"Fans for Change" plan a walkout at the Pirates/Nationals game on Saturday night, after the third inning, to protest the pathetic management of the franchise over the last ten-plus-plus years.
The team, ever respectful of its fans (not!), has instructed broadcasters at FSN Pittsburgh not to show images of the walkout or refer to it on air. And the team has removed discussion of the walkout from the message board at pirates.com.
Tried to remove, I should say; it's hard to keep a board completely clean. And a poster this morning has already made the suggestion that I wanted to post here: Aux armes, cell phone, PDA, and mini-cam owners! Shoot photos and videos of the walkout yourselves, and upload the results to YouTube and Flikr. (Don't shoot images of the game being played, though.) Fans for Change can aggregate the links at a site of their own. The protest will automatically get a permanent archive -- and Pittsburghers around the world (diaspora check, here) can see what's happening locally.
Bob Smizik writes: "The protest is an attempt to draw national attention to the lack of success of the team, which is in the midst of a 15th consecutive losing season. That national attention might be difficult to obtain." Show Bob that he's wrong about national (and international) attention. The Pirates and the P-G are thinking in old media terms. Who needs FSN?
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
BioBuds
Pop City features BioBuds, a small informal networking group of local bioscience entrepreneurs. I've been hearing off-the-record anecdotes about the group for years; it's nice that BioBuds is finally getting some broader publicity.
The Pittsburgh Panopticon
My Pitt colleague John Burkoff and I are both quoted in Rich Lord's P-G piece this morning on the City of Pittsburgh's proposal to install a broad web of surveillance cameras in public places throughout the City of Pittsburgh.
Here's a link to the full Request for Information that triggered the story.
The proposal initially sounds innocuous enough: The City, together with the Port Authority, wants to take reasonable anti-terrorism measures to guard the region's rivers and highways and bridges. That's "Phase One," with implementation planned for this Fall.
Phase Two, with no fixed date attached, is described this way:
And here is Phase Three:
I added the bold font to that last sentence because it's the kicker, and it's what I meant when I told Rich that the anti-terrorism rationale is a pretext -- for surveillance to promote general purpose public safety and neighborhood business development. Hopefully the public will have something to say about the plan. Hopefully the public will respond not to the anti-terrorism rationale (in political terms, who could be against that?), but to the proposal's Benthamite implications.
Benthamite implications? It's one thing (though it's not necessarily a good thing) to be watched when you know that you're being watched. It's something else entirely -- and rarely a good thing -- to be watched all the time, when you don't necessarily know it. Jeremy Bentham, known generally for sponsoring a flavor of utilitarian philosophy, also designed the Panopticon. Wikipedia describes the building:
Finally, the Panopticon, like any surveillance regime, raises Plato's question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers? Back to what I told Rich: The Pittsburgh plan is completely silent on what I call "the human back end." So Pittsburgh arranges to collect all of this surveillance data. What then? Who sees the data? What's done with the data? When? And why? For the dystopian version, watch Enemy of the State. It's not just local law enforcement watching. It's the bad side of the National Security Agency.
But we don't need to invoke dystopia; more likely than comprehensive and conspiratorial government abuse is comprehensive municipal incapability. Do the City and the Port even have the resources to make the program effective for its intended purpose? Or would Pittsburgh be collecting a lot of data without the ability to make meaningful use of it? My understanding of the British and German experiences with these CCTV systems is that the systems are very, very expensive -- and yield very, very modest -- or at least often unscrutinized -- benefits. Pittsburgh can do this better? Would this money -- more than $800k of local money -- be better spent on more cost-effective public safety initiatives?
Here's a link to the full Request for Information that triggered the story.
The proposal initially sounds innocuous enough: The City, together with the Port Authority, wants to take reasonable anti-terrorism measures to guard the region's rivers and highways and bridges. That's "Phase One," with implementation planned for this Fall.
Phase Two, with no fixed date attached, is described this way:
Phase Two will deploy cameras in City business districts to promote a safe corridor around the business perimeters and encourage city neighborhood business development. The objective of this phase is to deploy cameras in the business districts and tie them into the existing network developed in Phase One. The Phase Two project is not scheduled at this time.
And here is Phase Three:
Finally, Phase Three will deploy cameras in six-square block area increments in high-risk neighborhoods. As noted in Phase Two camera systems deployed in this phase will also be tied into the existing systems for the final development of a citywide network which will potentially change the way we provide public safety and deploy public safety personnel. The actual locations for Phase Two and Three have yet to be determined, however, the locations may be confirmed before the procurement of any network. Please note that the initial phases are intended as a pilot for the expanded citywide camera network which may be implemented pending the success of the pilot.
I added the bold font to that last sentence because it's the kicker, and it's what I meant when I told Rich that the anti-terrorism rationale is a pretext -- for surveillance to promote general purpose public safety and neighborhood business development. Hopefully the public will have something to say about the plan. Hopefully the public will respond not to the anti-terrorism rationale (in political terms, who could be against that?), but to the proposal's Benthamite implications.
Benthamite implications? It's one thing (though it's not necessarily a good thing) to be watched when you know that you're being watched. It's something else entirely -- and rarely a good thing -- to be watched all the time, when you don't necessarily know it. Jeremy Bentham, known generally for sponsoring a flavor of utilitarian philosophy, also designed the Panopticon. Wikipedia describes the building:
The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." In his own words, Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."
Finally, the Panopticon, like any surveillance regime, raises Plato's question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers? Back to what I told Rich: The Pittsburgh plan is completely silent on what I call "the human back end." So Pittsburgh arranges to collect all of this surveillance data. What then? Who sees the data? What's done with the data? When? And why? For the dystopian version, watch Enemy of the State. It's not just local law enforcement watching. It's the bad side of the National Security Agency.
But we don't need to invoke dystopia; more likely than comprehensive and conspiratorial government abuse is comprehensive municipal incapability. Do the City and the Port even have the resources to make the program effective for its intended purpose? Or would Pittsburgh be collecting a lot of data without the ability to make meaningful use of it? My understanding of the British and German experiences with these CCTV systems is that the systems are very, very expensive -- and yield very, very modest -- or at least often unscrutinized -- benefits. Pittsburgh can do this better? Would this money -- more than $800k of local money -- be better spent on more cost-effective public safety initiatives?
Columbus?
Business Week has released a "Blog Belt" snapshot:
The lists are the usual large metro areas and wired and wireless meccas. And Columbus, Ohio, which comes in at number 30.
[HT: Chris]
As Net connections spread, Web 2.0 services are expanding. On a recent day, these were the top 30 cities for blog postings and comments, divided into three tiers by levels of activity.
The lists are the usual large metro areas and wired and wireless meccas. And Columbus, Ohio, which comes in at number 30.
[HT: Chris]
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Whining about Public Art
It's great to have a public conversation in Pittsburgh about something other than the Steelers or the Mayor. Here's another post on public art. John Craig and I have disagreed on the various public art projects proposed for the city. [My post, responding to his TNP piece in the Post-Gazette] [His reply to me] Today, I'm disagreeing with the Post-Gazette's architecture critic, Patricia Lowry.
In this morning's paper, she reports on a recent talk by James Wines, progressive architect, critic, and faculty member at Penn State.
This is a version of the "plop art" critique, damning museum pieces dumped willy-nilly into parks and office plazas with no regard to how people will interact with them or use the space.
There's a lot of merit in the plop art critique, but it can be overdone. Off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen museum pieces dumped willy-nilly into public spaces that succeed brilliantly as public art. I'll bet that you can, too. But I digress.
Lowry goes on and makes an implicit case that the Fred Rogers statue proposed for the North Shore, framed by a cutout in the old Manchester Bridge pier, amounts to unworthy plop art. That's where I disagree. But her critique is disjointed; it reads like she added the Rogers statue evaluation after the fact, as a defense of John Craig's criticism rather than as an extension of her report on Wines. In full, with comments, here it is:
No, actually, I don't wonder for a moment what Fred Rogers would have thought. I also don't wonder what Abraham Lincoln would have thought about a huge statue of him inside a modern version of Greek temple. Do we really want to limit ourselves to public memorials that honor men with egos bloated enough to justify life-or-larger-sized statues?
I agree -- this is a memorial, not a children's park, but the North Shore is hardly thick with them. The memorial would be a nice contrast to the bustling commercialism nearby -- Heinz Field, two new office buildings, the proposed casino.
Isolated from where young children congregate? Huh? Can you say "very short, safe, and picturesque walk from the Carnegie Science Center"? Can you imagine a better teaching opportunity that taking a group of children from the hands-on experiences of the CSC to the nearby statue of a man who delighted in promoting that very thing? Sure, there will be some weeks in January and February where that connection can't be made. But if we want to spent money on a superb interactive children's park that is hospitable in winter, we'll be spending it in San Diego.
