Walls and Bridges

# 86, December 11, 2005

Walls and Bridges

This follows on from #81, "Don't Fence Me In."

“Projecting our images in space and in time…”

– John Lennon, “Mind Games”

A friend and I were walking along 34th Street heading toward the subway station at Market Street, discussing a matter of great historical import – no doubt!

A man approached. He was disheveled and his fair skin was darkened by the fact that he clearly had not had a bath recently. He was clearly down and out.

He beckoned to us as we passed and we turned to him. He asked us where the nearest hospital besides HUP (the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania) was. I told him that Presbyterian Hospital was about four blocks away on Market Street.

This did not appear to reassure him in any way. He told us that he had been at HUP but that they had turned him away. He then revealed the cause of his concern, a sight the horror of which cannot truly be described. He lifted his shirt and pulled his pants down slightly for just a fraction of a second to uncover a small volcano-like wound, red around the slopes with a dark, cavernous center. Bullet wound, or what? “I need help,” he said.

Immediately, my friend and I started reaching for our wallets and searched around for a taxi to take this man to hospital. But the man then said to us that the doctors at HUP had told him that he had to go back to the same hospital where he had the original operation in North Philadelphia and that the Taxi fare was $9.60.

Alarm bells went off. For my part, I had been fooled out of money before on several occasions. I had also given a different man about $9 (all I had on me) toward a taxi fare described as $13.50. The request for an exact amount of money for the fare began to make the two of us feel that what we had seen wasn't real. We began to wonder whether a man would be able to walk around with such a wound, and why there was no blood.

We each gave the man a couple of dollars; he did not protest, but turned to catch another person's attention.

Now, I do not know what really happened in this chance meeting. I may have been tricked; I may have been insensitive. Either way I am not happy about it.

What I do know about it is that back in 1977 this incident would not have taken place on Chestnut and 34th. Maybe somewhere else in the city, but not on the Penn campus.

Why not? Well, in 1977 there used to be a public hospital standing right behind HUP. A man in this unfortunate person's situation would have walked a couple of blocks and would have been taken care of immediately. Such a scam, if it was one, could not possibly have worked.

The hospital is no more. In the late 1970s, Penn had wanted to expand its own hospital, and having a public hospital right on the campus brought to the area large numbers of people, like the man I met, who did not help contribute to the image Penn wished to project. At the time, Penn was not faring well: its football team kept losing in the Ivy League, its financial situation was not great, and it seemed, by comparison to the other Ivy League colleges, no better than a poor relation. Students wore, "Not Penn State" sweatshirts like they really worried that people didn't know the difference.

The university under President Martin Meyerson made a rather handsome deal with the Rizzo city administration to take over the ground on which the public hospital stood and demolish the building. No doubt dollars changed hands, but the most important part of the deal, as far as we are concerned, was the University's agreement to increase the number of Mayoral Scholars to 125 per year.

The Mayoral Scholars program had been increasing since its inception in the 18th century. Essentially, what it represented was payment to the people of the city in exchange for the city ceding land to the university and, I suppose, to compensate for the amount of disruption the university was causing through displacement of its neighboring populations.

The Rizzo administration was replaced in 1979, however, and consequently the University was able to table its commitment to the Mayoral Scholars program.

So now we are left wondering what the commitment of the University of Pennsylvania (and other universities) is to surrounding communities. First, whole streets of families have been displaced to establish university buildings and parking lots; second, a public hospital has been replaced by university-run private institutions; and third, people who are injured can be turned away from the hospital door because they do not have the money to pay for their health care (even though they have, by city taxes, indirectly subsidized the establishment of the very facilities from which they have been evicted).

Not long after the event on 38^th and Chestnut, around Christmas of 1992, I was asked to help put together a conference for the following spring that was to focus on the University's relationship with West Philadelphia and the kinds of programs that it has put together to aid people living in this section of the city. The idea was that Penn should become a model for all urban universities to follow, and be something, perhaps, that the Clinton administration could look to for ideas about dealing with urban blight. But, the very fact that the university was fighting the case of the Mayoral Scholars in court, win or lose, was a public embarrassment that made the planning of such a conference somewhat ludicrous. More important, I noted to the organizers, an examination of the history of Penn's relationship to the community revealed that the university had a history and policy of distancing itself from West Philadelphia and only a recently developed secondary policy of engaging with the results of this distancing. My services were no longer required after writing down and voicing such opinions!

