Before Professors Davarian Baldwin and Maya Wind sat down for a conversation with University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) Postdoctoral Fellow Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn within the Global Justice focus of the 2024-25 William J Cooper Series, Professor Baldwin sat down with The Phoenix.
Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College, and a prominent voice on the intersection between higher education and urban history. Baldwin is the award-winning author of several books, including his most recent book, In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, which unpacked the sometimes predatory relationships between universities, especially ones in urban areas, and the communities surrounding them.
Below is an edited transcript of his conversation with The Phoenix on higher education, urbanism, politics, and more.
Daniel Perrin: So first, I want to begin by thinking about what’s been dominating the news in the last week. How does your work intersect or not intersect with electoral politics, and what is the relationship between your work and the impending Trump administration?
Davarian Baldwin: Most of my work is grounded in local communities across the country and the relationships between urban communities and the large, wealthy nonprofits that are colleges and universities. So the local political scene plays a very large role in the work that I do, but the backdrop of both state and federal policy is also playing an increasingly bigger role, especially because of the impending [Trump] presidency. For example, all universities, public and private, come into existence because of a state charter, so that is something that’s also the backdrop of the conversation, which most universities don’t want to talk about. Private schools like Swarthmore would say “Well, we’re a private university. We run our own ship, and don’t want to have a conversation about how our existence is actually because of the state charter, and that state charter is under the precondition that you serve the public good.” That’s usually a conversation that most schools don’t want to have at moments of tension and strife. And as we’ve noticed, the notion of public good has been a bouncing ball, or a moving target, if you will.
At the federal level, my work comes in when talking about how universities get funded. I think 90% of research and development grants come from the federal government, particularly in STEM, so that’s related. The conversations around taxing endowments, which is becoming a bigger issue, is coming at the federal level. Universities serving as 501(c)(3) nonprofits is what triggers their tax exemption for their increasingly large growing footprint right in our communities. That’s a big part of the work that I do: issues around policy, endowments, taxation, grants and loans, research and development, student loans — those are the nexus points where politics takes shape.
But, there’s no question that in the ensuing months, politics is going to play a large role. We’re foreshadowed by what happened with The New College in Florida, with [Governor] Ron DeSantis and [conservative activist] Chris Rufo and others taking over. That’s going to get scaled up to the federal level. I’ve seen on YouTube or Twitter, the clip from Trump going on about his calls to end DEI projects and saying basically that we need reparations for white people who have been oppressed. So there’s no question this is going to ramp up and be even more critical for the work that I do with my research, with my Smart Cities Research Lab, and more.
I still do think that we have the ability to fight at the local and state level, but it’s increasingly going to be a federal conversation. I think that the president-elect and his advisors understand why they tell the public, “Hey, higher education is not a big deal. You could be like Bill Gates and create a multi-billion dollar business from your garage.” They’re telling us that, but they’re still sending their kids to school. To add another layer, they understand what I talk about in my book, that at this point, the smaller role of schools is education and peer research. These are locations for hoarding and seeding capital, managing low wage laborers, not faculty, but low wage labor at a grand scale, dictating the terms of health care and even increasingly, policing. So while [Trump] is telling us, “Hey, you know, not a big deal,” [Trump and his advisors] see what I see in the sense that taking control over higher education is about gaining control over all these issues in the political economy that have a lot less to do with teaching and learning. So that’s the issue.
DP: You mentioned that you’re hopeful that there are ways to fight back on these issues at the local and state level. Can you talk a little bit more about how your research and your prescriptions fit into what people can still do at local politics and state politics?
