As featured on NPR's News & Notes, August 4, 2006
West Harlem Wary of Columbia Expansion
ED GORDON, host: From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I’m Ed Gordon.
Universities around the country are staking claim for more land. Analysts say construction-related spending on campuses nearly tripled between 1993 and 2003, and the trend is barely letting up. Columbia, ranked one of the top 10 universities in the nation, plans to forge ahead with its $7 billion expansion plan in West Harlem.
Some community members say they’re concerned Harlem’s cultural and historic landscape will be lost, but school officials promise that won’t happen. More than 100 town hall meetings between organizers and residents have reportedly been held.
Joining us to talk more about the plan and the so-called town and gown issues that come into play is Lionel McIntyre, associate professor of urban planning at Columbia University. He’s also founding director of the Urban Technical Assistance Project. Mr. McIntyre joins us from our New York bureau. And joining us via phone, Evan Dobelle, president of the New England Board of Higher Education. Mr. Dobelle served as the president of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1995 to 2001.
Mr. McIntyre, let me start with you. This has not necessarily been an easy move for Columbia, because you have seen some resistance from the community. Talk to me about that and where you are today.
Professor LIONEL MCINTYRE (Columbia University): Well, one, I should start out by saying that I, you know, don’t represent any official entity that is responsible for the new campus or the new campus expansion. But from working within the community, providing technical assistance for revitalization projects and so forth, we do have an intimate knowledge of what the concerns are, I guess, and what the needs are of the university.
And it appears that the university is in the process of beginning negotiations with the local development corporation that has been formed in order to legally negotiate with the university around benefits and so forth.
GORDON: Mr. Dobelle, you were known as someone who was able to marry the two concerns, the idea of growing what is good for the college but also benefiting the area around the college and the people. Talk to me, if you would, about what was the magic potion that you used to make this a happy marriage.
Mr. EVAN DOBELLE (New England Board of Higher Education): Ed, what we needed to do, and I think what we continue to need to do, is to listen to communities and neighborhoods. Colleges and universities in America, they really have become engines of renewal and revitalization in cities and towns.
We’re educators but we’ve also become great researchers, great spin-offs with economic multipliers, in many ways urban developers. At Trinity, it wasn’t a case of taking down dilapidated buildings with absentee landlords, but listening to the community and building schools and neighborhood centers and boys and girls clubs to able to help the community.
We have to give back as well as be able to be helpful. But it’s not only at Trinity. There are colleges and universities throughout America which really are enormously helpful to Philadelphia and to Los Angeles. But the College of Charleston, South Carolina, Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, Virginia Commonwealth in Richmond - these schools are not only doing well in a self- interest way, but they’re also critical to be, in many ways, saviors of those cities.
GORDON: Mr. McIntyre, one of the concerns from many – and I’m wondering how you see the ability to marry, particularly in urban areas – is making the campus, if you will, more inviting. Often campuses are closed off to the general public for safety reasons as well as others. But there is a need in urban settings to have it blend in and be more inviting to the surrounding communities. How can that be done?
Prof. MCINTYRE: Well, I think that the university design efforts have been geared towards retaining the grid pattern that we’re so accustomed to in northern Manhattan, and retaining through-streets, retaining the connection to the community and other things on the other side along the Hudson River.
And so I think the design has been really sensitive to those things. I think that the university has probably one of the most complex and difficult development issues that any university in this country faces. Because, you know, Harlem is a historic neighborhood and it’s a very sophisticated neighborhood. And it’s also a neighborhood of great need, but it’s also a neighborhood of great ability.
And so the issues that underlie the Columbia situation isn’t necessarily a land use issue, but it’s how do we wrestle with the issues of disparity that are so prevalent around in the surrounding areas that goes beyond any policy or any development interests of the university?
That has a lot with the way in which the private sector functions, the way in which the public sector functions. Examples of which is housing policy, job- related or employment generation issues.
And so the university, you know, has taken it on and I think has been very sensitive to the fact that it’s a question of social integration as the construct and the thematic core of the development of the campus. And so then the issues of physical, we could solve those. The other ones we have to invent ways of solving those.
