Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In five tautly written case studies—of Ball State University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—LaDale C. Winling analyzes the mutually constitutive relationships between twentieth-century American urban environments and the major institutions of higher education sited within them. Twisted may be a more apt word for the alliances Winling describes among city boosters, university administrators, and political elites. In each case, the cityscapes these consortia shaped were more bitterly riven by race, class, and ethnicity than they had been before. By the time Winling gets to the twenty-first-century neoliberal apotheosis of Harvard/MIT, the equalizing and redistributive promise of higher education has waned. But the promise was never for everyone, as Winling shows in the especially strong chapter on how Ball State University and the city of Muncie created each other a century earlier. The black and white workers who built the university were priced out of its neighborhood by “the enduring principles of suburban exclusion” grounded in the ideology of white supremacy (p. 33). Higher education after World War I may have seemed a vehicle for upward mobility, but the “spatial logic” of college and university construction undermined that potential (p. 35).

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