Appendix A

“The Mask of the Public Good: What the University Costs Community.”

Original Interchange episode aired August 31, 2021. Edited and aired on WFHB Rewind, August 20, 2025.

INTRODUCTION: Today’s archive segment comes from an episode of Interchange broadcast on August 31, 2021, titled ‘The Mask of the Public Good: What the University Costs Community.’ Host Doug Storm spoke with Davarian Baldwin, an urbanist, historian, cultural critic, and professor of American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. They talk about Dr. Baldwin’s book ‘In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities,’ and discuss the complex and often contentious relationships between colleges and college towns, what Dr. Baldwin calls the ‘universe-city.’ The full episode is available for listening on WFHB.org.

Doug Storm: You're talking about how all these municipal services, you know, all these things that we associate with our city governments and state governments, you know, have been kind of pushed into these, these sort of private spaces called universities, which then become municipalities themselves, or arms of the state function and have their own governance, their own rules, their own, as you say, their own police force, et cetera, as if the cities and towns are becoming the university themselves, and the city becomes a service to the university where the bulk of the people live to be exploited labor. And you get that sense of what's happening, like, it's become visible now.

Davarian Baldwin: Higher education has taken a growing influence over the political governance and economic development of our cities and towns, and I call this the creation of the 'universe-city.' And we discussed earlier this article that laid out the relationship between IU and Bloomington in terms of taxes. Should they be paying more taxes? And it was interesting, one of the administrators, you know, in a celebratory way, talked about, you know, how IU was kind of a self-sustainable, independent entity. He described it as being a city within a city, as a good thing. It's sustainable, it's independent. It takes care of its own facilities and services. But that's always a bit of a misnomer, i.e., that, you know, it takes care of its own trash, it does its own maintenance, things of that nature. But that's very much a misnomer, because I spent a summer in IU and and I've, you know, with this work I've done tons of research, and spent time at universities all over the country. Even these schools that claim to be self-sustaining, they are directly and intimately connected to the cities and towns in which they sit in terms of labor, in terms of wealth extraction, in terms of public services. The public roads don't just stop at the campus borders. The electrical grid doesn't just stop at the campus borders. Most of the low-wage labor that takes place on campuses is not performed by students, but by primarily working-class Black and brown people in the surrounding cities, and primarily women, the low wages, so we think of universities as primarily being employers of faculty, but it's really low-wage workers and food service staff and grounds crew and support staff in the various offices around the campus. And so this idea of a city within a city is not necessarily true, because the prosperity and capacity of these universities is maintained by the residents that live in surrounding areas. And then you add the additional issue around taxation, which we can talk about in more detail in a minute, but the prosperity that these schools brag about in their endowments and in their wealth generation is not divorced from the fact that they don't pay into public services in the towns where the faculty and the off-campus students and their workers live, and so when they brag about their endowments or their wealth accruement, part of that is because they're not paying into what all other businesses have to pay into in terms of public services, the schools, the roads, trash removal, snow removal, all these things are not paid because of the tax exemption of universities because they're designated as 501(c)3, nonprofit entities. Because there is less of a state contribution, the money they're not paying into now goes into for profit making ventures and people. People make this argument to me all the time, well, what would New Haven be without Yale? What would Bloomington be without IU? So I want to acknowledge that, yes, colleges and universities bring ideas and people together, and they generate new innovations and jobs. But my point in doing this research, and what I saw all over the country is that there was a cost to this for those living in the shadows of these ivory towers. Campus expansions also raise housing costs and displace residents in the neighborhoods that largely surround campus. Campus Police forces surveil and profile the same residents, usually of color, and are rarely held to public account. And then higher education's broad control over labor, not high end faculty labor, but low wage labor, can lower wage ceilings and suppress collective bargaining efforts. And so I want to be clear about that. And so schools, actually, because they have such a great, this great impact on our cities and towns, they are setting the housing costs and land values, the wage ceilings, the health care standards, and the policing priorities for whole cities. And I'm sure, I spent time, I'm sure this is the case in Bloomington. And so in exchange for their impact, they have a non-public control. So even a public university, whereby they are a public entity, they're making decisions not for the entire public, they're making decisions for the university interest, but because of the public university, they presume or suggest that what's good for them is good for the city. And that's not always the case, and the clearest example of this has been with the rise of what's been called the knowledge economy. And so the knowledge economy here is where academic research is being used to create profitable commercial goods or patents in a range of fields, from pharmaceutical industries and software products to military defense weaponry to hotels. And so what's happening with this is we have what I'm calling a public good paradox. So precisely because colleges and universities are presumed to offer up inherent public good, and this is most clearly marked by their 501(c)3 property tax exempt status, their land becomes a financial shelter when they participate in what are called public-private partnerships. So you can have university land that's held by the Board of Trustees or the Board of Regents, depending on the state, at a public university. They engage, the university engages with a partnership with private entities. And then when these private entities sit on university land, what goes on there, that land becomes tax exempt. They pass on, the university passes on the financial shelter of their nonprofit public good status on to these private entities. So if the pharmaceutical company sits at a university, or if they conduct their research and development with a university, it's presumed that that's educational work, but what's happening is that the work that's being done there would normally have to be done at a private research facility, and would have to be paid regular wages. But when it's done on a university campus, it's done by graduate students who are paid below standard wages, a stipend, the overhead is less because the land is tax exempt. Then when the university sells that research and development in the form of intellectual property on the private market, millions of dollars can come back to the university in the form of royalties. So this becomes a money-making entity, both for the university and for the private partner, while the graduate student workers and the city get the short end.

