I started this book feeling a bit defensive, but mostly agreeing with the premise and curious which direction this argument would go. Dr. Baldwin covered a lot of ground, but it also left me with a lot of questions about the broader relationships between universities and the cities they inhabit throughout the country. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is an excellent qualitative and almost ethnographic work that gets into very specific detail about how the universities mentioned manipulate their capital and tax-exempt status for private benefit, but it seems vulnerable to a cherry-picked argument.

Dr. Baldwin presents his argument in profiles. He begins with an examination of Yale and the way it has, in his words, come to "swallow" New Haven. It is the largest single employer, one of the largest landlords, and has come to provide almost all medical care (and insurance, by virtue of being such a large employer). He offers a terrifying glimpse of the repercussions of this when it collides with a university mental health policy that is arguably illegal in its breadth of definition of "harm to self or others" when students, faculty, and staff cannot access adequate care that is not provided by their school/employer. In an unfortunately common situation where a graduate student experiencing what is described as moderate suicidality cannot access treatment without seeing a university provider using their university-owned health insurance, he is admitted involuntarily to a university hospital where he is treated by--get this--one of his own professors. And this care team then reaches out to his advisor for information about his academic performance, sharing information in a way that sounds like it violates the spirit of both HIPAA and FERPA by keeping that information only within its own university system. While university-provided student health insurance is becoming much less the norm in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, this is still a huge concern for faculty and staff, to which I can personally attest. He also talks a lot about unjust labor practices in this first chapter.

In the second chapter, Dr. Baldwin examines Trinity College (where he is currently on faculty). He focuses on the public access and public benefit relationships with the surrounding community, and how the university routinely overpromises in that regard. From ice rinks to concerts to day care centers, the university time and again made promises to the community it did not keep. The capstone example is a magnet middle school that Trinity developed as part of its Learning Corridor, a project that came at huge community expense, and never paid the dividends it promised:

"When houses needed to be demolished to complete the project, Perez used the third-party Lemquil Realty or bought them through SINA so that owners wouldn't jack up the prices after realizing the properties were for Trinity. Dobelle and Perez promised the community that 50 percent of the slots at the middle school would be reserved for kids from the 06106 and 06114 zip codes. It never happened. The student split ended up being 50 percent from the suburbs and the other half from Hartford more broadly."

In chapter three, Dr. Baldwin takes on the eminent domain projects of Columbia (that dealt a devastating blow to Harlem) and NYU (which took a completely different tone when dealing with an affluent white community, but still culminated in the same result). In a manner nothing short of insidious, Columbia was able to buy up parcels in the surrounding neighborhood and leave them vacant for years in order to establish the community as a "blight" and then seize it under eminent domain, even as a private institution as long as it promised a public benefit. And instead of having an independent review determine if the neighborhood had been blighted, Columbia was able to pay for the blight study itself. But the public benefit it promised was assuredly vague--neuroscience research, etc. It dismissed out of hand the idea that it owed anything to the community from which it seized the property, saying "We are trying to do things that help the world more broadly. The community is not everything." And despite consulting a community advisory board that voted 73-22 against the expansion project, Columbia pushed ahead full steam and devastated Harlem.

Chapter four gets into a topic that feels perhaps the most timely: police brutality and overreach by campus police departments. Focusing primarily on the University of Chicago, with nods to other institutions. UCPD has one of the largest private security forces in the world, including 100 sworn officers and a "legion" of private security guards. And despite being offered jurisdiction extending well beyond campus boundaries, this private force (along with most university police forces) is exempt from federal oversight, including the reporting of Terry stops and other data required under the Freedom of Information Act. Even after a University of Cincinnati police officer killed Samuel DuBose during a routine traffic stop in 2015, universities have resisted their police departments being required to report this information. And yet as campus police encounter people suspected of committing crimes, students are typically referred to university administration for discipline, while community members (often people of color) are processed through the criminal justice system. And while the murder of George Floyd and resulting uprising has made it politically unpopular in the last year to start up or expand a campus police force, little has been done to shrink the power of those that already exist.

