The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago

Introduction

■ xiii Introduction Lasting institutions like colleges and universities invoke a social rationale for their physical installations, a rationale that speaks to their overarching purposes and helps elucidate the ideas behind their operations. In our culture, we are educated to find in our surroundings the manifestations of character and purpose, particularly when those larger abstractions such as character, purpose, and meaning would tend to escape our immediate grasp. Kurt W. Forster,“From Catechism to Calisthenics,”1993 I n Chicago today the largest campus for higher education contains neither ivy nor lawn. There are no frat houses or sororities, no neo-Gothic dining halls, and no carillon bells chiming the hour. There are no gates to signify entrance into its territory. Indeed, its boundaries are diffuse and ill defined. What has come to be known as “Loop U” is really an agglomeration of institutions of higher education woven in and around the streets and buildings of the southern end of the city’s historic business district, the Loop. It is the fastest growing “campus” in the city today, a reflection of­ college-age students’ interest in exciting urban spaces and education directly connected to opportunities to participate in the postindustrial knowledge economy. Though the clientele of American institutions of higher learning may once have been exiled to small towns in cornfields or to hilltop enclaves , today students are flocking to large cities, where urban campuses are growing and prospering, making new commitments to the metropolis and enlarging their domains in neighborhoods once scarred by urban renewal, urban abandonment, or both. And within higher education in general and on urban campuses in particular there is the beginning of a new relationship with the city based on the common mission to acknowledge and accommodate diverse people, ideas, and technologies and to advance knowledge directed toward global interactions. As a consequence, universities and colleges are occupying spaces in the skyline, in buildings left vacant by businesses that have fled to the suburbs or relocated to new, technologically equipped, twenty-first-century office buildings; they are building new housing and retail developments; and they xiv ■ Introduction are finding new ways of partnering with neighboring communities with the aim (not always successful) of avoiding the territorial and intellectual antagonisms that marked earlier town-and-gown conflicts. More than just an object to be studied, the city is now acknowledged to be a unique and beneficial environment for higher education, an extraordinary resource for pedagogy in general and for curricula in particular. Why does the contemporary city serve so well as today’s campus? How did the city, once claimed to be anathema to American higher education and pedagogy, come to find itself so intertwined in the future of both? The institutions explored in The City as Campus are offered as a specific case study of Chicago and its universities, but they are also indicative of and situated within larger national trends. They are not merely institutions that happen to be in a city; their founding premises and historical trajectories rest on their relationship to the city and its unique conditions, be they social, cultural, physical, or economic. Thus, the book is not a comprehensive history of higher education or campus design in Chicago but, rather, a story about specific institutions that can trace their origins to moments of intense urban transformation. In these examples the urban campus is imbricated in the city by virtue of the need to produce urban citizens and, equally important, to research social and urban forms that will lead to new ideas about urban migration, calls for urban reform, and ultimately, new models of urban planning and design. What binds these unique examples together is what they teach us about the interrelationship of knowledge and urbanism. The City as Campus addresses—through a historical account and a reflection on contemporary conditions in Chicago—the physical, that is, specific design implications of campuses in urban environments. It concerns itself with how design, both architectural and urban, is used to represent, negotiate , and influence the relationship between universities and their communities and, ultimately, the success or failure of the exchange between them. In so doing, it also argues that the city itself serves a greater purpose than being the “host” of a university; it also serves as a site of pedagogy and a viable location for the larger purpose of the academic community: the production of knowledge. In the end, The City as Campus is concerned with the situation of higher education, with how its...