The number of national media opinions about Detroit's troubles seems to correlate directly to the number of urban affairs writers at major publications.
As with sports and politics, everybody sees what's wrong and doesn't hesitate to say so.
Comes now Justin Pope, an education beat journalist who analyzes this bankrupt city from that perspective in a provocative essay at The Atlantic
After ticking off the usual Detroit villains addressed by others ("the banana-republic-caliber corruption and fiscal fecklessness of its politicians, the greed of its unions, the spinelessness of automobile executives who gave in to them . . . racism, sprawl and unbridled capitalism"), Pope floats a different idea:
Where is Detroit's Johns Hopkins? Or, to limit the comparison to neighboring Rust Belt states, where is its Carnegie-Mellon or Case Western Reserve? Why is there no, say, Henry Ford University in Detroit?
His point is that "a large, and usually quite wealthy, private research university" uplifts cities economically. The two cited above helped Pittsburgh and Cleveland "adapt to the decline of manufacturing," believes Pope, a former Associated Press national education writer.
"Wayne State does important work and even a fair amount of research," the magazine author acknowledges.
Detroit's lack of anything comparable has to do with the University of Michigan and the appeal of blue-collar auto industry in flush times, Pope contends. (More on that later.)
In the United States, private universities occupy a disproportionate share of the very top tier in wealth and prestige -- places that operate in education, research and health care on a scale that could substantially affect the economy of a city as large as Detroit.
Yes, Detroit has public Wayne State and a smattering of mostly small and often Catholic private colleges. But while Wayne State does important work and even a fair amount of research, its operating budget is $576 million. In Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon and the quasi-private University of Pittsburgh are about $3 billion combined in a city less than half Detroit's size. . . .
Of course, Detroit isn't the only major American city without a prominent private research university. . . . But it is arguably the most surprising.
Detroit was once America's fourth-largest city, and not lacking in rich philanthropists. More to the point, a century ago, it was the Silicon Valley of its day, bustling with engineering talent, entrepreneurs and venture capital. Imagine visiting Detroit in 1920 then journeying to the farmland of Palo Alto, CA, and finally the tobacco warehouses of Durham, NC. Which place would you have bet on to become a global research and education powerhouse? Yet among those three, only Detroit failed to do so.
The magazine writer, who has degrees from Princeton ('97) and Oxford ('99), shares two hunches about why Detroit lacks a big-deal private campus.
One involves UM, where he spent nine months in 2010-11 on a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship, and the other involves assembly lines.
Here's the gist of each:
-
UM is too near: "Had the University of Michigan not decamped from Detroit to Ann Arbor in 1837, the region's entire history might well be different." After moving just 35 miles away, it grew into "one of the best public universities in the world . . . casting its shadow over Detroit, lessening the chance a rival would flourish there." . . .
"in practice, Michigan is a private university in all but name, the state's share of its general fund budget down below 17 percent. In its global ambitions, cost and dearth of low-income students, Michigan has more in common with Harvard or Hopkins than with Wayne State -- and the benefits of its presence are focused in Ann Arbor, not Detroit." - Automotive jobs: Paradoxically, the ease of employment in past decades may have backfired in the long run. "The city's burgeoning automobile economy seemed to offer endless decently paying jobs that didn't require a degree. Those now-departed career tracks help explain why Michigan ranks 21st nationally in the proportion of adults 25 to 64 with a high school degree but 32nd in the proportion with a bachelor's."
Pope also points fingers at Henry Ford, whose "educational causes were vocational and extended beyond Michigan, and at the Big Three for starting "their own tech schools and enormous in-house research operations." He quotes Detroit history buff Robert Fishman, a UM professor of architecture and urban planning, on the impact:
"This separation between the auto companies and the wider urban culture of Detroit was very damaging, and very different from, say, Silicon Valley later on."
The thought-provoking essay, which is more stimulating and less far-fetched than it may sound initially, concludes with a sour-note reminder that Detroit is a far cry from Philadelphia or New York -- where it's costly for Penn and Columbia to expand "in the newly pricey neighborhoods they've gentrified.
Affordable real estate would not be a problem for somebody starting a university in Detroit.