DB: It’s funny: when my book first came out, I got calls from Fox News to come on and talk about the problems in higher education, until they found out what my solution was. The problem is that our friends on the right have a critique for higher education, and they’ve had one for a long time. And they have a vision for it. But our so-called liberal democratic allies want to keep higher education as it is. And lots of people in the middle are hurting. So I fall somewhere in the middle where I share with my friends on the right that there’s a critique, but the vision for it is vastly different. And because allies and friends on the left and in the Democratic Party do not have a vision, it’s created this void. It’s opened up this void for the right to step in and dictate terms in ways that do not reflect our values or reflect the best of what higher education could be. So, Trump’s talking about taxing endowments and revoking nonprofit status. Those are things that I talk about! But for very different reasons. He’s saying to do these things because these schools are racist and oppressing white people. And my research demonstrates that these endowments and policies and realities are hurting the host communities that sit around these campuses that are largely Black, brown, and working class. We have a similar solution with a very different analysis.
So for those who are in higher education leadership, they are at a crossroads. Do they want to just circle the wagons and perform as conservative-lite, doing the things that we’re doing now, cracking down on free speech and academic freedom, and holding their students to account for what they consider to be violations of safety — and that word has become very hazy and fuzzy — and trying to speak to their donors and other industrialists that find great value in seeding and putting their capital on campuses, or they could say, well, let’s lean into the actual mission of higher education: serving the public good in a broad way. Free education, taking food that’s thrown away every day in these cafeterias, and converting it into healthy meals for communities of need in, say, Philadelphia, or in the working class areas surrounding campuses. Engaging in police abolition, which means not the end of safety, but examining what the actual avenues for safety have been. Safety means housing, housing security, food security, trauma care. These are the things that schools can actually do, that they’re trained to do. So if schools actually lean into that vision of public good and social justice instead of this cosmetic, surface-level, nibble around the edges so that we can hold on to our elite privileges as they currently exist, they can actually build a coalition and build investment from communities, and actually provide a viable pushback against the seizure of higher education by the right.
Administrators talk about using higher education as a ladder to upper mobility, but there’s no real, robust conversation about how we can move working class and working poor people into higher education. And, because of our impact, higher education is actually encroaching on their lives in ways that have nothing to do with education. So the idea of applying our social justice, public good mandate to those other areas as well is not what colleges want to do. They want to hold on to those bits of privilege, these partnerships with industrial corporate donors, and just perform goodness, perform safety. That’s going to be our downfall, because the people that could carry us, that could lift us, that could move with us, they see the handwriting on the wall. They are subjected to the contradictions and the ironies of these performative claims. They are subjected to the actual outcomes of the performance. So this is the reason why they turn to people like Trump: because our allies, and those who we advocate for in my work, those who are the working poor, working class, Black and brown, working class white, queer folk, Palestinian, they are subjected to the realities of the current economy. They’re subjected to the ways in which higher education encroaches in their lives, daily, in terms of non-living wages, poor benefits, policing, all supposedly in the name of the “public good.” They see the contradictions, and so when they look at the landscape, they’re saying, “Our so-called allies are saying everything is fine while we’re struggling.” And there’s this guy over here who was giving the middle finger to the establishment. So even though we don’t agree with him, our frustrations with the establishment can be funneled through his poor behavior and even his decisions that can only hurt us, but at least he’s pushing back and calling out the corruption and contradiction. And then our allies are saying, “We don’t know why we lost. We don’t know why people don’t like us.” It’s right there in front of your face. People are frustrated with that, and I get that totally.
DP: There are a lot of debates about urbanism at the moment, and they’re often dominated by these intense, often racist narratives about crime and how cities are falling apart that are usually not backed up by any facts. Last week, the debates were reunited a little bit as some major cities, Philadelphia included, shifted a couple, hugely important, points towards Trump in the election. How do you think about these questions of urbanism and the status of our cities?
DB: Just to be clear, the ways in which Caribbean and African nations are being called, “shithole countries,” or “islands of garbage,” finds its parallel in the ways in which people are referencing Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore. It’s a dog whistle for racism and basically saying, “Look what happens when Black and brown people take leadership. They can’t control. They cannot govern. We need strong law and order. We need not just law and order on the streets, but law and order in schools. We need draconian policies and a strong authoritarian hand to keep these people in their place, to stop ruining our country.” That has been the mandate, the call, and we’re going to see it ramped up in the present moment with the federal government change.