Historic preservation is Pittsburgh's trump card; here, the problem isn't the statue itself but what the statue does. The statue calls for change. "Must we destroy the pier to save it" is a rhetorical question that starts with a false premise (the pier doesn't need to be "saved," because it isn't threatened) and lurches to a false conclusion (the pier won't be destroyed). The two sides of a Pittsburgh critic's sensibility are in public conflict: Using the pier to frame the Point is a good idea [there's the artist] but seems like city-sanctioned vandalism [there's the romance of Old Pittsburgh]. Is the bridge pier, in its current form, really that important? Because if it is [maybe it is; my ignorance of Pittsburgh history continues to grow], then abandon the statue; let's spend $1.3 million making the pier itself a public monument. But as it stands, the pier is just a relic, or maybe a reliquary, embodying the glories that preceded the Fort Duquesne Bridge, for Pittsburghers of a certain age.
The pier gives us three options: tear the pier down, since it's an eyesore in its current form; aggrandize it in a stand-alone form, because it's historically significant; or re-use it creatively. As an argument against the Rogers statue, however, the point about the pier is out of place.
Conclusion: Maybe the money earmarked for the Rogers project would be better spent elsewhere; this isn't a brief advocating for the statue and nothing else. A superb interactive children's park is a great idea and would be a super memorial to Fred Rogers. But why build something from scratch, when Pittsburgh already has superb interactive children's parks? How about $3 million for repairs and upgrades to Schenley, South, North, Boyce, and so forth?
[The post title is an allusion to Patricia Lowry's characterization of James Wines as "a provocative whiner."]
In this morning's paper, she reports on a recent talk by James Wines, progressive architect, critic, and faculty member at Penn State.
He blasted the kind of public art that cities have embraced since the 1970s, the freestanding sculpture in the plaza.
"Cities are too full of private art as public art," he said. "Works of art should be seen as the environment, not objects in the environment. They should never be able to be removed and put in a museum." . . . .
"Without people interacting there is no public art," he said.
This is a version of the "plop art" critique, damning museum pieces dumped willy-nilly into parks and office plazas with no regard to how people will interact with them or use the space.
There's a lot of merit in the plop art critique, but it can be overdone. Off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen museum pieces dumped willy-nilly into public spaces that succeed brilliantly as public art. I'll bet that you can, too. But I digress.
Lowry goes on and makes an implicit case that the Fred Rogers statue proposed for the North Shore, framed by a cutout in the old Manchester Bridge pier, amounts to unworthy plop art. That's where I disagree. But her critique is disjointed; it reads like she added the Rogers statue evaluation after the fact, as a defense of John Craig's criticism rather than as an extension of her report on Wines. In full, with comments, here it is:
Don't you wonder what Fred Rogers would have thought of the idea of a larger-than-life statue of himself on the North Shore? I met him only once, but "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" was must-see TV in our house 30 years ago, and I absorbed enough of his outlook then and since to suspect that this least-self-aggrandizing of men would be aghast at the prospect of a big bronze Fred on the riverfront.
No, actually, I don't wonder for a moment what Fred Rogers would have thought. I also don't wonder what Abraham Lincoln would have thought about a huge statue of him inside a modern version of Greek temple. Do we really want to limit ourselves to public memorials that honor men with egos bloated enough to justify life-or-larger-sized statues?
The project's promoters have said it will not be a memorial to him; rather it will be a children's park. But how can a monumental, 10-foot-tall figurative sculpture of a deceased person be anything but a memorial, even as it's part of a children's park? And the North Shore already is thick with memorials.
I agree -- this is a memorial, not a children's park, but the North Shore is hardly thick with them. The memorial would be a nice contrast to the bustling commercialism nearby -- Heinz Field, two new office buildings, the proposed casino.
I'm all for a children's park honoring Mister Rogers, but I agree with former PG editor John Craig (The Next Page, June 17) that this location, adjacent to Heinz Field and a wide road with no street parking, isn't the right one. It is too exposed, too isolated from where young children congregate and too unrelated to his work and will seem especially out of place (and rather inhospitable) in the windy chill of winter. And I can't help thinking that the $3 million it will cost (including $1.3 million for the sculpture) would have gone a long way to creating a superb interactive children's park.
Isolated from where young children congregate? Huh? Can you say "very short, safe, and picturesque walk from the Carnegie Science Center"? Can you imagine a better teaching opportunity that taking a group of children from the hands-on experiences of the CSC to the nearby statue of a man who delighted in promoting that very thing? Sure, there will be some weeks in January and February where that connection can't be made. But if we want to spent money on a superb interactive children's park that is hospitable in winter, we'll be spending it in San Diego.
The plan is to build a deck around the stone Manchester Bridge pier, which dates to 1915, and create a keyhole-shaped opening within it to frame the sculpture and the view. And while the idea of framing the view of the Point is a good one, blowing a hole in the pier seems more like city-sanctioned vandalism than creative repurposing. Must we destroy the pier to save it?
Historic preservation is Pittsburgh's trump card; here, the problem isn't the statue itself but what the statue does. The statue calls for change. "Must we destroy the pier to save it" is a rhetorical question that starts with a false premise (the pier doesn't need to be "saved," because it isn't threatened) and lurches to a false conclusion (the pier won't be destroyed). The two sides of a Pittsburgh critic's sensibility are in public conflict: Using the pier to frame the Point is a good idea [there's the artist] but seems like city-sanctioned vandalism [there's the romance of Old Pittsburgh]. Is the bridge pier, in its current form, really that important? Because if it is [maybe it is; my ignorance of Pittsburgh history continues to grow], then abandon the statue; let's spend $1.3 million making the pier itself a public monument. But as it stands, the pier is just a relic, or maybe a reliquary, embodying the glories that preceded the Fort Duquesne Bridge, for Pittsburghers of a certain age.
The pier gives us three options: tear the pier down, since it's an eyesore in its current form; aggrandize it in a stand-alone form, because it's historically significant; or re-use it creatively. As an argument against the Rogers statue, however, the point about the pier is out of place.
Conclusion: Maybe the money earmarked for the Rogers project would be better spent elsewhere; this isn't a brief advocating for the statue and nothing else. A superb interactive children's park is a great idea and would be a super memorial to Fred Rogers. But why build something from scratch, when Pittsburgh already has superb interactive children's parks? How about $3 million for repairs and upgrades to Schenley, South, North, Boyce, and so forth?
[The post title is an allusion to Patricia Lowry's characterization of James Wines as "a provocative whiner."]
Monday, June 25, 2007
Channelling the Manifesto
Carl Kurlander's Next Page paean to Pittsburgh storytelling yesterday hit most of the nails on the head. As an intellectual property lawyer, I'm not fond of his phrase "Take intellectual property seriously" (it's a nice slogan, but it doesn't mean anything), and Pittsburgh needs more than one "hit" to create a post-tipping point narrative. But his emphasis on risk, on investing in novelty and talent, on mobility, and on nurturing an important creative and wealth-creating community in Pittsburgh that doesn't necessarily include "higheder education," "robotics," "tissue," or "biotech" in its name -- all of those things are terrific.
Friday, June 22, 2007
John Craig Responds on Public Art in Pittsburgh
I closed comments on my Public Art post because the Fred Rogers debate was headed too far off topic. But closing comments kept John Craig from responding directly, so he emailed his comment to me. Here it is:
I have a little more to say, in the Comments.
There is a great deal of the Mark Madden entertainment technique in Madison
When the Museum of Modern Art included the U.S.Steel building in its review of developments in world architecture in 1979, it was part of a cluster, six pre-eminent post-World War II U.S. skyscrapers that included the Sears Tower and John Hancock Building in Chicago and the Prudential Building in Boston. The six remain civic landmarks 40 years later and none has a logo tacked on its side because the architects who designed them and the clients who commissioned them did not call for it. The same is true of Pittsburgh’s other great old office buildings (Frick, Union Trust, Gulf, Koppers, Oliver, PPG Place). Respecting the integrity of fine work and seeing it preserved adds to urban vitality, it does not detract from it. Such respect does not preclude putting lighted signs on all manner of building in their neighborhood either -- when it “works.” Both facts are obvious if you visit Boston, New York, Chicago and other vibrant cities of the world that pay attention to these matters.
Youth and vitality are only rationalizations for schlock -- as in “we’ll at least we are trying to do something.” If Madison actually believes the Rogers proposal is “brilliant” and is not merely making an argument, the aesthetic gulf is unbridgeable and we’ll nominate him for the Wildwood, NJ arts commission. His ancillary contention that a statue on a riverside site is going to get more attention than would be possible anywhere else in town is also debatable: Consider the Viet Nam and Korean War memorials, which I am sure bring a tear to his eye every time he takes the family over for a visit. The contrast these days between what we Pittsburghers deem as suitable to honor war dead and almost any of our pre-World War II memorials is embarrassing.