GORDON: Mr. Dobelle, have we been trying to solve those, the idea of the integration that Mr. McIntyre talked about? Many people heard about it, saw it with the situation, the spotlight that has been put on Durham, North Carolina by virtue of the Duke scandal. There are whispers all the time from townies, if you will, about those who invade their space.
How do you deal with the problem that has, quite frankly, been ongoing ever since universities and colleges started to spring up in this country?
Mr. DOBELLE: Well, we have to come down off the ivory tower. I think, you know, we have cherished communities that are college towns like a Gainesville or a Chapel Hill or an Amherst or a Bloomington or a Lawrence or a Davis, and they’re wonderful. And they’ve basically been built around those colleges and universities, particularly with the Morill Act of 1862, which started land grant colleges. But colleges and universities that have grown up in cities have seen the demographics of cities change and they haven’t changed.
There are issues of access on affordability. You can’t have sidewalks that run uphill. You can’t continue to take down neighborhoods to expand a college and university and not raise a hope among those in the neighborhood that they have the ability to perhaps attend that college in the future. And we have to be sensitive to that.
We need to partner more and more with community partnerships in neighborhood community-based organizations. We have to tie ourselves into pre-K through 12 systems. We need to make sure that when we become urban developers - which are critically necessary because in most cities colleges and hospitals are the key factors in the future - that we have to give a sense of hope to young people that then can attend college.
And right now access and affordability are very complicated. Public education has been reduced significantly in state budgets with the increase in Medicare cost. Tuitions have spiked the very same time as the federal government is moving from a policy of need-based to merit-based, and have increased loans as opposed to grants.
It’s not fair and it’s not equitable, and we’re becoming, clearly, two Americas about access and affordability at colleges and universities. And we need to correct it. But it is being done by many institutions who are not famous institutions: IUPUI in Indianapolis, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Clark University in Worcester. These are extraordinary institutions that are doing well by doing good.
GORDON: Mr. McIntyre, let me ask you in relation to the non-brick and mortar in urban planning and urban development. Harlem is unique because it’s a historic neighborhood, traditionally has been an African-American neighborhood. When you raise the question of race in this kind of development, how much of that, the social construct, is taken into consideration?
Prof. MCINTYRE: Well, I think that just as Mr. Dobelle just said that it’s that there’s this disparity. Disparity, you know, is playing out along racial lines. You know, I mean most Americans are just a part of that. Like, you know, why is everybody not happy?
Well, the benefits of the boom of the past decade just did not reach everyone. And we saw among African-Americans and Latinos in particular, but other groups as well, you know, an inverse relationship. As unemployment went down to 4 and 5 percent in New York City, well it went up in most neighborhoods of Harlem at a high rate of 23 percent.
And how do you reverse these disparities? Then it also – and this is what I mean about the complexity of the undertaking here, that goes beyond brick and mortar, and that is the fact that it forces institutions to take their head out the sand and provide more leadership in society, and not just be passive in saying, well, we did all we can do.
But I think that Columbia is challenged with setting a standard of what is the responsibility of the institution as citizen. And when it looks squarely at the scale of the disparities, and the scale of the solutions, you know, to address those disparities. And so when in developing this campus, I think the administration was, you know, almost forced by the reality - but not in terms of resistance - but forced to look at the fact that we have to talk in terms of thousands of jobs. We have to talk in terms of a whole educational system, whole healthcare delivery. And these are very large problems. We can’t say, well, we saved these three students who went on to be Rhodes scholars, and so we have done our part.
Secondly is that it almost brings it to a position to some degree of advocacy. And nudging and insisting up the public sector and private sector to look at these issues from the standpoint of the university’s responsibility to do good.
GORDON: One can only hope that for Harlem’s sake, and the university’s sake, we have a happy marriage here.
Lionel McIntyre is associate professor of urban planning at Columbia University, and the founding director of the Urban Technical Assistance Project. He joins us from our New York Bureau. And Evan Dobelle is former President of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He now heads the New England Board of Higher Education. Gentlemen, I thank you both.
Prof. MCINTYRE: Thanks.
Mr. DOBELLE: Thank you.
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