Over the last twenty-five years the university has attempted to bring in people from a wider section of the country, attempting to expand their catchment areas, at the same time that they recruited fewer and fewer people from the Delaware Valley. Twenty years ago, a class of which I was a member was comprised predominantly of eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Long Island students. Today the student profile looks more like Princeton, with a large number of elite students from suburbs all over the country.

University officials believed that in order to get these suburban students to come to an urban campus stuck in the middle of poor neighborhoods insulation was required. Police were hired in abundance, and once they began questioning anyone who appeared to be an outsider, a veritable cordon sanitaire was established around the perimeter of the university – aided by new car parks, and other imposing buildings that had entrances looking inwards onto the campus and not out onto the streets. Fortress Pennsylvania!

If one now stands at 38th and Market and looks east one can see an imposing wall between you and the heart of the university. A reliable source (a former advisor to President Sheldon Hackney) informed me that one trustee even proposed (without being forced to resign for insensitivity) that the university construct an actual wall around the campus to make it more difficult for outsiders to infiltrate the university's environs. Other trustees pointed out that this was redundant, that there was no need when all the newer buildings had been designed to create the equivalent of a wall. In one instance, the desire for this effect was such that a building which had been designed in the 1970s to reduce energy costs by having its large windows facing towards the south, was turned around so that it faced north thus creating huge heating bills. The expanse of windows would have opened up the building, and symbolically the university also to the street.

The successful campaign to dump the mayoral scholars program was just part of this overall university policy of Princetonization.

Not surprisingly, the university has had a public relations problem with the surrounding community. People get moved, they get harassed, they cannot use its library, they cannot use its facilities, the hospital doors swing shut in their face, and an antagonistic relationship is cemented. That's a public relations problem.

But instead of reversing its policies, the university funds organizations to work in the schools and with community groups. Such efforts can only be bandaids. First, the university shows quite clearly by its overriding commitment to increasing the number of out-of-area students that its bottom line is money. It therefore will not make the kind of financial commitment to really redress some of the wrongs that it has committed in the past and truly help boost employment, wages and other opportunities in the area.

Second, the fact that there is not a large contingent of Philadelphia-based students at the university means that there isn't a very large body of students willing to really get involved in local problems (and protest university policies). A number of truly idealistic students tutor at West Philadelphia High or help in some other way, but they are a small minority of the total. The surrounding community is represented as threatening to most students, who will avoid stepping off campus at all costs.

Third, pretending that the university is located in the suburbs and denying its strong historical relationship and debt to Philadelphia creates an academic climate in which the problems in the city can be treated with detachment. The problems of West Philadelphia become problems of crime, drugs, and single-parent families that require careful study before remedies are suggested so as not to “throw money at the problem.” They are no longer seen as problems connected to the flight of capital (i.e., the flight of the university) and the distancing of the middle classes from the urban poor (the removal of university employees to the suburbs in part caused by the university's antagonistic relationship with the community).

The university might have begun to correct these problems by settling its legal Mayoral Scholars case on the plaintiff’s terms. It could then have started to think about inviting the community in, rather than inviting itself out into the community so that it can give advice to people who already know pretty well what problems they face. It chose not to do these things. It has instead undertaken a very public campaign to provide loans to its faculty to buy and restore houses in the vicinity, it has undertaken a green campaign to improve the environment and landscape of West Philadelphia, and it has endeavored to set up a new public school, so that the members of the University community will feel comfortable sending their children to a local school. But the situation is not improved dramatically. In part, this is because the university still has a siege mentality. The efforts to provide a system of safe transportation for members of the university community, for example, once again distanced those people from the surrounding residents – with fewer university students riding public transportation – and also had the effect of taking people off the streets so that those who happened to be on the streets became less safe than they had been. Similarly, pumping money into real estate, while integrating the communities, has the potential to raise taxes, pushing longtime residents further away from the university, while the very high rents that the university charges in their on-campus residences allows local landlords to inflate the rents in the vicinity of the University – also pushing poorer residents out of the area.