Doug Storm: Right, virtually get nothing.

Davarian Baldwin: Right. As we have these discussions, we're looking at university budgets, we might be talking about the tuition, the classes, but we're not talking about the technology transfer departments. We're not talking about the research and development. We're not talking about the development office. We're not talking about the university foundation, we're not talking about the real estate office, and we're not talking about the police departments. So all these other areas, these profit generating areas, aren't even discussed when we're having these conversations about austerity measures. And so it's almost comical, and this is even more appalling when we consider that most a number of universities with multi-million, some multi-billion dollar endowments receive millions of dollars in the from the CARES Act during the pandemic and are still calling for austerity measures.

Doug Storm: Well, you know what you're doing, you're talking about an entity that has a lot of power, a lot of money, a lot of weight in wherever it sits, that is not at all interested in doing anything other than supporting its own, you know, reproduction of itself, its own, its own money, its own wealth for, you know, the board, for shareholders within the the corporate system it's created as well. So it has no interest in community. It has no interest in supporting any of the human things that happen within its borders, even. You know, your book entirely points out these aren't community-minded entities in terms of its people, let alone the people around it that don't actually go there, or, you know, have anything to do with it, but even its own people. So it's, I mean, it's a key issue to say we could have these, these enormous entities that have so much power and so much capacity to help, to teach, you know, to move us in certain directions that are literally just sucking the the money and air and life out of communities, out of people.

Davarian Baldwin: And let me, I also want to be clear that all universities are not created equally. So there are major flagship public universities and, of course, very wealthy private universities that are doing all the things I'm talking about. But during the pandemic, we saw, for example, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, taking the money they received from CARES Act and just clearing out the debt of their students. So doing better, doing different. We see community colleges all throughout the country that are trying to service the health insecurity and the food insecurity of the students and their families that attend these colleges. So there are examples of schools doing, at least in small versions, doing the right thing. The universities and colleges that have significant amounts of wealth, we just see them over and over again behaving badly. And so this, this thing I'm talking about called the public good paradox, it works at two levels. On one level, it serves as a financial shelter, but on the other level, it serves as kind of a perception shelter, because we presume that higher education is driven by a higher function and purpose, so we don't even question what goes on behind campus walls.