and offices for research; classrooms and lecture halls for teaching; buildings for administration, recreation, and retail services. Across the country, higher-education institutions catalyzed changes in land development in rural or suburban areas, and brought people together in dense settlements—nodes of communication, recreation, and inquiry—to create new knowledge.6 The economic vision for higher education required a complementary spatial vision for universities and their campuses.
Despite a long and intimate relationship between universities and cities, scholars have largely written universities out of urban history.7 Higher-education historians emphasize the impact of the Morrill Land Grant Acts, which often provided land outside of urban centers and promoted agricultural education.8 This emphasis has maintained the image of university campuses as bucolic, rural places more like farms than cities. Urban historians typically break the twentieth century into a pre-Depression era of industrial vitality and immigrant influx and an era of suburbanization and urban crisis that starts, at earliest, in World War II.9 In neither of these eras do universities figure in scholarship on urban life.
In this book, I put universities at the center of metropolitan transformation and cities at the center of university transformations. Turn-of-the-century industrial magnates plowed their profits into higher education institutions and helped create the postwar economy that sacrificed manufacturing might in favor of knowledge work, often in suburbs. The crisis of the Great Depression prompted an active federal investment in higher education that was carried forward and intensified during World War II and the Cold War. Simply put, the “meds and eds” economy has roots far earlier in the century than historians have acknowledged and was closely linked even then to metropolitan growth.
To fully appreciate the economic value and power of universities, we must retrace that relationship back to its origins in the nineteenth century. American industrialization and the Civil War changed the stature of colleges and universities when policy leaders identified them as instruments to fulfill state ambitions. The Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 reflected this bargain, providing federal resources to support the creation of engineering and agricultural colleges, where scientific knowledge could be made practical and applied to promote economic growth and improved health and welfare for the growing nation.10
Civic boosters in the nineteenth century hardly distinguished colleges and universities from factories or other state institutions that could help attract new residents and new customers to their cities, and colleges were small ones at that.11 From their founding, however, universities introduced class differences to cities in ways that only intensified as the institutions became key platforms for social and economic mobility—for those who were allowed to enter. Progressive Era reformers at universities emphasized expertise, education, and the use of scientific knowledge to tame the city and manage American life. They created settlement houses to minister to immigrant masses and government institutes to improve urban political administration.12 The philanthropic origins of the University of Chicago and Stanford University in the era are well documented, but many other colleges and universities were born of founding alliances with business interests.13 In Southern California, for example, two real-estate developers, brothers Harold and Edwin Janss, helped turn a teacher training school into the University of California, Los Angeles, which became a major research university. The wealthy Duke tobacco family transformed Trinity College, a small private institution in Durham, North Carolina, into Duke University, beginning in the 1890s. By the 1930s, it was among the nation’s top schools.14 What these relationships demonstrate, in part, is that regional leaders in the early part of the century were essential to the creation and expansion of universities. Moreover, this regional support helped incorporate and expand higher education into the realm of statecraft by promoting local economic growth and putting universities to work solving issues of interest to the state.
The Great Depression ironically brought about significant opportunities for universities to grow.15 The New Deal expanded the federal commitment to higher education, and the Roosevelt administration fundamentally transformed the relationship among universities, the government, and cities. The National Youth Administration employed students, the Works Progress Administration funded faculty research, and the Public Works Administration (PWA) paid for new construction. These expenditures fulfilled short-term work relief goals and long-term economic development ambitions, transforming the American economy and workforce. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration did not invent the state commitment to higher education, but it provided unprecedented resources for its growth, fundamentally changing the character of college life. In the process, they made universities central parts of the project of building the liberal state.
Investments in spatial political economy constitute some of the most enduring effects of New Deal education aid. Federal programs such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration mortgage guarantee programs, and the Interstate Highway System subsidized suburban development and privileged outlying areas at the expense of central cities, creating new forms of racial segregation and economic inequality.16 But the PWA provided funds for 1,286 buildings on college campuses across the country, granting $83 million and lending another $29 million for new construction, renovation, and expansion of existing facilities. These investments catalyzed nearly $750 million of construction at colleges and universities—one-sixth of the nation’s total construction spending at the Depression’s low point in 1933.17 More than just “priming the pump,” as in Roosevelt’s famous phrase, this construction was an investment in the future of the nation’s economy. Using what Roosevelt called “bricks and mortar and labor and loans,” these projects built new laboratories, classrooms, and dormitories that served millions of students over the subsequent decades, increasing professional knowledge while expanding university capacity and student access to higher education.18 This growing access meant rising enrollments, necessitated the expansion of existing campuses, and led to establishment of new ones. These campuses grew increasingly urban, became busier places that anchored growing parts of their cities, and made the institutions more prominent political forces.
PWA investments also helped strengthen racial segregation. Southern states usually had two (or more) land grant institutions, one for black students and one for whites, and the PWA lent more to Southern institutions that could not provide a local match than it did to Northern institutions.19 Thus, these investments relayered segregation on the new urban investments, meaning the new American city was not so different from the old one—but with larger colleges and universities and a more productive economy.
When World War II reached American shores, universities were already proven allies for federal action. They had accepted aid and fought economic Depression, and were ready and willing to help fight a global war as well. Through efforts such as the U.S. Navy V programs and the Manhattan Project, universities took on national goals and gratefully accepted federal resources. By 1944, when Congress passed the G.I. Bill, perhaps the best-known example of aid for higher education, universities were already indispensable tools for enacting federal policy.
At the end of World War II, universities and cities faced linked crises. Higher education had taken on massive new responsibilities and struggled to adjust to the increasingly democratic promise of education. Millions of new students and scores of new programs meant jam-packed campuses and classrooms, while global research imperatives put teaching and scholarship in tension. These were the problems of a surplus of resources and vitality. Cities, meanwhile, had suffered from fifteen years of neglect and disinvestment. Industrial cities, especially, saw overcrowding and overuse of real estate and infrastructure—too many people packed into a single house, too many conversions of apartments to small kitchenette studios. Suburban growth began to solve a number of issues for political and economic leaders, but began to drain population and economic activity from central cities. For universities located in the arsenals of democracy—the industrial cities that had led the productive efforts in World War II—urban problems became university problems. They turned to the federal government for aid and became what one historian has called a “parastate.”20 Universities could meet federal goals and allow the actual state to deliver services to the public indirectly. Channeling federal expenditures through universities had the benefit of realizing political objectives while helping