Town & Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

[statler]

Lot of discussion on this board about this topic lately, so as suggested, here is a one-stop shop for all rants, raves questions and other observations.

Probably a good place to discuss other large, non-profit institutions here as well, MFA, ICA, MGH, etc..

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Some thoughts from the Performing Arts thread to get things rolling:

I suspected that when the city of Boston got into bed with expansionist ambitions of colleges such as Emerson there'd be trouble down the road for the fabric and infrastructure that makes the city great. The first sign is when specialized schools became junior colleges, and then became colleges, and then became universities. When will the public stop living in the dream world that colleges and universities are benign institutions that foster learning and intellectual excellence? Most of them are corporations as potentially toxic as big pharm, research, and tech companies that swallow up real estate for their stock holders. They should be paying property taxes rather than getting tax breaks to destroy neighborhoods. In the case of higher ed, the interested parties are those who go after the deep pockets of govt. and private grants that fund particular tenured professors' arcane research, college sports and their facilities, and the bottom line profit, otherwise known as "endowment." Why else are they raising tuition costs beyond the reach of ordinary mortals? Forget American students. There are plenty from overseas who are being subsidized by their governments and embassies. Wake up Bostonians!

You really think the city of Boston would be a great city without the universities and colleges that bring BILLIONS into the city and metro area each year? The brain power that is attracted to the city and eventually settles here is one of the reasons for Boston's continued success and in so many areas. Frankly, Mike, we probably wouldn't be here (literally or figuratively) without those toxic tech, research, and big pharm companies.

Let's be honest. The only ones that really matter are Harvard, MIT, BU, NEU (recently), and BC. Maybe also Berklee. The others are completely forgettable and would likely have a negligible impact if they just up and disappeared.

Again, I'll say, what would this city be without the colleges and universities in Boston, Cambridge, and the inner metro area (Ill throw Tufts and Brandeis into the mix)? And Meddlepal, tell that to the people who attend those schools, who work at those schools and to the businesses that surround those "completely forgettable" others if they were to just up and leave. The positives of all these schools far, far outweigh any negatives.

I think you're missing the point. The point isn't that they don't have any impact because they do, but rather that Boston doesn't need them. They are not anchors like the other mentioned schools are. There impact is negligible, heck, it might even be better off in some cases since there would be more housing stock available if we dropped the Emerson, Suffolks, Fenway Colleges etc. of the world.

The same could be said of any number of organizations, institutions, and companies. Does Boston need the ICA? How about Boston Medical Center? New Balance? No, it doesn't. The city would run perfectly well without them. Does that mean we'd be better off if those groups "dropped" and made "more housing stock available"? Hell, does the city need you or me or anybody on this board? Of course not. We should all just pack up and leave...

This may be one of the least-urban lines of reasoning I've ever read on ArchBoston. Cities are about throwing a whole bunch of different people and ideas together and seeing what happens, not making decisions about who is allowed to stay and who should go to make more room.

I'm also struck by the elitism/classism of deciding that the rich and fancy schools are necessary while the more accessible schools would be better off gone...

Also Emerson is a top school for a few areas such as acting. The colleges of the Fenway are also important for filling a niche that is not filled by the large prestigious schools. There are plenty of students which don't want to go to a large school but want to go to school in a city and without the smaller schools present in Boston might be unable to attend. The idea that only large schools with a lot of influence internationally/ nationally matter is an issue in general because it ignores the fact that a lot of smaller schools especially at the undergraduate level actually have as good or better instruction than some of the huge and very powerful larger universities like Harvard and BU for example.

The city does have the ability to some extent to influence what a school can and cannot do to the public realm and as such needs to be sure it is keeping the schools accountable for not sterilizing the area they are located in.

I'm also quite frankly confused why Emerson would want to create a "campus" because part of the point of the school imo is that it is located in a city and integrated with it which I would think many of the people attending the school appreciate or they wouldn't have applied.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Apologies for the double post... this excerpt from F-Line's Boston 2024 postmortem missive diagnosing systemic and structural problems for the Commonwealth is exactly on this topic.

The universities. Nobody has been a bigger recipient of public largesse or public contribution of matching planning resources in Boston than the very largest universities. We were counting on them, especially Harvard with all its unbuilt land holdings acquired via the public, to lend a hand in hosting the games. The response from Harvard, BU, etc.? "Fuck you, I got mine." Even UMass got into the act, with pushback from the Boston campus and pressuring to get the Lowell and other campuses in as hosts.
This is one of the most troubling takebacks from the experience. The city's very partnership with its universities needs major re-examination, since they're treating it as a one-way street that demands but never gives back. What does this continue to say about Harvard? The only entity that seems to be held to any schedule deadline on its Allston master plan is the city, and public infrastructure resources for their campus. Conversely, the keepers of the world's largest U endowment are content to sit on empty property until they damn well fucking feel like lifting a finger to erect a crane. If Allston is any indication we're looking at 20 years of barren weeds and no tax revenue out of Beacon Park, and barren weeds and no tax revenue out of Beacon Park serving to suppressing the land value of other sites--like Widett--until Harvard damn well feels like it.