In the fifth and final chapter, Dr. Baldwin turns to Arizona State University's downtown campus and the insular community it created that closed off revenue streams for the small businesses that it relied on to pay the majority of property taxes in the area as it sheltered large corporations from having to pay any through a complex web of contracts and tax breaks. Most alarmingly, they even leased out their public land to private corporations like State Farm, exempting them from property taxes in exchange for direct payments to the university that the state had no jurisdiction to place any spending restrictions on. The entire downtown campus project reeks of for-profit real estate investment couched in a pretense of offering some higher education. Dr. Baldwin so sharply highlights the way even the language used by administrators and developers on the project gives away its neocolonialist motives.

For the epilogue, Dr. Baldwin takes us across the border to Winnipeg to demonstrate what responsive community engagement can look like for a university (and it is dreamy). He offers six recommendations for "building a better urban future" including city-enforced payments in lieu of taxes, community benefits agreements, community-based planning and zoning boards, just and equitable public safety, fair labor practices, and profit sharing of athletic revenues. Only the last of these felt to me under-supported by the book, and overall, I found these suggestions extremely insightful and appropriate.

Overall, I do have to acknowledge that I feel like there is some significant overgeneralization at play. But even in their own individual contexts, these are stories worth telling, and having now lived in eight states, I can attest that all of the universities in the towns and cities where I have lived have erred much closer to the profit-seeking models described in the bulk of this book than the engaged model of the University of Winnipeg presented at the end. These concerns are substantial and all of us who are part of these university communities need to take note.

Much appreciation to PublicAffairs and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for the review.

Read if you: Want a deep dive into the "town-gown" issues, particularly in regard to gentrification, policing, etc.

Librarians/booksellers: I would purchase if you are in a college town or near an urban university; although specific universities are profiled, other colleges/universities face similar situations.

Many thanks to Perseus Books/PublicAffairs and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

To sum up this book in one quote: "The university has shifted from being one small, noble part of the city to serving as a model for the city itself." Baldwin seeks to address the growing disparity between large, influential universities and colleges with the local communities that surround them.

I think the University as a corporation invading and governing community policy decisions is such a fascinating and under-addressed concept in the modern era. The drive for larger profit margins and higher student enrollment are clearly pushing universities out of a space of higher learning and into a much seedier place of backroom real estate deals and grandstanding medical facilities.

While there were parts of this book that had me emphatically nodding along and saying "YES!" , the amount I agreed coincided almost in a near 1:1 ratio of me disagreeing wholeheartedly with other points made or solutions offered. Now let me be clear: that is perfectly okay. I didn't read this book with the thought that I would completely agree and I enjoyed the new perspectives I hadn't considered that this book brought to my attention. However, I wanted so much MORE.

A few such instances include Baldwin hinting at the ways in which universities build their brands/research interests often on the backs of free or exploited student labor. I also thought his one brief sentence on how many universities force first-year students to live on campus or have student meal plans was integral to his belief that universities wish to remain exclusive and keep students safely contained (and therefore not interacting much with the larger city) but these ideas were so glossed over for a focus on race relations that it grew a bit repetitive.

In large part, I think my hesitations with this book stem from how it is formatted. I wish Baldwin had set the chapters up topically, rather than by school. The chapters felt a bit disjointed and like the points weren't being hammered home because it felt a bit all over the place to me. You want to talk about how campus police are affecting larger urban communities? Have a chapter on it and reference the schools that stand out with issues in this area.

I also really wanted statistics and what I was presented with was a lot of anecdotal evidence from residents and university workers about how these universities were interacting well or poorly with their surrounding communities. While all of that is fine, I think a better structure and more statistical evidence would have greatly added to the author's arguments in the book. Otherwise, I didn't walk away agreeing with his perspectives on many things.

Overall, an interesting read. I think the only thing this book did for me is make me more conscious there is a problem with universities acting as governing bodies without much oversight, but the author's arguments did not at all convince me that his solutions are the right ones.

I suspect people who love focusing on problems through a racial lens will thoroughly enjoy this book, but I personally felt it could have been so much more.