A couple other examples come to mind, Columbia U and its whole relationship with Morningside Heights. And I had an interesting conversation with David Cohen, a BID-Main Street guy in Philly last year about how intrigued I am with Penn’s University City Initiative and the University City District BID, which is funded by assessments, not TIFs. He said that at one point in the 1970s, Penn was considering leaving the city for the suburbs, because of the “neighborhood.” Of course there is the classic example of Yale and New Haven too.

Re: John Gilderbloom, I actually toured the Russell neighborhood and some of the SUN projects with him in 2004, and I co-authored a journal article with him and one of his students (we’ll see if it gets published).

If you’re going to look at modern revitalization efforts, the Mercer U initiative with Historic Macon Foundation (it’s one of the Preservation Development Initiatives with the National Trust, the paper is online, but I also saw an excellent presentation by them in 1/2005), the Hartford Consortium project described in the Arch. Foundation video “Block by Block”, and the Campus Partnership initiative at Ohio State are particularly good examples (along with Penn). I saw a presentation by Tom Foegler (sp?) of the OSU project and was quite impressed. We talked afterwards and he said that the Lincoln Land Institute has brought together the most forward-thinking universities together to work through these issues together on town-gown revitalization.

The relationship between the city and the university in urban history and urban studies is one that is beginning to get more interest from scholars. Arnold Hirsch’s chapter on the University of Chicago in Making the Second Ghetto is one of the first instances of this, demonstrating how the activities of a university’s administration can have a major impact on a community (Hyde Park). Julian Levi Lawrence Kimpton, the university president, even arranged for a local planning authority he masterminded to be delegated powers of eminent domain. Margaret O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge addressed city-university partnerships in developing research parks and asserted that such projects have a profound effect on urban decentralization. John Gilderbloom, in Promise and Betrayal, illustrates the potential for revitalization that locally-engaged universities like Louisville have for their surrounding communities. My contribution to this literature is to examine the chief intermediaries between cities and universities, the students. Even at mighty Michigan, perhaps the largest multiversity in the country, students outnumber all non-student employees combined. (Check out the Michigan Daily salary supplement.) Investigations aimed elsewhere miss a main point, in my opinion. Blake Gumprecht, you might recall, has also touched on this with his recent article in the Journal of Urban History.

The university has, of course, seen its history written as an institution that is largely segregated from community and urban concerns. Paul Turner’s Campus: An American Planning Tradition displays the rhetoric of university founders about cities upon a hill and inward-looking architecture that endures almost to this day (but is little more than rhetoric, from what I see). Roger Geiger’s To Advance Knowledge on the growth of the research university interprets the provision of student housing as being driven by educational philosophy, rather than including consideration of community concerns. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’ Alma Mater also takes this angle, showing how the founders of women’s colleges designed buildings embodying their educational philosophy, but only begins to address the connections between the colleges and their communities.

Finally, we must note that the important actors in the periods I am addressing found student housing important. As noted, CC Little resigned in large part because of the outcry over Mosher-Jordan. John Hannah, president of MSU, testified before Congress on behalf of land grant colleges about the desperate need for the federal government to intervene (this was Commerce and Banking, not an education committee) and cause a structural shift in university community housing markets. Congress created a special housing program in the National Housing Act of 1950 to finance college housing that lasted for 30 years and provided more than 4 billion dollars of construction.

This is just a start, but it’s at least as important a story as Eero Saarinen’s design for North Campus.

Don’t fret Mr. Urbanoasis. My firm is always looking for “thinkers” and “intellectuals” to mop the floor. We can scatter your thesis over the tiles and it will prevent me from tracking dirt into my BMW. You will have plenty of time to think about how tall building “relate to the street” as your are sorting post in the mail room!

As always, thank you for giving me an outlet and someone to look down to.

-Curious Observer

Were institutions like Howard U and Gallaudet (and Rochester Institute of Tech. institute for the deaf) somehow harbingers of this change you see, since those institutions enjoyed federal support long before other institutions? What about the Morrill Act? Etc.

This was co-incident with growth of the population nationally and the need for local institutions to respond differently, perhaps on a scale difference, given the variety of changes in society.

(Another example is public transit. It’s hard for us to imagine today that public transit was at one time a private business. For various reasons, not relevant to your entry, this changed.)

You probably know that UM was the largest public university in the country, even during the depression, until the 1950s.

I’m sure you’ve looked at North Campus plans, plans to move the undergraduates there, plans to move the fraternities and sororities, etc. I remember looking at back issues of the Daily from the 1950s, maybe a little more than 20 years ago, about some of this. However, the faculty of LSA revolted, and plans for the university to keep growing were halted. Eventually schools like OSU and U of Minnesota eclipsed UM.

Anyway, I think that changes in student housing were merely changes comparable to other changes in society and the way that the various levels of government interacted.