This is a public-private partnership...how...again? And there's no consequences for this...why...again? Deep soul-searching to do here about the very bedrock the U & city relationships stand on. Deep soul-searching.

Long-term structural issues: Fissures of dysfunction opening up in city's relationship with its largest educational institutions, pervasive attitude amongst U's that public partnerships are spoils with no reciprocal obligations, city is not getting ROI from deferred land use, no easy way of calling out the U's on this without risking a growth-stunting Cold War.

 

[Shepard]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Unless you're associated with a college, what Boston resident has any occasion to be around Huntington between the MFA and Symphony, unless you're passing through? Ditto Comm Ave between Kenmore and BU Bridge. Ditto the entire catchment area of the B Line past Chestnut Hill Ave. Ditto many streets around MIT. Entire corridors have become so thoroughly institutionalized that they don't really exist as part of Boston-The-City anymore.

BU essentially took over a swath of neighborhood I'll call Audubon-North. That's no longer a residential neighborhood.

I'm not sure what the solution is to any of this... insisting that new institutional development is mixed-use could be a start. But if a university insists on gobbling up a neighborhood piecemeal, what can be done?

Harvard may not be seen as the best civic player, but everything touching Harvard in Cambridge is vibrant for both town and gown (with a few isolated exceptions, like the new Law building).

 

[atlantaden]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Unless you're associated with a college, what Boston resident has any occasion to be around Huntington between the MFA and Symphony, unless you're passing through? Ditto Comm Ave between Kenmore and BU Bridge. Ditto the entire catchment area of the B Line past Chestnut Hill Ave. Ditto many streets around MIT. Entire corridors have become so thoroughly institutionalized that they don't really exist as part of Boston-The-City anymore.

But couldn't you say the same thing about the Longwood Medical area or the Financial District, or any other number of areas that revolve around a particular industry/institution?

 

[Matthew]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Yes, it's a major problem that Boston lets itself get chopped up into institutional 'turfdoms' of various sorts. Becomes less of a city and more of a collection of office parks.

 

[shawn]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

I am the MD of the Japan division of a US/UK media advertising agency in Tokyo. We are part of a larger network of group companies which includes some of the world's biggest and most prominent marketing and branding research outfits. One of the verticals our client portfolio heavily rests in is travel - we probably have a little too many airline, hotel group, OTA, and board of tourism clients than a healthy portfolio mix should contain, but it has focused us on the value of branding for destination cities.

And among Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese travelers, Boston has positive brand metrics through the roof (depending on seasonality, Top 5 in the entire Western Hemisphere), frequently underpinned by the prestige Boston schools carry in Northeast Asia. To be clear: it's not specifically Harvard/MIT which drives the Boston brand uplift. It's broader than that. It's the perception that Boston as a whole espouses the importance and the values of higher education, with qualitative paneling producing quotes similar to "My sister's husband's cousin went to Simmons and she is the most successful person on that side of the family - Boston made her what she is today." More times than not, it's the second and third tier schools which get named in qual panels, which stands to reason; not that many people make it into Harvard or MIT.

There are many reasons why Chinese tycoons are buying Millennium Tower top floor units and not dropping the same $millions site unseen on units in Philadelphia or Dallas, but a considerable part of that purchase making equation is informed by Boston's brand, and that brand is built on the back of the higher education regime in its entirety.

 

[whighlander]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

I am the MD of the Japan division of a US/UK media advertising agency in Tokyo. We are part of a larger network of group companies which includes some of the world's biggest and most prominent marketing and branding research outfits. One of the verticals our client portfolio heavily rests in is travel - we probably have a little too many airline, hotel group, OTA, and board of tourism clients than a healthy portfolio mix should contain, but it has focused us on the value of branding for destination cities.

And among Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese travelers, Boston has positive brand metrics through the roof (depending on seasonality, Top 5 in the entire Western Hemisphere), frequently underpinned by the prestige Boston schools carry in Northeast Asia. To be clear: it's not specifically Harvard/MIT which drives the Boston brand uplift. It's broader than that. It's the perception that Boston as a whole espouses the importance and the values of higher education, with qualitative paneling producing quotes similar to "My sister's husband's cousin went to Simmons and she is the most successful person on that side of the family - Boston made her what she is today." More times than not, it's the second and third tier schools which get named in qual panels, which stands to reason; not that many people make it into Harvard or MIT.