Elitist? Absolutely. That’s what drove CMU to put such care in the placement of its new sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky to cite just one very good and very accessible piece of public art. Let’s have more of that; more Mattress Factories, more Southside Works risk-takers. Pittsburgh is not going to recapture a sense of vitality by jumping at every and all ideas that come down the pike (see the North Shore apartments by the Ninth Street Bridge as Exhibit A). We need the self-confidence to say “no,” which will come only with a recaptured sense of worldliness rooted in actual accomplishment as opposed to hyperbole and a pure heart.
I have a little more to say, in the Comments.
The Diaspora Echo Chamber
Burgh Diaspora brought it up, Bill Toland in today's Post-Gazette writes about it, and now I'm blogging the P-G coverage. The Pittsburgh Diaspora has been spotted in Florida. Score one for the Manifesto.
The conversation at Antirust about Pittsburgh "authenticity" offers an interesting counterpoint; in the comments there, "authenticity" is local within Pittsburgh. "Pittsburgh" is represented by a neighborhood, a football field, a bar. (The comments about Heinz Field are noteworthy given that the stadium is basically brand new. Would Pittsburghers have said the same thing about Three Rivers? Forbes Field? Is it the place, or the team?) In diasporan terms, Pittsburgh represents itself, that is, Pittsburgh is its own best evidence of authenticity. I think that's where the Antirust conversation is going; "authenticity" is a construct -- physical (bar, stadium), metaphoric (the working class ethos), cultural (Pittsburghese) -- that brings Pittsburghers together.
There ought to be a way to connect these souls -- Pittsburgh's human capital with its satellite job-providers.
And the result of that would be ... ?
"Wherever you go, and whatever you want to do, there are Pittsburghers who can help you."
The conversation at Antirust about Pittsburgh "authenticity" offers an interesting counterpoint; in the comments there, "authenticity" is local within Pittsburgh. "Pittsburgh" is represented by a neighborhood, a football field, a bar. (The comments about Heinz Field are noteworthy given that the stadium is basically brand new. Would Pittsburghers have said the same thing about Three Rivers? Forbes Field? Is it the place, or the team?) In diasporan terms, Pittsburgh represents itself, that is, Pittsburgh is its own best evidence of authenticity. I think that's where the Antirust conversation is going; "authenticity" is a construct -- physical (bar, stadium), metaphoric (the working class ethos), cultural (Pittsburghese) -- that brings Pittsburghers together.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
What Pittsburgh Needs from Young Entrepreneurs
Harold Miller has a good post up featuring Project Olympus, a new effort at Carnegie Mellon to promote local careers for its computer science graduates and generally to build a robust infrastructure for an IT sector in the region.
Maybe so -- though that all depends on lots of other things falling into place locally. And what happens to the other 380 graduates? Where do they go? Where do they work? What kinds of Pittsburgh connections do they or their employers have -- if any? In the absence of a local entrepreneurial infrastructure that can easily absorb another two dozen CS grads each year, is Pittsburgh better off spreading the gospel according to CMU as those folks migrate around the world? Or should Pittsburgh try to keep them here in town and hope that the infrastructure eventually emerges?
Perhaps that's a false choice:
In other words, recent graduates want people to give them money, give them jobs, and treat them nicely. At one time or another on Pittsblog, I've argued for the very same things. What Pittsburgh needs to do, etc. etc. Much of Harold's post is a plea for the same things, and he's right.
What's missing here, though, is a commitment from the grads themselves. The sleep-on-the-sofa, max-out-your-credit-cards, borrow-from-friends-and-family, believe-in-your-dream-no-matter-the-cost kind of commitment that entrepreneurs know that it takes to succeed even in the face of failure after failure. Pittsburgh absolutely needs to develop the kind of infrastructure that Harold Miller and Project Olympus are referring to, but Pittsburgh needs something in the bargain, too, and what it needs is a commitment by those would-be entrepreneurs to stick to it. What three things are new grads willing to do? Find the resources yourselves. Go around institutional obstacles. Persevere. Force change.
Easier said than done, I know, especially when money is tight here and seems to flow freely elsewhere. One solution is to import the money. The Olympus board is interesting to me because it seems to reflect what might be a diasporan mentality -- investors from elsewhere looking to Pittsburgh in order to keep Pittsburgh tech here, rather than export it to the West Coast. Is that a correct perception?
Lenore Blum, Director of Project Olympus, estimated that only 20 (5%) of Carnegie Mellon's 2007 Computer Science graduates were staying in Pittsburgh. That means another 400 could potentially stay here. If Project Olympus merely doubles the current percentage of CMU's CS graduates who stay each year through entrepreneurship, it could significantly expand the number of startup companies in Pittsburgh.
Maybe so -- though that all depends on lots of other things falling into place locally. And what happens to the other 380 graduates? Where do they go? Where do they work? What kinds of Pittsburgh connections do they or their employers have -- if any? In the absence of a local entrepreneurial infrastructure that can easily absorb another two dozen CS grads each year, is Pittsburgh better off spreading the gospel according to CMU as those folks migrate around the world? Or should Pittsburgh try to keep them here in town and hope that the infrastructure eventually emerges?
Perhaps that's a false choice:
What do these students want/need in order to stay? Based on a survey of students conducted by Project Olympus, three things are key:
(1) Access to angel/venture capital and other assistance through networking opportunities;
(2) A "safety net," i.e., other job opportunities if the initial one falls through; and
(3) A region that views entrepreneurship, even in failure, as a valuable learning experience.
In other words, recent graduates want people to give them money, give them jobs, and treat them nicely. At one time or another on Pittsblog, I've argued for the very same things. What Pittsburgh needs to do, etc. etc. Much of Harold's post is a plea for the same things, and he's right.
What's missing here, though, is a commitment from the grads themselves. The sleep-on-the-sofa, max-out-your-credit-cards, borrow-from-friends-and-family, believe-in-your-dream-no-matter-the-cost kind of commitment that entrepreneurs know that it takes to succeed even in the face of failure after failure. Pittsburgh absolutely needs to develop the kind of infrastructure that Harold Miller and Project Olympus are referring to, but Pittsburgh needs something in the bargain, too, and what it needs is a commitment by those would-be entrepreneurs to stick to it. What three things are new grads willing to do? Find the resources yourselves. Go around institutional obstacles. Persevere. Force change.
Easier said than done, I know, especially when money is tight here and seems to flow freely elsewhere. One solution is to import the money. The Olympus board is interesting to me because it seems to reflect what might be a diasporan mentality -- investors from elsewhere looking to Pittsburgh in order to keep Pittsburgh tech here, rather than export it to the West Coast. Is that a correct perception?
Monday, June 18, 2007
Public Art in Pittsburgh
John Craig's anti-art piece in yesterday's The Next Page -- he opposes putting a UPMC sign on the USX Tower, and a Fred Rogers statue on the North Shore, framed by the Manchester Bridge pier -- is fuddy-duddy-ish and Old Pittsburgh in the extreme. At least he recognizes that he is anti-change and a fuddy-duddy at heart. What he doesn't recognize is that he makes no persuasive case for his conclusion. These things are "the very significant misuse of property to an unintended purpose," whatever that means. It's a good thing that he doesn't take property law from me; with writing like that, he'd fail the course.
The issue isn't "property," and it isn't "art." Signage on skyscrapers is "art" only in the loosest sense, but what we're really talking about isn't "Art" with a capital "A" anyway. Analogizing these things to graffiti, which Craig's piece tries to do, is misleading. The issue is the aesthetics of public space, how they should be managed, and who should manage them. Personally, I think that the Art Commission and the Planning Commission should take a broad view. Pittsburgh's public space could use some livening up. I was watching the U.S. Open golf tournament yesterday afternoon, and once again I was exhausted by recurring broadcast images of steel mills. Pittsburgh should make it easy for TV producers, with limited budgets and limited imaginations, to find additional images of the region. That's hardly the only reason to promote public art, but it's a start.
Signs on skyscrapers are a matter of taste, but Pittsburgh has a lot of them already, and personally, I like them. City skylines should be lively. My old architecture history teacher Vincent Scully anthropomorphized the Manhattan skyline, arguing that the towers were striving for attention with their distinctive tops. The UPMC sign on the USX Tower would at last give that blunt rusty block a hint of color. A bigger sign would be better, I think, than the smaller one that the Planning Commission seems to want.
The Rogers statue and particularly the proposed use of the bridge pier is brilliant. John Craig would hide the statue in a museum or on Fifth Avenue in Oakland or in Shenley Park. I can't think of a better stage for Pittsburgh's most beloved 20th century citizen than a spot just across from the Point, reusing a memorable piece of Pittsburgh history.
