The campus in the American imagination has long been linked to the small college nestled within a picturesque small town. Even large universities are often cast into this idyllic niche, making certain they are literally outside city limits. Outliers are deemed as inauthentic, alien to our national culture. Steven J. Diner acknowledges this peculiar heritage by providing elaborate documentation of the symbols and icons of higher education across the national landscape. His historical account redresses the myopia of popular town-and-gown images by folding the rich legacies of urban universities into the profile. This is a welcome antidote to the misnomer that, after all, cities are to be distrusted—and colleges in cities are especially to be distrusted or discounted.
To appreciate the historical baggage Diner had to overcome, it is useful to consider geographer Blake Gumprecht's 2008 book, The American College Town. Gumprecht's selections of all-American colleges include Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, Ithaca and Cornell University, Davis and the University of California, Athens and the University of Georgia, Lawrence and the University of Kansas, Norman and the University of Oklahoma, and Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama. The only chance Manhattan had for inclusion was as the home of Kansas State University (known as “Aggieville”). Illustrative of an anti-urban bias is that Columbia University and its “campus town” of Manhattan, New York, failed to make the roster of special American academic places.
One explanation for this indifference is that urban universities have been associated with commuter students, many of whom are what we now call “first gen” and who were (and are) the daughters and sons of immigrants. Demographics elaborate to show that such characterization was usually accompanied by xenophobia directed at Catholics and, hence, American families who were Irish, Slavic, French, and Italian. Nor was anti-Semitism far from suspicion and scrutiny, especially when coupled with Ellis Island rosters of recent newcomers from Eastern Europe. One might think that providing affordability and access would endear urban universities to the American dream of upward mobility and opportunity. More often than not, the result was begrudging acknowledgement that urban universities were taking on a marginal, thankless educational mission.
Diner documents how presidents and other advocates of universities in metropolitan areas stood their ground and embraced their mission by forming their own associations. Ironically, it was somehow acceptable and even laudable that a land grant university could be a haven for hicks and hayseeds who made their way to “state college” and a place in the educated middle class. Yet there was no symmetrical appreciation for the socialization the urban universities provided for newcomers and outsiders in working-class Detroit or multiethnic Brooklyn and the Bronx.
On closer inspection, urban universities were integral to the nation's economic and educational ascent. Ultimately, both public and private leaders in higher education acknowledged the necessity of universities in the cities. This was evident when a state university evolved from a single campus into a system and created new sites. The University of California, whose historic home was Berkeley, grudgingly responded to the population growth of distant Los Angeles by setting up a downtown site with the patronizing name “Southern Branch.” Later, this stepchild would gain status and stature as UCLA. A comparable pattern could be found when the University of Illinois supplemented its Urbana-Champaign campus with a presence in the state's foremost city, establishing the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Eventually, the nomenclature that brought to mind a subway stop gained reasonable respect in its own right as the University of Illinois at Chicago.
From about 1940 to 1980 the urban universities gained new prominence for their collaborations in massive federal programs of urban renewal and housing development. Diner's account is evenhanded in sorting through the good, the bad, and the ugly of this town-and-gown alliance. On the one hand, an expanded university enhanced a city with new programs, services, and facilities. On the other hand, this came at the cost of using eminent domain and federal dollars to raze established neighborhoods to literally pave the way for new, large-scale campus construction.
Traditional critics of the urban university often slighted the institution for its nondescript character that was often hard to distinguish from adjacent office buildings and commercial shops. In fact, many of the great metropolitan universities came to personify the campus as a castle, an academic city-state within a city. Either way, the urban university continued to be viewed with some skepticism or criticism. Another peculiar wrinkle is that population growth and a proliferation of academic support services and innovative companies have turned historically isolated rural campuses into a twenty-first-century urban university. A good example is The Ohio State University and its host city of Columbus, Ohio. When James Thurber enrolled at Ohio State in 1919, it was known as a “cow college” in a small town. Look again—the university is among the largest in the nation, with more than sixty thousand students. Columbus, perhaps once a classic college town, now surpasses Cleveland and Cincinnati in population.
Diner's superb scholarship documents how and where colleges and their communities have changed. Whereas a half century ago the “urban crisis” sounded an alarm of inner-city population decline, migration out to the suburbs, and the flourishing of traditional campuses, the situation in the twenty-first century is markedly different. Gentrification and the prestige and popularity of higher education have made both cities and their campuses a magnet for talent, ranging from students and professionals to employees. In many American cities, a university is now a large, perhaps the largest, landowner and employer. Think how different Boston would be without Harvard, Baltimore without Johns Hopkins, New York City without Columbia, Seattle without the University of Washington, Philadelphia without the University of Pennsylvania, Providence without Brown University, or Pittsburgh without, well, the University of Pittsburgh.
Central to the flourishing of urban universities in recent years has been the emergence of academic medical centers and high-tech startup companies that have become central to the depiction of the modern university as an “economic engine.” Despite such changes and innovations, Diner concludes, with quiet irony, that the deep streak of anti-urbanism that runs through American social history perpetuates a lag in institutional image. This disconnect is conspicuous in the script that Diner produces for the drama of universities and their cities. That is important in its own right. It gains in historical significance when one considers the counterintuitive fact of American social history that, contrary to Frederick Jackson's heralded Frontier Thesis, the main event in population change is not only that Americans moved from east to west but, equally important, from rural settings to urban ones. And with this central fact about our national history, universities and their cities will gain rightful claim as all-American in their characterization and contribution.