Some of this boils down to formerly suburban whites and others returning back to the city in university areas, and trying to carry suburban policies to urban environments. So you have this ethos of New Urbanism with the great signs of walkability, and waterfront parks, and WiFi, all great infrastructural elements, but there is this profound economic border around who gets access to these new urbanist dimensions. So you have a “University City” in Philly or a “Midtown District” in Detroit. That’s an island of white prosperity surrounding university areas, because they want the walkability, they want the Wi Fi, they want the coffee shops, lectures, [and] art museums. So they’re creating these white islands of prosperity amidst these Black and brown seas of despair, and the university is handmade for this process. They’re using things like exclusionary zoning law and policy to maintain these things so that even in the middle of a city, they’re having exclusive single family zoning areas or non-mixed use developments or parking mandates. All these things are bringing suburban sprawl ethos to the city as a way of carving out protection for the prosperity that’s coming back in white middle class or middle class hands, and calling it urbanism. Whereas, for me, true urbanism is about diversity of use, not just diversity of color or people, it’s about the ability to post up, the ability to have different ideas about noise, different abilities about scale, and talk about these in a democratic way, and not just simply covering over in the name of some uniform idea about safety.
Universities are having a strong hand in this. A perfect example of this was during the pandemic, when you had young students coming back to UPenn or Drexel [University] from all different places, different quarantine practices, different cleanliness practices, different ideas about hygiene, different ideas about vaccines, into a downtown or West Philadelphia area, with an existing living Black and brown community. No warnings, no signals about when they’re coming back, when they’re moving in, what have been the mandates for how they’ve sheltered in place or vaccinated, so it ends up basically leaving these folks in these communities vulnerable to the whims of this education class, this young professional class to do whatever they want. I know it’s a very specific example, but it’s symbolic of the ways in which urban environments get plagiarized by young professionals who come back and want to create it in the image of the places they came from. And, at the same time, they want to have Black and brown folks not in that environment, but just close enough to be able to come back and clean the floors, or cook the food, but not to be able to afford to live in these environments, to cohabitate, to attend schools. Yeah, they have retail, but at price points that are above the means or the interests of what I call the legacy residencies and communities. So there’s not an explicit demolition and displacement, but through price walls and over-policing in certain areas and under-policing in other areas. So, oh, those kids on the street corner playing dominoes or posted up with the news too loud? Over-police that, but then the other kids who got red cups and who are vandalizing after a game? Oh that’s just “Kids will be kids.” The discriminant use and deployment of laws around zoning and noise is a way to manage urban environments in a way that benefits certain people in power who want to create this urban playland to the detriment of those who live there and actually maintain space and make it available for this development and have basically become a servant class for this new this new urban environment.
DP: You’ve written a lot about shifting philosophies in higher education towards colleges and universities being more sterile, more corporatized, more financially focused, more about assets than education. As an academic and a scholar studying this stuff specifically, what are prescriptive steps higher education can take to push away from that trend? And what external forces need to be in play to make that happen?
DB: One of the first things to talk about here is the state contribution. There’s been a drastic decline in state contributions to higher education. Some public schools in the ’70s had 70% of their annual budget coming from public expenditures. Now it’s down to as low as between 7% and 12% at those same schools. Some schools are public in name only. So what this has meant is that the donor class, either directly through philanthropy and donations, or through overpopulating the boards of trustees, are controlling these private institutions of higher learning in their own image. As my book demonstrates, some of this is because their corporate partners understand that profit seeking can be done under the cover of an educational institution. Tax exemptions can allow for research and development to take place with low overhead costs. Higher education lets companies take advantage of graduate workers who, if you hire directly, would have a certain wage. All these things happen on university campuses. These are the leverage points that we can engage. And if we don’t do these things now, it means we’re more vulnerable to our ending.