Public art is happening in Pittsburgh, and that's a good thing. It could use more publicity. Dave Edwards, one of the local artists behind the Pittsburgh Roars inflatables last year, sent me a photo of a 3,000 sq. ft. public mural that he's just completed on the North Side titled "Welcome to Deutschtown." The mural is located at the corner of Cedar Ave. and East Ohio Street and is painted on the side of the Park House. The mural project is managed by the Northside Leadership Conference with the support of the URA, The Elm Street Community, PNC and the East Allegheny Community Council. Dave writes: "The mural has an architectural and stained glass theme containing nine city crests representing the Austrian, German and Swiss towns of some of the original settlers of the area. A Maestro playing piano by candle light adds a warm and whimsical touch." Pittsburgh Dish has a posting of the latest pictures with scaffolding removed. There will be a dedication on June 20 at 6:30 p.m., complete with live German and Swiss music in the park in front of the site.
UPDATE ADDED 6/27: UPMC signs are going on the U.S. Steel Tower after all. Yay!
The issue isn't "property," and it isn't "art." Signage on skyscrapers is "art" only in the loosest sense, but what we're really talking about isn't "Art" with a capital "A" anyway. Analogizing these things to graffiti, which Craig's piece tries to do, is misleading. The issue is the aesthetics of public space, how they should be managed, and who should manage them. Personally, I think that the Art Commission and the Planning Commission should take a broad view. Pittsburgh's public space could use some livening up. I was watching the U.S. Open golf tournament yesterday afternoon, and once again I was exhausted by recurring broadcast images of steel mills. Pittsburgh should make it easy for TV producers, with limited budgets and limited imaginations, to find additional images of the region. That's hardly the only reason to promote public art, but it's a start.
Signs on skyscrapers are a matter of taste, but Pittsburgh has a lot of them already, and personally, I like them. City skylines should be lively. My old architecture history teacher Vincent Scully anthropomorphized the Manhattan skyline, arguing that the towers were striving for attention with their distinctive tops. The UPMC sign on the USX Tower would at last give that blunt rusty block a hint of color. A bigger sign would be better, I think, than the smaller one that the Planning Commission seems to want.
The Rogers statue and particularly the proposed use of the bridge pier is brilliant. John Craig would hide the statue in a museum or on Fifth Avenue in Oakland or in Shenley Park. I can't think of a better stage for Pittsburgh's most beloved 20th century citizen than a spot just across from the Point, reusing a memorable piece of Pittsburgh history.
Public art is happening in Pittsburgh, and that's a good thing. It could use more publicity. Dave Edwards, one of the local artists behind the Pittsburgh Roars inflatables last year, sent me a photo of a 3,000 sq. ft. public mural that he's just completed on the North Side titled "Welcome to Deutschtown." The mural is located at the corner of Cedar Ave. and East Ohio Street and is painted on the side of the Park House. The mural project is managed by the Northside Leadership Conference with the support of the URA, The Elm Street Community, PNC and the East Allegheny Community Council. Dave writes: "The mural has an architectural and stained glass theme containing nine city crests representing the Austrian, German and Swiss towns of some of the original settlers of the area. A Maestro playing piano by candle light adds a warm and whimsical touch." Pittsburgh Dish has a posting of the latest pictures with scaffolding removed. There will be a dedication on June 20 at 6:30 p.m., complete with live German and Swiss music in the park in front of the site.
UPDATE ADDED 6/27: UPMC signs are going on the U.S. Steel Tower after all. Yay!
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Moving Forward With the Manifesto, Part I
Back in April, when I first posted the Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh, a number of commenters wanted specifics. How is the Manifesto going to take hold? What should people do? I've owed some responses for awhile. I'll take this in small steps. Here is Part I: The Media.
"The Media" for my purposes here refers to one institution: Pittsburgh's major newspaper, the Post-Gazette. One commenter on the Manifesto wrote:
I think that's right, and I think that the Post-Gazette could be that vehicle -- or an important vehicle, in any event. The P-G's editor, David Shribman, wrote in a while later, hoping to get some suggestions. It turns out that Doc Searls, blogger and observer of things digital, preceded all three of us. Doc has this terrific post for newspapers trying to find their way in the networked world. These are great starting points for a diasporan Post-Gazette. I've included Doc's bullet points. Read his post for what each of them means. Not all of these apply to the P-G, and not all of them apply with equal force. But many do. And any other media vehicle for the diapora should take many of these points to heart.
"The Media" for my purposes here refers to one institution: Pittsburgh's major newspaper, the Post-Gazette. One commenter on the Manifesto wrote:
There has to be a leadership role for the Post-Gazette to help build these bridges globally. You would think that a business that is desparately looking for a life-line might see how they can re-invent themselves by identifying their customers not by a geographic region (which is so meaningless in the Internet age,) but by the people who have a connection with Pittsburgh. Just think - the number of people who used to live here is probably greater than those that still do. If their content served such people, their readership could become larger than ever, and in turn, reverse the declining ad revenues. And, it would still be called the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette! Do you think they would ever embrace the principles? I think it's important to have such a communications vehicle embracing the manifesto.
I think that's right, and I think that the Post-Gazette could be that vehicle -- or an important vehicle, in any event. The P-G's editor, David Shribman, wrote in a while later, hoping to get some suggestions. It turns out that Doc Searls, blogger and observer of things digital, preceded all three of us. Doc has this terrific post for newspapers trying to find their way in the networked world. These are great starting points for a diasporan Post-Gazette. I've included Doc's bullet points. Read his post for what each of them means. Not all of these apply to the P-G, and not all of them apply with equal force. But many do. And any other media vehicle for the diapora should take many of these points to heart.
1) Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds.
2) Start featuring archived stuff on the paper's website.
3) Link outside the paper.
4) Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies).
5) Start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers.
6) Start looking to citizen journalists (CJs) for coverage of hot breaking local news topics.
7) Stop calling everything "content."
8) Uncomplicate your websites.
9) Get hip to the Live Web
10) Publish Rivers of News for readers who use Blackberries or Treos or Nokia 770s, or other handheld Web browsers
11) Remember the higher purpose behind the most informative writing — and therefore behind newspapers as well. To review
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Up, Up, and Away
Another promising local tech startup is leaving Pittsburgh for Boston. Why? As Willie Sutton never said, because that's where the money is, and moving is what the money wants.
Cori Shropshire's P-G report on the impending departure of Logical Therapeutics does a good job of pointing out some of the other problems that keep Pittsburgh biotech/biomed startups on the launch pad for other destinations:
(1) Depth. Boston has it; Pittsburgh doesn't. "Moreover, biotech firms are risky, so it's difficult to persuade experienced workers to relocate to Pittsburgh without guarantee of success, [Logical Therapeutics co-founder Carolyn] Green said. In Boston, there are several hundred companies where workers can go if a venture doesn't work out, she said." I've written about this before.
(2) Infrastructure that supports biotech operations. "Despite the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's global reputation in basic research and clinical trials, particularly in drug development, 'What's missing is the expertise in designing and carrying out early tests for new drugs, managing the federal regulatory process and manufacturing material used in clinical trials,' [Logical Thereapeutics c-founder Dr. Mitchell] Fink said." I may not have blogged about that problem before, but I've certainly heard about it in private conversations. Pittsburgh has a lot of magnificent scientists, and Pitt and UPMC are getting better at pushing technology into the private sector. But the regulatory gauntlet is daunting, and there aren't enough people in town who are trained to manage it.
Updated and extended with most of the text of a comment that I left on an earlier Pittsblog post:
Is LT's departure fair to PA taxpayers, in view of PA-subsidized investments in the firm? One thing to note is that PA taxpayer money in LT (or in any private co. with university-developed technology) may be dwarfed by indirect money coming from the federal treasury. Pitt and UPMC take in several hundred million dollars in federal grant money each year, a huge chunk of which goes into biotech/bioscience research. I don't know how much federal money went into the technology that LT is developing, but federal indirect cost reimbursement funds facilities that likely housed much of the early work.
Federal law (Bayh/Dole) gives university researchers using federal funds the right to patent and license resulting inventions; the researchers split licensing proceeds with their employers under the terms of policies set by the employers. Here, that means Pitt and UPMC. State interests usually end up taking a back seat to federal policy. Biotech investing is a particularly high-stakes version of poker, and state-related investment funds are playing with public money. But they are investors nonetheless, placing bets with their investments and hoping to win a hand or two. Returns are never guaranteed.
The question in my mind isn't whether the PA funds are entitled to their money back, but whether they should be playing at all, given the amounts that they are able to invest, and the stakes. Are they are playing at a table where they don't have enough cash to compete effectively over the long term? Biotech and biomed investing is a long-term game, and every play is risky. While LT is leaving with PA money and has chance to succeed elsewhere, would we as PA taxpayers be happier if it stayed in Pittsburgh -- and was more likely to fail? Personally -- no. Remember, you're a federal taxpayer as well as a PA taxpayer. When you combine your taxpaying hats, that's the point at which you should ask whether you're getting a fair deal while the government invests your betting money. In some ways yes, you are, and in some ways no, you're not. I'll save more for a later post.
