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In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

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In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

By: Davarian L. Baldwin
Narrated by: Wayne Carr
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About this listen

Across America, universities have become big businesses - and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow.

Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes listeners from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power - and who is made vulnerable.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Davarian L. Baldwin (P)2021 Bold Type Books
Higher & Continuing Education Politics & Government Social Classes & Economic Disparity Urban City Chicago

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A piercing piece of work in urban social justice

Professor Baldwin's work is illuminating,  highlighting the requisite social justice within urban environments. 


The work awakens the reader to the 'noble' narrative of higher educational institutions which use aspirations of social citizen, and social value, and social good and exploit them.


Universities are in a feeding frenzy of acquisition, wealth building and autocratic rule. This posturing has killed through campus policing, continues the theft of public and community lands and sucks dry  the civil and social bloodlines of the towns and cities they are meant to serve.


This book is an excellent journey through the behemoth of universities and the role they play in our cities and towns. This role is largely unaccountable to the public, while using the public tax systems for oxygen to grow bigger and bolder.


Community agreement of real benefits must be placed at the heart of university growth with the public and community citizens having oversight and rights to veto, challenge and hold accountable these institutions. The social value must be core institutions, including paying taxes, and genuine resource equity and inclusiveness. 


The days of the ivory tower are gone,  and communties must demand, and be supported politically in expecting more in socialised rewards in development without displacement.


Highly recommend this engaging and plain speaking work. It offers deep thinking and sophisticated practical solutions to responsible social value.


Arabella Douglas 

BA LLB, GDLP BBUS(HONS)(Ist Class) GAICD, PhD (Scholar)

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