The things that we can do include actually paying our fair share to host communities through taxation. Additionally, 5% of endowments are required to be spent to maintain that tax exemption. But colleges can take an additional 3% and engage in community investments. Not turkey giveaways and tutoring programs that cost maybe $2,000 a year, but I’m talking about millions of dollars in community investments that are inconsequential to a multi-billion dollar endowment but that would be transformative to communities in need. We can do these simple things. Take the food that’s thrown away every day, and repackage them for healthy meals. These things are simple. Offer scholarships in real ways to surrounding communities, that are zip code specific. Engage in procurement contracts so that the services that are needed on these campuses — for paper, for food, for lights, for all the things at a mass scale — are contracts reserved for minority- and women-owned businesses. So there are ways in which the university is already embedded within our political economy, in ways that have nothing to do with teaching and learning. Take the public good ethos that is the reasoning behind a lot of these federal and public dollars that you’re using for your own interest, and apply it to your noneducational expenditures and investments. That will send a huge message to those who are frustrated with the establishment, so that when a Trump [type] comes, people say, “They’re actually invested in us in a real way. It’s not perfect, but these are our allies.” That way, there’s no air in the room for a demagogue to come in and say that he’s populist. There’s no room for that if when colleges build out, they reserve a portion of every building for affordable housing. There are developments I spent some time at the end of my book talking about in Winnipeg, Canada, where the university has their own development corporation, and the University of Winnipeg is building downtown housing for both students and residents at four different price points. These things are within our reach. And a lot of these ideas are actually rooted in the tradition of Black studies in this country. Black studies, at its origins, had called for things and believed in things like living wages for workers. They knew that most of the workers on campus were not going to be white faculty. It’s going to be Black and brown service workers.
These things get framed as just simply helping a middle-class elite, so they put a halt to them. But by higher education, I don’t even just mean elite higher education. I mean community colleges actually doing the work, HBCUs actually doing the work, so higher education in the broader sector. Instead of Harvard [University] taking a $50 billion endowment and investing in the privatization of water rights in the Amazon and in California, speculating on futures, they could be taking a portion of $50 billion and spending in the Boston/Cambridge areas around them, or in the world! Swarthmore can take a portion of its $4 billion endowment and do these things. Sending kids abroad is great, doing Habitat for Humanity is great, but the impact is much greater when colleges are making sure that their public good mandates and ethos that they have in their master plans and their vision plans every three years are being matched in their full expenditures, because schools don’t talk about economic impact. They say, “We hire this many people, we offer this many scholarships,” but we don’t talk about how their tax exemption actually helps a lot of that. So how is the public already helping to pay for a large portion of that? Let’s have a real balance sheet that subtracts the public expenditures through tax abatements and other ways that the public contributes already to the school, and then let’s have a real conversation about social or economic impact. But they don’t want to do that, because they’re still trying to hang on to these ideas around elite education and exclusivity. If you look at the press kits that go out to the alums and parents, the first thing that’s in there is about how exclusive Swarthmore is, articulated in terms of how many people don’t get in here. And that mandate is actually set up by creditors, like Moody’s, that dictate a lot of what goes on in these institutions because of the higher credit ratings that go to schools that are more exclusive, have weak faculty governance, [and] have weak tenure. So all of the things that make these colleges democratic end up running counter to the incentive. We’ve got to de-commercialize these institutions.
DP: You’ve written a lot about urban universities, but here we are at a college in the suburbs. How does your work think about small liberal arts colleges in the suburbs in the context of suburbanization and urban trends?