Cori Shropshire's P-G report on the impending departure of Logical Therapeutics does a good job of pointing out some of the other problems that keep Pittsburgh biotech/biomed startups on the launch pad for other destinations:
(1) Depth. Boston has it; Pittsburgh doesn't. "Moreover, biotech firms are risky, so it's difficult to persuade experienced workers to relocate to Pittsburgh without guarantee of success, [Logical Therapeutics co-founder Carolyn] Green said. In Boston, there are several hundred companies where workers can go if a venture doesn't work out, she said." I've written about this before.
(2) Infrastructure that supports biotech operations. "Despite the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's global reputation in basic research and clinical trials, particularly in drug development, 'What's missing is the expertise in designing and carrying out early tests for new drugs, managing the federal regulatory process and manufacturing material used in clinical trials,' [Logical Thereapeutics c-founder Dr. Mitchell] Fink said." I may not have blogged about that problem before, but I've certainly heard about it in private conversations. Pittsburgh has a lot of magnificent scientists, and Pitt and UPMC are getting better at pushing technology into the private sector. But the regulatory gauntlet is daunting, and there aren't enough people in town who are trained to manage it.
Updated and extended with most of the text of a comment that I left on an earlier Pittsblog post:
Is LT's departure fair to PA taxpayers, in view of PA-subsidized investments in the firm? One thing to note is that PA taxpayer money in LT (or in any private co. with university-developed technology) may be dwarfed by indirect money coming from the federal treasury. Pitt and UPMC take in several hundred million dollars in federal grant money each year, a huge chunk of which goes into biotech/bioscience research. I don't know how much federal money went into the technology that LT is developing, but federal indirect cost reimbursement funds facilities that likely housed much of the early work.
Federal law (Bayh/Dole) gives university researchers using federal funds the right to patent and license resulting inventions; the researchers split licensing proceeds with their employers under the terms of policies set by the employers. Here, that means Pitt and UPMC. State interests usually end up taking a back seat to federal policy. Biotech investing is a particularly high-stakes version of poker, and state-related investment funds are playing with public money. But they are investors nonetheless, placing bets with their investments and hoping to win a hand or two. Returns are never guaranteed.
The question in my mind isn't whether the PA funds are entitled to their money back, but whether they should be playing at all, given the amounts that they are able to invest, and the stakes. Are they are playing at a table where they don't have enough cash to compete effectively over the long term? Biotech and biomed investing is a long-term game, and every play is risky. While LT is leaving with PA money and has chance to succeed elsewhere, would we as PA taxpayers be happier if it stayed in Pittsburgh -- and was more likely to fail? Personally -- no. Remember, you're a federal taxpayer as well as a PA taxpayer. When you combine your taxpaying hats, that's the point at which you should ask whether you're getting a fair deal while the government invests your betting money. In some ways yes, you are, and in some ways no, you're not. I'll save more for a later post.
Monday, June 11, 2007
The University as Investor
From time to time at Pittsblog, I have drawn comparisons between Pittsburgh and New Haven, Connecticut and specifically between Pitt's role locally and Yale's role in New Haven. In many ways, Pitt doesn't compare favorably. In the real estate department, its economic development initiatives over the last decade have been confined largely to making the campus more secure and serene for students, more pleasant for shoppers, and more robust for researchers. On all three counts, the university has succeeded brilliantly. But its ambition has been limited. On the whole, and outside of Oakland (and outside of co-developments with the Steelers) Pitt has not used its leverage as a licensor or investor -- which is significant, given Pitt's size -- to make the City of Pittsburgh a more vibrant economic community. Not publicly, anyway. While New Haven, by contrast, still has even farther to go than Pittsburgh, Yale's impact has been direct and tangible impacts on the quality of the city.
But Yale is hardly impervious to criticism. The New Haven Independent reports today that Yale is facing criticism for pursuing the purchase of a soon-to-be-abandoned biotech research facility in -- West Haven, not New Haven. Bruce Alexander, the Yale official who runs Yale's property program, is one of the shrewdest real estate developers in the country -- university or no university. So I'm willing to bet that he knows what he's doing. Still, the report suggests a significant public relations misstep. The economic footprint of a research university is regional, not city-wide. Yale has learned that a better city makes a better university, and it has invested accordingly. But universities need to take account of political boundaries, too.
But Yale is hardly impervious to criticism. The New Haven Independent reports today that Yale is facing criticism for pursuing the purchase of a soon-to-be-abandoned biotech research facility in -- West Haven, not New Haven. Bruce Alexander, the Yale official who runs Yale's property program, is one of the shrewdest real estate developers in the country -- university or no university. So I'm willing to bet that he knows what he's doing. Still, the report suggests a significant public relations misstep. The economic footprint of a research university is regional, not city-wide. Yale has learned that a better city makes a better university, and it has invested accordingly. But universities need to take account of political boundaries, too.
U.S. Open Blog
The folks at the USGA have set up a blog that follows the U.S. Open.
Link: http://www.usopen.com/blog/pt/blog/
Link: http://www.usopen.com/blog/pt/blog/
Pittsburgh PR Porn
Every year, US News & World Report publishes lists of "the best XYZ schools" in the country -- colleges, universities, business schools, law schools, etc. Lots of Presidents and Deans and professors make ugly noises about being ranked this way, but lots of schools spend lots of money trying to influence the rankings. Since one part of the rankings in law is school reputation among fellow academics and among practicing lawyers and among judges, law schools produce what is derisively called "law porn." Law porn consists of glossy brochures touting the accomplishments of the school's faculty and the quality of the school's programs, which are mailed to thousands of professors and lawyers around the country, many of whom throw these things away without reading them.
I thought of law porn when I saw two recent, classy examples of the journalistic genre that I now christen "Pittsburgh PR porn." Pittsburgh PR porn consists of op-eds and features written with a simple storyline: "Pittsburgh went through a long period of being crappy, dirty, and/or just old, but it's on its way to becoming young, clean, and great." There is a description of the old steel economy. A reference to contemporary smoke-free skies. A nod to an emerging economy supported by high tech, biomedicine, and higher education. Livability metrics and the low cost of living. There are almost always a few quotes from the City Fathers (usually, folks associated with The Allegheny Conference, or VisitPittsburgh, or the History & Landmarks Foundation) and/or the City Children (the Mayor). A reference (not too heavy-handed) to the quagmire of city politics and finances, but colored by generic optimism that those problems can be overcome. Stir gently, and voila: An uncritical, highly romanticized narrative of the City with a Past and a Future.
Today's example A is Howard Fineman, in Newsweek, "What Pittsburgh Can Teach the Country:
A city down on its luck has an optimistic young leader. The scene there mirrors our national situation. Maybe we can all learn something from Luke Ravenstahl." Fineman is a Pittsburgher (who knew?!), so he knows local context better than most journalists. But the headline gives away the entire piece.
Today's example B (not online) is a feature called "Walking Through Pittsburgh: There was a time when Pittsburgh was described as "Hell with the lid taken off. Not anymore," by Bob Drury, in The Official USGA Program for the U.S. Open championship coming up this week at Oakmont. A taste:
To be fair, Pittsburgh PR Porn isn't intended to analyze. These are fairytales, and fairytales are for inspiration and for moral instruction. If you're already a moral person, however, fairytales can paralyze. Why think about novelty and creativity and innovation if you're already a special person? Once in a while, it would be nice to find a deconstructed Pittsburgh fairytale, a Shrek-on-the-Mon.
I thought of law porn when I saw two recent, classy examples of the journalistic genre that I now christen "Pittsburgh PR porn." Pittsburgh PR porn consists of op-eds and features written with a simple storyline: "Pittsburgh went through a long period of being crappy, dirty, and/or just old, but it's on its way to becoming young, clean, and great." There is a description of the old steel economy. A reference to contemporary smoke-free skies. A nod to an emerging economy supported by high tech, biomedicine, and higher education. Livability metrics and the low cost of living. There are almost always a few quotes from the City Fathers (usually, folks associated with The Allegheny Conference, or VisitPittsburgh, or the History & Landmarks Foundation) and/or the City Children (the Mayor). A reference (not too heavy-handed) to the quagmire of city politics and finances, but colored by generic optimism that those problems can be overcome. Stir gently, and voila: An uncritical, highly romanticized narrative of the City with a Past and a Future.
Today's example A is Howard Fineman, in Newsweek, "What Pittsburgh Can Teach the Country:
A city down on its luck has an optimistic young leader. The scene there mirrors our national situation. Maybe we can all learn something from Luke Ravenstahl." Fineman is a Pittsburgher (who knew?!), so he knows local context better than most journalists. But the headline gives away the entire piece.