There are many reasons why Chinese tycoons are buying Millennium Tower top floor units and not dropping the same $millions site unseen on units in Philadelphia or Dallas, but a considerable part of that purchase making equation is informed by Boston's brand, and that brand is built on the back of the higher education regime in its entirety.

Shawn -- very well stated

There was an old expression which defined the pecking order of the then major cities: NY, Philly, Boston

To Wit:

In NY they ask someone -- how much he is worth

In Philly they ask -- who were his parents

But in Boston they ask -- What Does He Know

That is what characterizes the Hub of Innovation on a global scale -- What collectively do they know

The "they" is made-up of all of the institutions and persons who are actively in the formal or informal "business" of Knowledge:

• Preserving our collective culture [e.g. MFA, colleges and U's, Freedom Trail]
• Expanding it and providing global access to it [e.g. BSO, colleges and U's]
• Teaching it both formally and informally [e.g. myriad examples of colleges, U's, MOS, and others]
• Creating it
• Employing it for our well being [e.g. Teaching Hospitals, Financial Institutions]
• Developing it and as the patent office would say -- reducing it to practice [e.g. Kendall Sq., Raytheon, Boston Scientific]
• Supporting enterprises -- suppliers of goods and services such as:
  • transportation,
  • beer,
  • musical instruments
  • baseball games
  • Millennium Tower
  • restaurant meals
  • scientific instruments
  • artist supplies
  • surgical instruments
  • wrenches, screwdrivers, hard drives, displays, WiFi, encryption, etc., etc.

That in a capsule is the modus and the operandi of Boston -- in some sense we are a Company Town -- a bit like Pullman or the old Pittsburgh [aka Steel Town] -- everything in Boston should revolve about the "Knowledge Economy" because we are its Hub

 

[tangent]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

everything in Boston should revolve about the "Knowledge Economy" because we are its Hub

Unfortunately, a lot of people have trouble making the connection between the quarter million tuition paying, food eating, bar hopping, store spending students that make the Boston area their new home, at least for several years, and the health of the local and regional economy that is supported by being a major university and research hub.

 

[Shepard]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Question for consideration: is the idea that so many thousands of undergraduates enhance Boston vibrancy a myth?

To some extent I would say it is indeed a myth. Undergraduates today are still adolescents who stay coddled in their college cocoons and contribute little to the broader city except for beer bottle litter and noise complaints in Allston/Brighton.

 

[JumboBuc]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Question for consideration: is the idea that so many thousands of undergraduates enhance Boston vibrancy a myth?

To some extent I would say it is indeed a myth. Undergraduates today are still adolescents who stay coddled in their college cocoons and contribute little to the broader city except for beer bottle litter and noise complaints in Allston/Brighton.

Raise your hand if you used to be an undergrad at a Boston area school.

My point is that the undergrads themselves may not add a whole lot to Boston, but nearly 100% of undergraduates end up becoming graduate students or young professionals. These young professionals and highly-educated postgrads are the lifeblood of the Boston economy, and they wouldn't be here if not for the undergrads.

It also doesn't hurt that those undergrads pay for a whole lot of things that are great for Boston (research being among the most important).

 

[Shepard]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

But Boston should be a magnet for young professionals whether or not they have done their undergraduate here. (I'm not saying it isn't - in fact, the majority of young professionals I know did not do their undergraduate degree here). In NYC and SF, universities/colleges take up a much smaller share of the area and population in general compared to Boston, but still see a net in-migration of young professionals.

I'd argue that it comes down first to jobs, but also to an amorphous metric of "fun-ness" that still has a ways to evolve in Boston. Liquor licensing schemes play a major role in this. 24 hour amenities is part of this as well.

Anyway, just some scattershot thoughts. Coffee time.

 

[underground]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Undergraduates today are still adolescents who stay coddled in their college cocoons and contribute little to the broader city except for beer bottle litter and noise complaints in Allston/Brighton.

 

[fattony]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Question for consideration: is the idea that so many thousands of undergraduates enhance Boston vibrancy a myth?

To some extent I would say it is indeed a myth. Undergraduates today are still adolescents who stay coddled in their college cocoons and contribute little to the broader city except for beer bottle litter and noise complaints in Allston/Brighton.

People have been saying the same exact thing about every generation since forever. Your parents and grandparents thought you and all your buddies were real assholes when you were in college. Know why? Because 20-somethings are real assholes.

