Walls and Quads, Campus and Community

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Opinion

Walls and Quads, Campus and Community

6/29/2004

By Kenneth C. Green

July. How will you spend your summer vacation? Work? Travel? Time with family and friends? Playing catch-up on sleep, reading, and project commitments? Trying to avoid phone, fax, and e-mail for a few weeks or maybe several months?

For many students and faculty, summer provides travel opportunities, often to Europe. If you are a committed (or aspiring) academic, the great European universities are typically a required stop on your tour. Sweatshirts from Europe’s historic universities are comparatively inexpensive souvenirs and also a clever catalyst for subsequent campus conversations about “how I spent my summer vacation.”

The architecture of the great European universities—institutions chartered centuries before the first class of nine students arrived in 1636 at the college that was to become Harvard—is striking. Thick stone walls often separate the campus from the city, reflecting the medieval role of the university as a place of learning and as a space isolated from city (and civic) life.

The architecture of American universities is a bit more porous. Yes, we have The Yard at Harvard, and Mr. Jefferson’s Lawn at the University of Virginia, historic places defined by barriers and boundaries—gates at Harvard, green space at Virginia. But today, the walls that separate many colleges from their adjacent communities, especially in urban and metropolitan areas, are more metaphor than mortar.

Yet the barriers are real and have consequences, for campus and community alike. Many institutions are part of the town, but many are often remain unconnected to the community. Town/gown relationships can be serendipitous, but are often symbiotic.

If memory serves me well (always questionable), the industrial revolution fundamentally changed the nature and function of cities. For centuries, cities were centers of commerce, a place for people to meet and to barter: people brought their goods to the city. But the industrial revolution that began two centuries ago changed the nature of many cities from venues of commerce to centers of manufacturing.

It was during the industrial revolution that cities evolved into the venue where labor, capital, and material converged to create finished goods: garment factories in New York, steel in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, stockyards in Chicago, and auto factories in Detroit. These industries became the icons of their cities, the financial foundation for large segments of the population.

The transition from an industrial to an information society has taken a toll on many cities. Where mayors in the Northeast and Midwest once worried about the migration of manufacturing jobs to the Southern states, today mayors and governors across the country are concerned about the migration of manufacturing and technology jobs to venues outside of the United States.

University research centers across the country monitor this migration, routinely charting (and often bemoaning) the ebb and flow of industries and opportunity. Ironically, as older cities struggle with the loss of manufacturing jobs and the accompanying infrastructure decline, colleges and universities in these same cities are investing in information technology to rebuild (some would say reinvent) the campus infrastructure. While much of the money has gone for hardware and software, it is the campus network—initially wire, increasingly also wireless—that is the key element of the new digital campus infrastructure.