Today's example B (not online) is a feature called "Walking Through Pittsburgh: There was a time when Pittsburgh was described as "Hell with the lid taken off. Not anymore," by Bob Drury, in The Official USGA Program for the U.S. Open championship coming up this week at Oakmont. A taste:
Pittsburgh is like no other American city I have ever visited. OfThe article even quotes a local: "Forward thinking; sums up the spirit of Pittsburgh right there."
course America's urban centers evolve subtly each day, but as we skim the narrow
streets of the North Side it begins to strike me that none have changed so
dramatically as Pittsburgh. You can breathe here now, literally and
figuratively. The city fathers may be desperate for residents to fill
downtown housing -- Pittsburgh's population has been halved, to 316,000, since
its 1950s height of 677,000 -- but the metaphorical shifting of gears from brawn
to brain has also, in a sense, cleared the air.
To be fair, Pittsburgh PR Porn isn't intended to analyze. These are fairytales, and fairytales are for inspiration and for moral instruction. If you're already a moral person, however, fairytales can paralyze. Why think about novelty and creativity and innovation if you're already a special person? Once in a while, it would be nice to find a deconstructed Pittsburgh fairytale, a Shrek-on-the-Mon.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
The University and the Sporting Life
This is the next post in a series of unknown length regarding the university and its role in the community, focused largely though not exclusively on the University of Pittsburgh. What is Pitt's role in Western Pennsylvania and beyond, as what PA law calls a "state-related" institution. Pitt is public, in a way. What does that mean? Here's the first post.
That first post kicked the tires of a number of issues. Sam raised some good questions in a comment, and here I want to talk about one of them. Responding, I think, to an observation about how Pitt's sports program -- football and men's basketball in particular -- connects with the community at large, Sam wrote: "And by the way, how has the Ivy League managed to function without Big Name sports?" The question is how Ivy League universities reconcile their aspirations to national and international prominence with the absence of Division I athletics.
First, then, a historical note: For the first 50 years of the 20th century, the Ivy League epitomized what then counted as Big Name sports. Harvard and Yale were regularly fielded teams that were among the most powerful in college football -- which is just about the only college sport that counted. They also produced college crews that were world-beaters. And I recall a distinguished Yale baseballer or two. I'm sure that the other Ivies have big-time athletic stars in their 20th century history books, and even a few competing today.
But the reality is that the Ivy Schools have given up the ghost in football and basketball and baseball, as have MIT and the University of Chicago and several other large, prosperous, and prestigious research universities. Why and how?
The answer is relatively simple: Research universities (actually, just about all institutions of higher education) traffic in two key things. One is reputation and prestige. Two is research funding. Harvard, et al. can generate plenty of both without having to subsidize a Division I-A football team. (Harvard and Yale each also offer just about the broadest programs of varsity athletics found anywhere in the country. It turns out that from a financial point of view, running a I-A football program may not maximize athletic opportunities for the students, once you add in administrative costs and the costs of related things, like marching bands. But I digress.)
Can Pitt compete at that level -- that is, compete with Harvard et al. in the reputation and prestige games -- while giving up its Division I athletic interests? I don't think so, and I don't think that it really wants to. Or, to put the thought differently, I think that a school like Pitt fields high profile athletic teams not because of platitudes about providing opportunities for different kinds of students, but because it needs the indirect and intangible reputation benefits of doing so, both inside the academy and beyond its walls. And this is true even though the football coach makes an obscene amount of money, and even though a healthy number of faculty are skeptical about the wisdom of an academic institution putting so much emphasis on competitive sports. While there are a few donors out there for whom fielding a competitive football team is a necessity, my guess is that from a fundraising standpoint sports are a wash; big time athletic programs are incredibly expensive to run. And, of course, research dollars have nothing whatsoever to do with sports. Athletics are worth the candle in part to avoid the embarrassment of this sort of discussion, in which folks discussing the University of Wisconsin are alarmed by what seems to be a faculty exodus, and especially alarmed that faculty might leave Madison, WI for Pittsburgh. Maybe that's a poor reflection on the reputation of the city of Pittsburgh, but I wonder whether academic reputation plays a role.
Meanwhile, the Ivy League and MIT have made their abandonment of big time Division I athletics something of a snobbish selling point. The Ivies sometimes distance themselves in reputational terms just a mite from Stanford, which does compete in Division I across the board, and very successfully. (Successfully everywhere except in I-A football, and in that regard, Pitt fans are nodding their heads knowingly.) In the prestige economy, *not* competing in athletics is what reinforces the top of the existing academic hierarchy; for the big public schools, *competing* is what allows them to stay in the public eye sufficiently to attract a needed quantum of prestige.
"The public eye," then, is a part of the prestige economy for public higher ed in a way that it's not for the Ivies and their cousins. Big time sports count publicly for places like Pitt in terms of their community standing. Pitt needs and wants the respect and admiration of the local population in ways that Harvard does not, at least not symbolically. Pitt wants to be the BMiP (Big Man in Pittsburgh). While Harvard etc. maintain their academic standing without big time athletics, they have mostly forfeited claims of broader symbolic importance to their surrounding communities. Harvard doesn't need to be BMiB (Big Man in Boston); it has bigger fish to fry. Harvard and Yale field football teams, but do Boston or Greater New York care? (Do Cambridge or New Haven care, to any meaningful degree?) Exclusivity has its privileges -- and its costs. Pitt and large state schools with I-A programs have chosen a different course.
The interesting local case then isn't Pitt, but Carnegie Mellon. (The other interesting case, though it's not local, is Notre Dame.) CMU competes in Division III, not Division I. CMU doesn't have the resources to compete in Division I; it may not have the non-sports-related reputational standing in academia to be classed with the Ivies - at least not across the disciplinary board. CMU aspires to a public role in the Western PA community, or at least it seems to in some ways. This question has nothing specifically to do with Pittsburgh, but here goes: Should CMU change its athletics strategy? And if so, how?
That first post kicked the tires of a number of issues. Sam raised some good questions in a comment, and here I want to talk about one of them. Responding, I think, to an observation about how Pitt's sports program -- football and men's basketball in particular -- connects with the community at large, Sam wrote: "And by the way, how has the Ivy League managed to function without Big Name sports?" The question is how Ivy League universities reconcile their aspirations to national and international prominence with the absence of Division I athletics.
First, then, a historical note: For the first 50 years of the 20th century, the Ivy League epitomized what then counted as Big Name sports. Harvard and Yale were regularly fielded teams that were among the most powerful in college football -- which is just about the only college sport that counted. They also produced college crews that were world-beaters. And I recall a distinguished Yale baseballer or two. I'm sure that the other Ivies have big-time athletic stars in their 20th century history books, and even a few competing today.
But the reality is that the Ivy Schools have given up the ghost in football and basketball and baseball, as have MIT and the University of Chicago and several other large, prosperous, and prestigious research universities. Why and how?
The answer is relatively simple: Research universities (actually, just about all institutions of higher education) traffic in two key things. One is reputation and prestige. Two is research funding. Harvard, et al. can generate plenty of both without having to subsidize a Division I-A football team. (Harvard and Yale each also offer just about the broadest programs of varsity athletics found anywhere in the country. It turns out that from a financial point of view, running a I-A football program may not maximize athletic opportunities for the students, once you add in administrative costs and the costs of related things, like marching bands. But I digress.)
Can Pitt compete at that level -- that is, compete with Harvard et al. in the reputation and prestige games -- while giving up its Division I athletic interests? I don't think so, and I don't think that it really wants to. Or, to put the thought differently, I think that a school like Pitt fields high profile athletic teams not because of platitudes about providing opportunities for different kinds of students, but because it needs the indirect and intangible reputation benefits of doing so, both inside the academy and beyond its walls. And this is true even though the football coach makes an obscene amount of money, and even though a healthy number of faculty are skeptical about the wisdom of an academic institution putting so much emphasis on competitive sports. While there are a few donors out there for whom fielding a competitive football team is a necessity, my guess is that from a fundraising standpoint sports are a wash; big time athletic programs are incredibly expensive to run. And, of course, research dollars have nothing whatsoever to do with sports. Athletics are worth the candle in part to avoid the embarrassment of this sort of discussion, in which folks discussing the University of Wisconsin are alarmed by what seems to be a faculty exodus, and especially alarmed that faculty might leave Madison, WI for Pittsburgh. Maybe that's a poor reflection on the reputation of the city of Pittsburgh, but I wonder whether academic reputation plays a role.
