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The Ivory Tower, Urban Growth, and State Subjugation

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The Ivory Tower, Urban Growth, and State Subjugation University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Geography ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Summer 7-14-2017 The vorI y Tower, Urban Growth, and State Subjugation: An Historical Analysis on the Construction of Student Identities and the Public Good During University Generated Redevelopment Projects Jacob R. Wolff Jacob Robert Wolff Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/geog_etds Part of the Human Geography Commons Recommended Citation Wolff, Jacob R.. "The vI ory Tower, Urban Growth, and State Subjugation: An Historical Analysis on the Construction of Student Identities and the Public Good During University Generated Redevelopment Projects." (2017). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ geog_etds/35 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Geography ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jacob Robert Wolff Candidate Geography and Environmental Studies Department This thesis is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Thesis Committee: John Newman Carr, Chairperson K. Maria D. Lane David Correia i THE IVORY TOWER, URBAN GROWTH, AND STATE SUBJUGATION: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS ON THE CONSTRCTION OF STUDENT IDENTITIES AND THE PUBLIC GOOD DURING UNIVERSITY GENERATED REDEVELOPMENT PROJECTS by JACOB ROBERT WOLFF B.A., Geography and History, University of Pittsburgh THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science Geography The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2017 ii DEDICATION For Pop. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are a near endless number of people for whom I owe my most sincere gratitude. Without the support of my family, friends, advisor, committee and colleagues, I could not have completed this brief work of scholarship. Their support, in contrast, has been monumental. Specifically, I want to thank my Great Grand Mother, Grandmother, and Mother for paving the way through their three generations of academic success in both undergraduate and graduate endeavors. I want to thank Mam and Pap for encouraging my interest in the profession of higher education and I must thank my father, a first generation college student, for reminding me that education is of immeasurable value. I am additionally indebted to my advisors – formal and informal, past and present – for their guidance through my undergraduate and graduate educations: At the University of New Mexico; John for his enthusiasm and kindness, Maria for her clarity, David for his thoroughness, And of my undergraduate professors; Bill for his love of geography, Ola for his forthright advice, Susan for her sincerity, Paul for his insights, Bob for his friendship. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention Hayley, Evan, Jordan, and Kalea, the very best friends a person could have. Their unrelenting support is responsible for giving me the emotional fortitude to finish this project. To all, both above and unmentioned, all my love and appreciation. iv Epigraph I’m hiring a DJ for the eve of our destruction. - Jack’s Mannequin, My Racing Thoughts v THE IVORY TOWER, URBAN GROWTH, AND STATE SUBJUGATION: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS ON THE CONSTRCTION OF STUDENT IDENTITIES AND THE PUBLIC GOOD DURING UNIVERSITY GENERATED REDEVELOPMENT PROJECTS by JACOB ROBERT WOLFF B.A., Geography and History, University of Pittsburgh ABSTRACT Having become almost cliché in academic discourses, the term gentrification offers a conceptualization of sociospatial transformation too narrow for contemporary understandings of inequality within the post-industrial city. Generalizations of a wealthy populous displacing working-class and marginalized populations fail to address the diversity, complexity, and scope of economic hollowing-out and fail to fully account for other incoming subpopulations such as the emergent “creative class,” comprised of university-educated individuals who are not necessarily considered affluent by traditional economic measures. To this end, scholars in the United Kingdom have identified university neighborhood formation as a significant yet distinct process of place production that results in exacerbated patterns of inequality that are incongruent to the predominant narrative – the degeneration and reconfiguration of physical property in areas of student occupation, thus leading to rising, increasingly exclusionary rents charged by private developers. This process, termed studentification, has gained little traction within the American academy, despite similarly pervasive neighborhood change vi surrounding research universities, and despite a wealth of scholarship interrogating the regenerative economic impact universities demonstrate as urban anchor institutions. And considering that urban real estate markets are largely a consumptive byproduct of globalizing capital, universities should be positioned at the administrative nexus between transnational networks of production and the localized processes of neighborhood recommodification, thus warranting a multi-scalar evaluation of campus expansion as a spatial practice of power. Drawing upon three case studies of ostensible studentification – Columbia University in Manhattan, Temple University in Philadelphia, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque – my intervening research therefore seeks to resolve how academic institutions purposefully reprogram the cityscape for, in their appraisal, the public good, while specifically considering how university administrators leverage an economic idea of the student from their mission in urban planning processes. Each case represents a particular magnitude of scale; the global command city, the intermediate metropolitan, and the national fringe. The empirical work identifies a consistent ideology emphasizing intellectual accumulation and exchange, where students are positioned as both consumer and product; and as such, motivate and legitimate the increased institutional consumption of space. Such considerations, in turn, reinforce a theoretical discussion integrating studentification within university-generated urban development initiatives. Ultimately, this work builds upon contemporary analyses by positing that universities are central to a larger political project intended to reprogram urban space via the productive logics of a knowledge economy. As such, the humanistic ideal of infinite vii intellectual possibility is dangerously commoditized in corporeal form, the graduate or human capital, to provide an (a)spatial-fix to the limits of capitalist growth. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction ………………………………………………………….… 1 Chapter Two: Background ………………………………..…………….…………… 11 Chapter Three: Literature Review ……………………...…………………….……... 31 Chapter Four: Research Design …………………………………………..…………. 61 Chapter Five: Columbia University in the City of New York ……………...……… 71 Chapter Six: Temple University ………………………….………………………… 107 Chapter Seven: University of New Mexico ………………………………………… 133 Chapter Eight: Towards a Theory of University Power ………………….………. 152 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………….…………. 176 ix CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The Post-Industrial Promise From a young age I had watched the economic landscape around me shift and change. The main street movie theater shut its doors shortly after I learned to walk and by the time I was out of a car seat, the service station on the edge of town no longer had an attendant and full service. Within view of my neighborhood playground, state contracted bulldozers closed a mountaintop scarred by strip mines left idle from my grandfather’s generation. Most people on the Eastern Seaboard hadn’t burned anthracite coal in their home furnaces for a half-century, and any remaining demand was purely local. We had a coal stoker. A lone hopper sat terminally immobile at the railroad siding, although royal blue painted Conrail locomotives occasionally passed through. But among my cherished memories, what stands out most significantly was the community’s love of my elementary school. A quintessential red brick building constructed in the early twentieth century, it was near enough that I could walk down the grey macadam alley from my yard, passing makeshift vegetable gardens and an abandoned flag pole that once towered over a baseball grandstand, to get to school. Once there, I lined up with my friends in the walnut and linoleum clad lobby waiting for our teachers to lead us into the classrooms. There we learned about the alphabet, language, and mathematics, but also of our town’s story. I sat marveling in sheer curiosity - and abhorrence - when the teacher talked of children marching to the mines to labor in dangerous coal breakers, sorting out slate with their bare, bloodied hands. 1 Yet, we also contemplated the future. The mines were clearly no more, and every one of us watched sad-faced men board up the windows along Main Street, a fading promise that reminding us that the era of small-town commerce was likely over. It was natural to wonder what was coming next. Our second grade teacher – my grandmother - asked the class to debate a proposed distribution center near the interstate highway that had – in the name of progress - been built over a former company town. The majority of my classmates argued to let nature overcome, although a few argued in favor of economic growth. The debate progressed rather one-sidedly until
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