This is a timely work on a very dynamic field. It provides more than 40 best practice case studies from nearly half the states in America, and discusses current and evolving trends in the relations between educational institutions and cities, towns and other municipalities. The schools include public and private universities and colleges, public school districts, and other local school systems. Case studies examine current and evolving state-of-the-art practices. Appendices include a glossary; regional, national and international resource directories; bibliographic sources; model agreements and documents; a state municipal league directory; a state public library directory; and a summary of distance learning resources. The handbook is indexed. The future of America's cities and schools depends upon the proper management of resources through the use of state-of-the-art town-gown planning practices. Both public officials and taxpayers, faculties, as well as students, benefit from town and gown best practices.
Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow. Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.
Town and Gown is the story of the birth in the 1960s and survival through the 1970s of an inner city college, York College of the City University of New York, in Jamaica, Queens. Created as a liberal arts college to provide increased access to minority students, it was placed in a mainly minority neighborhood, where it received exceptionally strong support from a middle class African American community seeking access to quality higher education for its children and a business community striving to overcome the effects of "white flight." Operating in rented quarters without a permanent campus and regarded as academically illegitimate owing to its location, the college was regarded as expendable in hard times. From 1971 to 1979 critics both inside and outside of the City University, such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor Edward Koch, questioned the school's right to exist, especially during the New York City and State Fiscal Crisis of 1975 and 1976. Undaunted, the college and its diverse supporters rallied and won. An amazing groundswell of support from Southeast Queens, and intense political pressure, saved it. Though the fight was often bitter, York College and Jamaica would not be denied. The college moved onto its permanent campus as a new Jamaica Center emerged.
A new perspective on the relationships among colleges, universities, and the communities with which they are now partnering. Colleges and universities have always had interesting relationships with their external communities, whether they are cities, towns, or something in between. In many cases, they are the main economic driver for their regions—State College, Pennsylvania, or Raleigh, North Carolina, for example—and in others, they exist side by side with thriving industries. In The New American College Town, James Martin, James E. Samels & Associates provide a practical guide for planning a new kind of American college town—one that moves beyond the nostalgia-tinged stereotype to achieve collaborative objectives. What exactly is a college town in America today? Examining the broad range of partnerships transforming campuses and the communities around them, the book opens by detailing twenty characteristics of new American college towns. Subsequent chapters invite presidents, provosts, planners, mayors, architects, and association directors to share their views on how college town relationships are shaping new generations of students and citizens. The book tackles urban and rural institutions, as well as community colleges, and closes with predictions about what college towns will look like in twenty-five years. Contributors include presidents from Lehigh, Portland State, New Jersey City, and Connecticut College, along with five college town mayors and the current or former executive directors from the International Town-Gown Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and others. The book also traces how town-gown relations are expanding into innovative areas nationally and internationally, moving beyond familiar student life programs and services to hundred-million-dollar downtown developments. The first comprehensive, single-volume resource designed for leaders on both sides of these conversations, The New American College Town includes action plans, lessons learned, and pitfalls to avoid in developing transformative relationships between colleges and their extended communities. Contributors: Robert C. Andringa, Aaron Aska, Beth Bagwell, Katherine Bergeron, Kelly A. Cherwin, Phillip DiChiara, Lorin Ditzler, Mauri A. Ditzler, Kevin E. Drumm, Erin Flynn, Michael Fox, Joel Garreau, Susan Henderson, Andrew W. Hibel, Patrick Hyland, Jr., Jay Kahn, James Martin, Miguel Martinez-Saenz, Fred McGrail, Kim Nehls, Krisan Osterby, Tracee Reiser, Stuart Rothenberger, Kate Rousmaniere, James E. Samels, Rick Seltzer, John D. Simon, Jefferson A. Singer, Allison Starer, Wim Wiewel, Eugene L. Zdziarski II
Ariana loves her life as a schoolteacher in a little frontier town. But one evening after classes are done and she prepares to hurry home, her life changes in an instant when a band of rough outlaws abduct her and take her far away from all she has ever known. Trapped in a small shack, Ariana prays and waits, her emotions swinging between terror and boredom as days stretch into weeks. Still, the outlaws refuse to tell her why they've taken her or what they plan to do. Then the boss's son appears in the doorway of her cabin. He seems different from the others, but can she trust him? Will she ever again see her mother and father, the couple who lovingly adopted her and raised her as their own? Will she ever wear the beautiful wedding dress so carefully saved for her--her one remaining link to her birth parents?
This is a timely work on a very dynamic field. It provides more than 40 best practice case studies from nearly half the states in America, and discusses current and evolving trends in the relations between educational institutions and cities, towns and other municipalities. The schools include public and private universities and colleges, public school districts, and other local school systems. Case studies examine current and evolving state-of-the-art practices. Appendices include a glossary; regional, national and international resource directories; bibliographic sources; model agreements and documents; a state municipal league directory; a state public library directory; and a summary of distance learning resources. The handbook is indexed. The future of America's cities and schools depends upon the proper management of resources through the use of state-of-the-art town-gown planning practices. Both public officials and taxpayers, faculties, as well as students, benefit from town and gown best practices.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian, and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century. In this powerful work, the first major book to tell his story, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson’s work interrogated the foundations of western political thought, modern capitalism, and changing meanings of race. Tracing the course of Robinson’s journey from his early days as an agitator in the 1960s to his publication of such seminal works as Black Marxism, Myers frames Robinson’s mission as aiming to understand and practice opposition to “the terms of order.” In so doing, Robinson excavated the Black Radical tradition as a form of resistance that imagined that life on wholly different terms was possible. In the era of Black Lives Matter, that resistance is as necessary as ever, and Robinson’s contribution only gains in importance. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn more about it.
