer. “Just work hard and be very good,” he said.

But then he turned to a discussion of the student’s chances of obtaining the ultimate credential in American law, a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice. Not good, he said.

“By and large,” he said, “I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, O.K.?”

The data bear out the hard truth the justice delivered.

Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for another 50. No one from Washington College of Law made the cut.

Awesome — he says “just work hard and be very good,” pushing that old line about the meritocracy. Then he admits he walks the halls of privilege to choose his clerks.

Then this:

“One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers.

“I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best law clerks I ever had.”

The only reason Sutton got to work with Scalia was because another justice, Lewis Powell, hired him.

What a wanker. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know jack about admissions decisions, either, or he’s totally lying about why he chooses from those schools. Admissions are arbitrary and capricious. Pretending otherwise is dishonest and malicious. It’s comforting to think that the people deciding constitutional law have no idea how the country works, isn’t it? But I guess this is the only way they’re able to render such garbage decisions like the Ledbetter case. They don’t know any better.

Via the Ann Arbor Chronicle comes a reminder about an account of going to college in the Depression, Edmund Love’s Hanging On. I came across this book as I did research on student housing for my masters thesis and Love’s account was an engaging portrait of Ann Arbor and Michigan in the period. As Tobin writes,

Gerald Linderman, now professor emeritus of history, often assigned the book in his popular course in early 20th-century U.S. history. Hanging On carries the story through Love’s prolonged college career at Michigan. “The Great Depression of the 1930s too often comes down to us as a series of statistics,” Linderman says. “We frequently use them to lighten the predicament of our own recession, e.g., ‘Our jobless rate is less than ten percent, theirs much worse at 25 percent.’

There are a few issues with believing Love’s memoir on every count. In probably half a dozen instances he is saved from total disaster by some amazing coincidence or stroke of luck — huge gambling winnings, selling cats to fraternity boys for practical jokes and the like — that come off as exaggerations.

Here’s what I wrote about Love in my thesis:

When Ed Love graduated from Flint Northern High School in 1929, he intended to fulfill his mother’s wish that he earn a degree from the University of Michigan. The onset of the Depression and the myriad compromises and serendipities of life on the edge of poverty diverted him from that path, taking him in and out of college at Michigan until he finally graduated seven years later. By the time Love earned his degree in 1936, he had spent several semesters living in rooming houses and more than half his undergraduate life rooming in his fraternity house, but had never had the opportunity – nor, apparently, the desire – to live on the U-M campus.
[...]
Edmund Love, the student from Flint, arranged his sophomore year to room at the fraternity he had joined. His father was facing financial difficulties and Love sought a “board job” at a sorority that would provide him with meals. His responsibilities were to help prepare and set up meals for the sorority women, enabling him to eat for free before or after meals in lieu of pay. Though rooming at the fraternity increased what Love expected to pay at a rooming house, he opted for fraternity living because the organization allowed its members to carry a balance on their room or board. The social networks of Greek life were an essential safety net for students working their way through college during the Depression.

Love’s fraternity was located at 1443 Washtenaw and the building is now the William Monroe Trotter House.

The New York Times runs something of an odd story knocking Harvard under the guise of a story on national trends, Slump Revives Town-Gown Divide Across U.S

The rats are out in spades this spring in North Allston, a gritty neighborhood wedged between the Charles River and the Massachusetts Turnpike, and residents are blaming Harvard.

Harvard had big plans to expand its campus into Allston with a science complex. But last winter, the university announced that the recession would force it to slow — perhaps even halt — the $1 billion project. Now Allston residents are living with a gaping hole and a bunch of vacant buildings instead of the prospect of a revitalized neighborhood.

We do get this tidbit, though:

Some cities and towns — including Ann Arbor, Mich., Durham, N.C., and Princeton, N.J. — have renewed calls for local colleges and universities to make voluntary payments to the communities because they have tax-exempt status.

Others have proposed levying taxes on dorm rooms or even on students, whom they say use municipal services at the expense of property taxpayers.
…
In Providence, R.I., Mayor David N. Cicilline has proposed charging students at the city’s four private colleges and universities, including Brown, a “municipal impact fee” of $150 per semester.

And in Worcester, Mass., one elected official has gone so far as to propose a tax on dorm rooms, an idea that is gathering support as layoffs take place.

“Police, fire, all the city services that colleges use are being cut,” said City Councilor Michael J. Germain, who proposed the dorm tax. “So now is the perfect time to go to the colleges and say, ‘Hey, we need a little bit more.’ This is a way to force their hand as far as I’m concerned.”

First, I don’t think these calls are serious, as Amy Goodenough couldn’t wring a quote out of anybody from Ann Arbor, Durham, or Princeton. This reads to me like name-checking top institutions where Times readership is fairly high. Second, I’d like to read some legal analysis of a municipal impact fee arbitrarily imposed on a group of residents who are basically indistinguishable in a legal sense from any other resident of a city. You remember Wilkins v. Bentley and Symm v. Walker, right? The state and U.S. court cases on voting that declared that excluding students from voting was a violation of 14th Amendment rights. A grad or undergraduate resident is no different from any other resident for voting purposes and I’d wager such residents are legally no different from other renters or homeowners for “municipal impact purposes,” either.