Pittsburgh: A Metrotextual Community

My law school colleague Jim Chen, who recently was appointed Dean of the law school at the University of Louisville, mused recently about that law school's role in the Louisville community, and more broadly about the aspirations and role of the *urban* university -- as opposed to aspirations and roles of universities in generally. Much of his commentary applies to Pittsburgh, both university and city; Louisville, like Pittsburgh, is a river-based community. I've posted occasional thoughts about the University of Pittsburgh (on sports, on economic development, on reputation), so the Louisville post is timely.

Lawyers love plays on words, and academic lawyers love to tweak the noses of literary post-modernists. So Jim dodges the word "metropolitan," which conjures some Louisville taboos (Kentucky, it appears, self-identifies as rural), and instead coins the word "metrotextual" to describe his view of that city:

The central problems of our time are the problems of cities, of urban conglomerations so potent as to transcend earlier generations' conception of the "metropolis." To paraphrase the popular singer-songwriter, Natalie Merchant, "A woman of beauty / A woman of pain / In France or Jakarta" faces frustrations and harbors dreams every bit as much as "A woman of color / With debts to be paid / In Trenton or Detroit." At home or abroad, "Her shadow's the same."

By the same token, the world's metropolitan research universities hold the key to a brighter future for ourselves and our posterity. In his epochal book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, Richard Florida quotes what he calls an "old German adage": Stadtluft macht frei. City air makes you free. Yes, today's cities generate many of the problems that confront contemporary societies. Led by their universities and their most engaged citizens, those cities offer hope. They offer solutions.

Read the whole thing here.
Here in Pittsburgh, Pitt aspires to prominence as a public research university; its urban identity -- dare I say its metrotextual identity -- is subsumed within that goal. Its metrotextuality, however, is worth pondering.

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.

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?

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:

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.