Meanwhile, the Ivy League and MIT have made their abandonment of big time Division I athletics something of a snobbish selling point. The Ivies sometimes distance themselves in reputational terms just a mite from Stanford, which does compete in Division I across the board, and very successfully. (Successfully everywhere except in I-A football, and in that regard, Pitt fans are nodding their heads knowingly.) In the prestige economy, *not* competing in athletics is what reinforces the top of the existing academic hierarchy; for the big public schools, *competing* is what allows them to stay in the public eye sufficiently to attract a needed quantum of prestige.
"The public eye," then, is a part of the prestige economy for public higher ed in a way that it's not for the Ivies and their cousins. Big time sports count publicly for places like Pitt in terms of their community standing. Pitt needs and wants the respect and admiration of the local population in ways that Harvard does not, at least not symbolically. Pitt wants to be the BMiP (Big Man in Pittsburgh). While Harvard etc. maintain their academic standing without big time athletics, they have mostly forfeited claims of broader symbolic importance to their surrounding communities. Harvard doesn't need to be BMiB (Big Man in Boston); it has bigger fish to fry. Harvard and Yale field football teams, but do Boston or Greater New York care? (Do Cambridge or New Haven care, to any meaningful degree?) Exclusivity has its privileges -- and its costs. Pitt and large state schools with I-A programs have chosen a different course.
The interesting local case then isn't Pitt, but Carnegie Mellon. (The other interesting case, though it's not local, is Notre Dame.) CMU competes in Division III, not Division I. CMU doesn't have the resources to compete in Division I; it may not have the non-sports-related reputational standing in academia to be classed with the Ivies - at least not across the disciplinary board. CMU aspires to a public role in the Western PA community, or at least it seems to in some ways. This question has nothing specifically to do with Pittsburgh, but here goes: Should CMU change its athletics strategy? And if so, how?
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Diaspora Fever
Clark Thomas joins the diaspora bandwagon with his column in today's Post-Gazette. Welcome aboard.
His column includes one particularly interesting nugget. Recounting a recent panel that included WTAE anchor Sally Wiggin, he writes:
There's a narrative nugget worth chewing on. "[T]the plant closings of the 1980s were so sudden the community was unprepared." The plant closings of the 1980s were sudden? They must have been sudden from the "jobs here today, gone tomorrow" point of view, and they had an immediate and dramatic impact on all of the people who lost their jobs. In that sense, individuals were unprepared. But the closing weren't sudden in the context of Pittsburgh's 20th century industrial history. Steel had been on the decline regionally for decades leading up to the 1980s; anyone who was suprised by its actual demise was, in historical terms, either not paying attention, not privy to what was actually happening over the prior decades, or ignoring it.
I should emphasize here that I am not blaming anyone for what happened. What I'm interested in here is the idea (to paraphrase Sally W.) that the region still senses that it woke up one day in the 1980s and the world had changed entirely. True? Let's assume that it is. What are the implications?
In my view, one implication of the "sudden disappearance" theory may be that the region's legendary fatalism and risk-aversion may be less difficult to overcome than is commonly believed. As a non-Pittsburgher, I've tended to assume that the region's nostalgia and resistance to change weren't prompted by the sudden disappearance of industry (pace Wiggin) but by its presence, that is, by the accretion of tradition-laden attitudes over a period of many decades. Local attitudes are so difficult to change because they have such a long pedigree. I've had numerous conversations with friends and colleagues over the last several years that start from the following premise: How do you change the psychology of a city?
Maybe we've been asking the wrong question; maybe Pittsburgh's fatalism isn't so hard-wired after all. If the narrative arc of the city includes "the world stopped turning circa 1982 [give or take a few years]," then maybe what we have here isn't deeply felt fatalism so much as grieving for a death in the family. And not just any death; to mix metaphors slightly, steel was literally and figuratively the heart of the region. The patriarch and matriarch, if you will, rolled into one.
What Pittsburgh has seen since that time may be less a reluctance to let go of a decades-old psychology and instead more a collective version of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I'm not going to speculate on where Pittsburgh now sits in the context of those stages (have fun in the comments!), and I'm not going to claim that I'm the first to draw the analogy that I'm working with (help out in the comments: where has this point been made before?).
Still, if this is the right version of the story, then that may be grounds for optimism. There is no need for collective therapy or for some kind of urban personality transplant. Resistance to change and fatalism aren't part of the city's DNA; they are at least partly responses to a traumatic event. If that's right, then those attitudes may evolve and improve organically; acceptance should arrive eventually, and with acceptance comes opportunity and possibility.
His column includes one particularly interesting nugget. Recounting a recent panel that included WTAE anchor Sally Wiggin, he writes:
Ms. Wiggin commented that the plant closings of the 1980s were so sudden the community was unprepared. "There was no time to fix things. Everyone left; no one came back in." That led to a discussion of Pittsburgh attitudes, as reflected in Steelermania. Did the sudden need to change foster nostalgia and a reluctance to change? Has there been a continued resistance to what is happening in the rest of the world, summarized in the term "globalization"?
There's a narrative nugget worth chewing on. "[T]the plant closings of the 1980s were so sudden the community was unprepared." The plant closings of the 1980s were sudden? They must have been sudden from the "jobs here today, gone tomorrow" point of view, and they had an immediate and dramatic impact on all of the people who lost their jobs. In that sense, individuals were unprepared. But the closing weren't sudden in the context of Pittsburgh's 20th century industrial history. Steel had been on the decline regionally for decades leading up to the 1980s; anyone who was suprised by its actual demise was, in historical terms, either not paying attention, not privy to what was actually happening over the prior decades, or ignoring it.
I should emphasize here that I am not blaming anyone for what happened. What I'm interested in here is the idea (to paraphrase Sally W.) that the region still senses that it woke up one day in the 1980s and the world had changed entirely. True? Let's assume that it is. What are the implications?
In my view, one implication of the "sudden disappearance" theory may be that the region's legendary fatalism and risk-aversion may be less difficult to overcome than is commonly believed. As a non-Pittsburgher, I've tended to assume that the region's nostalgia and resistance to change weren't prompted by the sudden disappearance of industry (pace Wiggin) but by its presence, that is, by the accretion of tradition-laden attitudes over a period of many decades. Local attitudes are so difficult to change because they have such a long pedigree. I've had numerous conversations with friends and colleagues over the last several years that start from the following premise: How do you change the psychology of a city?
Maybe we've been asking the wrong question; maybe Pittsburgh's fatalism isn't so hard-wired after all. If the narrative arc of the city includes "the world stopped turning circa 1982 [give or take a few years]," then maybe what we have here isn't deeply felt fatalism so much as grieving for a death in the family. And not just any death; to mix metaphors slightly, steel was literally and figuratively the heart of the region. The patriarch and matriarch, if you will, rolled into one.
What Pittsburgh has seen since that time may be less a reluctance to let go of a decades-old psychology and instead more a collective version of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I'm not going to speculate on where Pittsburgh now sits in the context of those stages (have fun in the comments!), and I'm not going to claim that I'm the first to draw the analogy that I'm working with (help out in the comments: where has this point been made before?).
Still, if this is the right version of the story, then that may be grounds for optimism. There is no need for collective therapy or for some kind of urban personality transplant. Resistance to change and fatalism aren't part of the city's DNA; they are at least partly responses to a traumatic event. If that's right, then those attitudes may evolve and improve organically; acceptance should arrive eventually, and with acceptance comes opportunity and possibility.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
University and Community
Work, travel, family, life . . . having been away from this blog for a little while, now I'm trying to figure out how to get back on track. Take up the tax abatement issue? I don't think so. Instead, I want to turn back to a question that Sam raised at AntiRust a few days ago: the future of Pitt -- the University of Pittsburgh, that is -- and the future and role of universities in general. For a number of reasons, not least of which is that I spent a couple of days at Harvard last week at a conference on the topic, I think that universities are going to be very, very important institutions in the decades to come. But we are only starting to talk about the roles that universities play (and will play) and why and how they may (and may not) succeed in those roles.
The topic also dovetails with something else I plan to invest in this summer: looking at Pittsburgh in narrative terms. Chris Briem and Harold Miller have the data end of things well in hand. But as they both lament, policy and politics in Pittsburgh (as elsewhere) are often impervious to the facts. Lament, or opportunity? Bearing the risks in mind, I want to explore the positive side of Pittsburgh's myths and stories. I want to take the stories seriously. Past, present, and future.