DB: The thing about suburban colleges and college towns is that you have to do an observational power map. Exclusive school surrounded by an increasingly exclusive town. The school’s unaffordable, the town’s unaffordable, because most residents that have means want to live where? In the college towns! But then who actually works here to clean the floors? Black, brown, poor white. So what decisions and infrastructure has been created that allow those people to come here and work… but not live here? That’s a product of decision. That’s a product of policy, in terms of housing, in terms of wages. How can schools fix that? They can build and support the building of affordable housing, workforce housing, residential housing, so that these workers can come and live where they work. So their kids can go to these exclusive schools. So that they can build equity. I’m just talking even within the frame of capitalism. I’m not even talking about what I really believe in, which is a social democracy. But even within capitalism, these schools can have a profound impact on shaping the social ecology of the environments in which they live. So talk about a democratic environment of Swarthmore, a learning and living community. What if that learning community actually required you to cohabitate with those who serve your food and clean your your dorm rooms, or if their children actually have access to the school and actually understand what goes on here, and spend summers and weekends and evenings on this campus, not just simply to visit and put their nose in the glass, saying, “Ooh, one day.” What a learning environment that could be. Colleges should let their public good mandate follow them around wherever they go.
I am an urbanist and I came to the project to think about urban democracy and looked around and said, “Wait a minute, the institutions that I actually work at are a major player and a major cause of harm when it comes to the task of maintaining and uplifting and building out urban democracy.” They have been hiding in plain sight. But this analysis about equitable urban living can be applied to college towns and rural areas as well.
DP: What has changed and/or stayed the same in the way you approach your work as both a scholar of questions surrounding marginalization and justice, as well as simply someone who exists within academia in the context of higher education’s response to the horrors in Gaza?
DB: You know, my good colleague and comrade Maya Wind is here as well, and our work intersects in powerful ways. But when I traveled to many encampments across the country, I saw water, food, mutual aid, solar powered classrooms, classes, first aid, community governed safety. I looked around and thought, “These are the universities.” And what was the response from the universities? To destroy them. To put the youth that were maintaining them up on charges, to say they were a threat to security. [University of California Los Angeles] students attacked with bottle rockets and quasi military devices, and the police stepped out of the way to allow white vigilantes, not even from the area, to come in and attack these encampments. Because these encampments represented what higher education could actually be. But we have to think about who was sent in across the country to clamp down on the encampments and their intersections with the very institutions that are blowing up these schools and museums, carriers of history, producers of futures, destroyed in real time while we’re watching on social media. And those military logics, trainings, and armaments are being built and underwritten in universities with research and development. And then those who are trained are training our military and our police to come and attack these encampments. So these areas are not disentangled. There is a circle has been rounded, and disclose and divest campaigns are the glue that can help us expose the connective tissue of all these things. Because the thing that I’ve been talking about in my work for over a decade now is, full transparency about what universities do with their money and where it comes from. So now, in the midst of the backdrop of Gaza, the call for disclosure and divestment is a confirmation of the work that I’ve been doing for almost twenty years. So I’m horrified, but I also feel emboldened and confirmed in the degree to which what I’m talking about has been globalized, and in its globalization exposes the expanded encroachment of the horrors that I’ve been chronicling at the local level for quite some time. So this is a powerful story. This is why we need global solidarity. This is why we need to make the connections. This is why we need to see the connections between local and global. We’ve been saying that in academia for years, but it’s coming out in real time right before our eyes. We need to lean into that.
DP: Any final words for the Swarthmore community?
DB: Those who are under siege right now, who’re being attacked by your own institution that’s eating its young. Stay resolved, stay steadfast. History will absolve you. History is on your side. We’ve been here before, and actually crazy enough, it’s been worse. There will be pain, there will be sacrifices, but the sacrifices that you make today are for the future. We applaud you. Your story is not singular. It’s a part of a larger network of oppression and debilitation. These institutes are talking to each other, they’re pulling from the same playbook. So the response that we can have right now is to match their organizing with a similar level of organizing. You should build and grow, and not live in organizing isolation. This is what we’re here for. We applaud you. Thank you.