This problem of its relationship with the surrounding community is not a new one for the University of Pennsylvania. Indeed, with the publicity brought to bear on recent cosmetic efforts things might even seem better now than in the past. Certainly, the organized protest movements that existed in the past no longer seem as vocal, and what we see instead, I think, is acts of violence carried out by individuals on individuals. While such acts cannot be condoned, they nevertheless are a product in part of the way in which the university chose to develop at the expense of the surrounding community.

The animosity between the university and its surrounding community goes back to the 1870s when the University moved from South to West Philadelphia. This move was made partly to take advantage of the more open space and cheaper land in that area, but it was also an attempt to escape what was perceived to be a harsh and unsavory environment in South Philadelphia, with its rapidly growing immigrant and African American communities. The words of the Provost, Charles J. Stille, referring to this area as “a vile neighborhood, growing viler every day,” sums up the attitude of the University to the city’s poor communities.[1]

Indeed, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was indirectly a product of the attempts of some members of the university community to combat this pervasive attitude. Susan P. Wharton, a member of one of the city's oldest and most prominent Quaker families (a family that had endowed the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania), was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia College Settlement which had been founded in 1892. Her concern for African Americans in South Philadelphia, matched by other members of the University community. It also coincided with the University's attempts to acquire more land from the City of Philadelphia, and showing a visible commitment to the city and an awareness of the need to combat some of its "social problems," which were in part caused by the university’s withdrawal was politic at such a time. This attitude did not extend to making Du Bois feel welcomed into the community itself (he worked almost entirely off-campus).

Such attitudes, which would later see an attempt to move the university out of the city altogether to Valley Forge, was matched by promises that the university made to the city on which they later reneged, as in the case of the Mayoral Scholars. One clear example of this can be found in the opening of the university library in 1891 on land that had been given to the university by the city. In exchange for this land, Penn was to provide the city with a free library.[2] No distinction was made in this agreement between Penn’s new library and the other free libraries in the city. And yet, one would have to say looking at the university library system today, that it is not a free library that welcomes members of the surrounding community in. It has a very tight security system and getting in without a student or faculty card from another college is very difficult, and borrowing books would be nigh on impossible.

In the 1960s, the whole residential area west of 38^th Street was opened up to the university by massive displacement of whole communities of people. Simultaneously, the university was distanced from the community further by the closing down of the surface trolleys that ran through the middle of the college, and putting them underground (with stops, one should note, on the corners, and not in the heart of the campus). Thus, whereas a member of the surrounding community might once have been intimately aware of the university from her daily trips on the trolley (and so perhaps more comfortable alighting to visit her free library), she would now have only a hazy idea of the university and would not feel welcome on its lawns or in its buildings.

The last thing to note about this distancing of the university from its community is the impact that it can have on intellectual pursuits on the campus, in particular as these touch on local neighborhoods. One would not want to entirely discount the work that has come out of the University of Pennsylvania that has focused on such neighborhoods, and it has often been written with intentions sympathetic to that community. The work of Elijah Anderson especially comes to mind as a very powerful attempt to speak to and for the communities. Nevertheless, there is an academic distance that has been fostered in many of the disciplines that places walls of objectivity between the scholar and the community s/he studies. When I suggested to Michael Katz that he bring together a group of scholars to consider the legacy of Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, it was this interaction between the scholar and the community that I had in mind. For part of the great significance of this work was in contributing to this relationship of the outsider observing and assessing a community, even making claims about what it (singular) needed. What this required, I felt, was that the scholars involved in this project undertake an assessment of themselves and their own relationships to both the community they were studying and that within which they were working. Katz seemed to like the idea of a book that celebrated Du Bois’s monumental work, but the idea of self-examination and auto-critique went no further.

And I suppose that represents, by itself, a parable speaking to the relationship between the university and urban communities.