So here goes. Regarding Pitt and its drive for "national prominence," Sam writes:
Is "national prominence" really a goal of the University? I think that the answer there is an unambiguous "yes," though it's important to break "the University" down into some subparts; the university's goals have to be understood both in direct terms and indirect terms, and on a unit-by-unit or even department-by-department level. Take, for example, the School of Medicine and the biomedical research enterprise at Pitt generally. There, I doubt that Pitt has a goal of national prominence; those units and that research already *are* nationally prominent -- in reality, are *internationally* prominent. The same must be said for certain academic departments, particularly Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science. I don't want to or mean to slight any of my faculty colleagues by pointing to these jewels in the crown. I'm well aware that Pitt faculty and Pitt research are top-flight in many areas, though weaker in others. Overall, I'm skeptical of the "public Ivy" designation (in my view, that label is best reserved for places like Michigan, Virginia, and UC Berkeley). Instead, in the years that I've been at Pitt I've come to believe that Pitt aspires to be grouped with several of the Big 10 public research universities, such as Illinois and Ohio State (as well as Michigan). Berkeley and Virginia and Texas are, generally and with some important exceptions, playing in a higher academic league.
That paragraph touches just the tip of the university iceberg. Note that I haven't written much about students, and I haven't written much about what role the university plays or should be expected to play in Pittsburgh or in Western PA. I haven't written much about how the university should adapt to the 21st century (Sam's post was prompted by Pitt's announcement of an expensive renovation to its main library). I haven't written much about the respective weight given to the university's traditional, basic missions (educate students, produce scholarship and research) and its contemporary elaborated missions (engage in ethically challenging collaborations with for-profit interests of various sizes).
On those questions, some quick hits, with more to come later:
On the undergraduate side, Pitt (like lots of universities and colleges) is benefitting because of the extraordinary expense and selectivity associated with Ivy League schools and their peers. When 20,000 kids apply to Harvard each year, lots of supremely talented 18-year-olds go elsewhere to college. Some of them, inevitably, will land at Pitt. Moreover, any given university exists in the overall ecology of higher education. As Pitt's undergraduate student body improves, the question is not just what Pitt wants to be, but also what other colleges and universities in the region want to be? There's a challenge ahead for Pitt, but also challenges and opportunities for all of the colleges and universities in the region. (I'll leave graduate and professional education to the side for now.)
On the regional role question, it will be a mistake for the university to see itself solely in functional terms, and then solely in terms of its own students and faculty and staff and alumni. Pitt is the largest university and one of the largest non-profit institutions in the region. Function is important, but symbolism is important, too. Great cities thrive not just on commerce, but also on spirit, and Pitt can be -- if it chooses to be -- a powerful supplier of intangible energy to the city of Pittsburgh and to the region at large. I wrote above about indirect goals, and here is where that thought comes into focus: Pitt football (over the last couple of years, anyway) and men's basketball (and soon, perhaps, women's basketball) are tremendous regional resources. Whatever his success on the field, and despite the heroic amount of money that Division I football coaches command these days, kudos to Dave Wannstedt for getting much of Pittsburgh behind Pitt football again.
And on the corporatization of the university: As an IP lawyer, I spend much of my professional energy thinking about the interface between market institutions (corporate America, for example) and nonmarket institutions (the university, for example). Like a lot of people, I respect the fact that the university houses a lot of valuable research and needs to find effective ways to move that into the development pipeline; like a lot of people, I worry that when the administration's eyes focus too much on the bottom line (startups, licensing revenue), the university loses track of its historic and special role as a home for intellectual inquiry mostly free from the pressures of price and profits. Pittsburgh has plenty of big corporate interests; the University of Pittsburgh doesn't need to become another one.
This is a long and complex topic, and Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne (to take two other local examples) work their way into this story in different ways. More soon.
The topic also dovetails with something else I plan to invest in this summer: looking at Pittsburgh in narrative terms. Chris Briem and Harold Miller have the data end of things well in hand. But as they both lament, policy and politics in Pittsburgh (as elsewhere) are often impervious to the facts. Lament, or opportunity? Bearing the risks in mind, I want to explore the positive side of Pittsburgh's myths and stories. I want to take the stories seriously. Past, present, and future.
So here goes. Regarding Pitt and its drive for "national prominence," Sam writes:
To what extent is "national prominence" one of the university's goals? I suspect it is, to be honest. But how do you define that? I think that a lot of small community colleges gain "national prominence" by being innovative and aggressive in pursuit of their goals. That is, one way to get a lot of respect is to "do what you do" very well. Well, what does Pitt do? Is it a school for Pennsylvania students who want a solid, affordable education? Or is it a school for people who want a prestigious degree? Sure, that's a false choice. Blah blah blah. But look around. This is controversial stuff. Look at other "public Ivies" such as the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan. Great schools. But are they serving their states well? Or have they turned too many of their desks over to students from out of state, from out of the U.S.? Do they cost too much? Do they spend too much on prestigious faculty that do little teaching?
Who gains from this "prestige"? Who loses? As the school gets more selective, you have to ask these sorts of questions. If your kid has the grades to get into Harvard, maybe he should just go to Harvard if that's what he wants. Even more interestingly, let's say he does want to stick around here. Is he also the kind of kid who needs/deserves state support for his schooling? That is, does Pitt's strange existence as a "state affiliated" university become even stranger? And what about Penn State? Does that need to be a "public Ivy," too? Why? (According to Wikipedia, it already is one.) Why were eight Ivy League schools enough in the past? Why do we need scores of them now? Does it stop meaning anything if, in addition to every kid in America being above average, every college is, too? And what about Carnegie Mellon? Is that "Ivy" to some extent? How does its presence impact the need for another such institution?
Is "national prominence" really a goal of the University? I think that the answer there is an unambiguous "yes," though it's important to break "the University" down into some subparts; the university's goals have to be understood both in direct terms and indirect terms, and on a unit-by-unit or even department-by-department level. Take, for example, the School of Medicine and the biomedical research enterprise at Pitt generally. There, I doubt that Pitt has a goal of national prominence; those units and that research already *are* nationally prominent -- in reality, are *internationally* prominent. The same must be said for certain academic departments, particularly Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science. I don't want to or mean to slight any of my faculty colleagues by pointing to these jewels in the crown. I'm well aware that Pitt faculty and Pitt research are top-flight in many areas, though weaker in others. Overall, I'm skeptical of the "public Ivy" designation (in my view, that label is best reserved for places like Michigan, Virginia, and UC Berkeley). Instead, in the years that I've been at Pitt I've come to believe that Pitt aspires to be grouped with several of the Big 10 public research universities, such as Illinois and Ohio State (as well as Michigan). Berkeley and Virginia and Texas are, generally and with some important exceptions, playing in a higher academic league.
That paragraph touches just the tip of the university iceberg. Note that I haven't written much about students, and I haven't written much about what role the university plays or should be expected to play in Pittsburgh or in Western PA. I haven't written much about how the university should adapt to the 21st century (Sam's post was prompted by Pitt's announcement of an expensive renovation to its main library). I haven't written much about the respective weight given to the university's traditional, basic missions (educate students, produce scholarship and research) and its contemporary elaborated missions (engage in ethically challenging collaborations with for-profit interests of various sizes).
On those questions, some quick hits, with more to come later:
On the undergraduate side, Pitt (like lots of universities and colleges) is benefitting because of the extraordinary expense and selectivity associated with Ivy League schools and their peers. When 20,000 kids apply to Harvard each year, lots of supremely talented 18-year-olds go elsewhere to college. Some of them, inevitably, will land at Pitt. Moreover, any given university exists in the overall ecology of higher education. As Pitt's undergraduate student body improves, the question is not just what Pitt wants to be, but also what other colleges and universities in the region want to be? There's a challenge ahead for Pitt, but also challenges and opportunities for all of the colleges and universities in the region. (I'll leave graduate and professional education to the side for now.)
On the regional role question, it will be a mistake for the university to see itself solely in functional terms, and then solely in terms of its own students and faculty and staff and alumni. Pitt is the largest university and one of the largest non-profit institutions in the region. Function is important, but symbolism is important, too. Great cities thrive not just on commerce, but also on spirit, and Pitt can be -- if it chooses to be -- a powerful supplier of intangible energy to the city of Pittsburgh and to the region at large. I wrote above about indirect goals, and here is where that thought comes into focus: Pitt football (over the last couple of years, anyway) and men's basketball (and soon, perhaps, women's basketball) are tremendous regional resources. Whatever his success on the field, and despite the heroic amount of money that Division I football coaches command these days, kudos to Dave Wannstedt for getting much of Pittsburgh behind Pitt football again.
And on the corporatization of the university: As an IP lawyer, I spend much of my professional energy thinking about the interface between market institutions (corporate America, for example) and nonmarket institutions (the university, for example). Like a lot of people, I respect the fact that the university houses a lot of valuable research and needs to find effective ways to move that into the development pipeline; like a lot of people, I worry that when the administration's eyes focus too much on the bottom line (startups, licensing revenue), the university loses track of its historic and special role as a home for intellectual inquiry mostly free from the pressures of price and profits. Pittsburgh has plenty of big corporate interests; the University of Pittsburgh doesn't need to become another one.
This is a long and complex topic, and Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne (to take two other local examples) work their way into this story in different ways. More soon.
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