Eye from Albany

April 2000

Future for Cities in Higher Education

by Paul M. Bray

New York State has the largest wilderness area east of the
Mississippi River in its Adirondack Park as well as vast
forested areas like Tug Hill and the Catskill and Allegheny
Parks. The State?s bounty includes a countryside of small and
large farms and picturesque small towns. There are also the
leafy green suburbs.

Few realize the intricate connection of this natural and bucolic
beauty with the State?s cities. No, the cities did not create
nature and scenic features, but they did generate the wealth,
ideas and political will that allowed us to protect and manage
areas as wilderness and establish 150 State Parks. They are the
marketplace for the State?s large agriculture economy.

Most of us, as environmental historian William Cronon points out,
are ?captive of the pastoral myth? that cities are ?a place
somehow separate from that other key human landscape, The
Country?. We tend to love the country, hate cities and forget
that they are not two separate places but rather are one whole.
Public support for spending public funds in cities that
increasingly seem distant and remote to the suburban majority has
dwindled.

This leaves cities alone to respond to societal ills and the
challenges like public education that come with the ideal of
social equality isn?t surprising. Therefore, it is heartening
that a path to city revival is taking shape. It is found in
town-gown relationships.

Not long ago most city colleges and universities prized the
isolation of their ivory tower from the urban communities in
which they were located. At worst, they would buy up surrounding
houses and let them languish in ruin until they might be needed
for future expansion. And at the same time city leaders
responded to this indifference by showing little interest in
their colleges and universities.

In the last few years the leaders of city based higher education
institutions have had a wake up call. It dawned on them that the
success of theirs schools could not be separated from their host
cities. If their surrounding neighborhoods, for example, were
under siege and their host cities were known mostly for their
urban problems, they were going to have an increasingly hard time
attracting students.

Now schools like Howard University in Washington, DC have done a
big time turn around. Howard University is aggressively putting
$24 million from Fannie Mae and its own foundation to renovating
urban houses it owns, developing others and filling them with
home owners at below market rates.

New Jersey has stepped up to the plate with a $2.5 million
College & University Homebuyer?s Program designed to increase
home ownership rates in cities. It provides faculty and staff of
public colleges forgivable, no-interest loans of $10,000 to buy a
home in designated urban neighborhoods and $5,000 for making
exterior home improvements. The program is modeled after a
successful University of Pennsylvania program that attracted 175
employees with $15,000 down-payments grants to buy homes in the
University?s troubled West Philadelphia neighborhood.

Things are also happening in New York State. A couple of years
ago the business community in New York City through the
Association for a Better New York did a year long campaign to
highlight the City?s many colleges and universities, that the Big
City was a ?College Town?. It was a public recognition by city
business leaders that higher education was a major urban economic
asset. Today, one only has to walk around New York University in
Greenwich Village to see the dynamic impact a university can have
on city life.

Union College in Schenectady, New York and Russell Sage College
in Troy, New York have gotten in the act of promoting city home
ownership. The lures that can be used include grants to college
employees or anyone, free or low cost tuition for children of
homesteaders and college generated amenities to improve the
quality of life in city neighborhoods.

Higher education is not only uplifting urban neighborhoods, it
has become an engine for creating urban jobs as its research
activities in information technologies and bio-med lead to the
creation of new jobs in cities. For example, through incubators
for start up high tech business, colleges and universities are
directly bridging their research and education to the
marketplace.

Last year Buffalo Assemblyman Sam Hoyt sponsored legislation to
include urban concerns of State University host communities
within their mission and is organizing with the University at
Buffalo a major town-gown conference to identity ways city
schools to be a vital part of the answer to having economically
vital cities. Hoyt believes that ?no institution has the ability
to positively affect its community the way a college or a
university does.?

Just as it isn?t easy for people to understand the connection
and, in fact, interdependence of cities and wilderness, the
marriage of town and gown or city and university will have to
overcome many ingrained notions based on years of estrangement.
But self interest and survival are strong forces, so our cities
will be looking more and more as university towns for their
identity and salvation.

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