There is nothing special about this generation. Sure, they are screwed up in a different way than people used to be screwed up. The next generation will invent a new way to be screwed up for Millennials to scoff at.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

I don't think it has to do with the undergrads themselves. It's more the institutions adopting a cattle-herder's mentality about packing them into huge blocs of the city that are increasingly being stripped of their mixed-use properties for totally inward-facing redevelopment. I am one of those undergrads who stayed...for 20 years come Aug. 2016. Got accepted into both BC and BU as top choices, Northeastern as backup. Chose BU...hands-fucking-down...because there was no campus / campus was the city. In '96--still in the days of Dirty Old Kenmore™ and a few fewer redev'd blocks of Comm Ave.--even moreso than NU was "The City". I didn't want the separation of property lines; that felt too suburban (which I was trying to escape). On the BC campus tours I detected a smidge of that 'good fences make good neighbors' claustrophobia I was explicitly trying to flee from the banality of the Central CT suburbs. It had the access to the city and all, but (small sample size, I know) I just got a little bit too much of a vibe from the students and the admissions tour guides that it was the "campus" people who were from the suburbs and planned to go back to the suburbs would prefer over the other U's closer to downtown.

I wanted to be FORCED to embrace the city in all its diversity, quirks, and life lessons. And there was no better place for that than Shelton Hall with all its upper floors lit up in blinding neon from the gigantic Citgo sign couple hundred paces ahead. People-watching and urban exploration those first few years probably made me more who I am today than anything else, and I'd be a vastly different person if it weren't for that.


I don't see as authentic an experience for the freshmen coming in now. Nearly everything from New Coke™ Kenmore to Packards has been whitewashed by BU-for-BU redev, and Kenmore-BU Bridge is just dire these days at offering anything whatsoever for a non-student. If I didn't go for a hair-chop at Louie's once every 6 weeks I'd go 6 months at a time never being on that side of the river anywhere between BU Bridge and Mass Ave. It's all inward-looking. Designed to insulate students from the city, not force them out of their shells into the heart of it. Harvard's done it too, though not nearly as thoroughly as BU and more with the modern Allston construction than Cambridge. And NU is starting to close the gap a bit at bleaching the Huntington corridor.


This doesn't bother me quite so much from a nostalgia standpoint; I know why Dirty Old Kenmore™ had to be rationalized, and I'm not much for nostalgia. It bothers me for the reasons I stated in my B24 post-mortem post that Busses quoted up the page: that the U's now view their relationship with the city as a one-way street. They expect to be accommodated at every turn, they expect to have the streets turned over to them for keeps. OK...but what is the city getting in return? They back up the truck for millions upon millions for U-serving material support, but the U's no longer are reciprically compelled to give back. The redev plans have to unilaterally push this inward-looking remake of city spaces, and when the city comes to them asking for coalition support it's increasingly "Fuck you; I got mine" as we saw during B24 where the world's largest endowments turned their backs on a Really Big Thing. They do it because they've taken so much they no longer have any motivation on their turf to reciprocate. The scales have tipped too far, the relationship has gone too unbalanced. Too often they don't join the city, they bunker in from it.

People notice the cattle-herding of undergrads now because there's de facto fences going up around the herds. It was not as noticeable before because even at ground-zero BU Central there was enough intermixing of other walks of life and people being there to do things totally not-BU related that the campus still felt borderless. Does anyone feel like that campus is borderless anymore?

 

[Shepard]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Thanks, F-line. That really gets at what I meant (which did, I admit, come off like old-man-yelling-at-cloud)

In other words, undergraduates are having less of an impact of city vitality because they're cocooned in college campuses or college campus-like mentalities... And collegiate corridors are doing less and less for non-collegiates because they're being turned into campus ghettos.

 

[tangent]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Question for consideration: is the idea that so many thousands of undergraduates enhance Boston vibrancy a myth?

To some extent I would say it is indeed a myth. Undergraduates today are still adolescents who stay coddled in their college cocoons and contribute little to the broader city except for beer bottle litter and noise complaints in Allston/Brighton.

Take away the Universities and you have Detroit.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Take away the Universities and you have Detroit.

Wayne State? They have more undergrads than BU, you know.

 

[statler]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Ok, we already pretty much agree that in term of urbanity, most, if not all of our local colleges and universities are turning their back on the city.

What, if anything, would you propose to stop and perhaps even reverse this trend?

More dialog between the city and schools? More/different zoning requirements? Economic incentives/disincentives?

 

[tangent]

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Ok, we already pretty much agree that in term of urbanity, most, if not all of our local colleges and universities are turning their back on the city.

What, if anything, would you propose to stop and perhaps even reverse this trend?

More dialog between the city and schools? More/different zoning requirements? Economic incentives/disincentives?

The city has been telling Universities for 40 years to go build self contained campuses and eliminate off campus housing. Now that many Universities are nearing the ability to house their students on campus the problem is that they are walling themselves off from the city? Sounds like poor public policy and buyers remorse.