Universities: Making the Most of Boston’s Top Assets     

If the leaders of some of the world’s most preeminent universities – institutions founded for public benefit –can’t sit together to plan strategically for the benefit of the region they make their home, then what hope is there for any leadership anywhere in our time?

Known and respected across continents, the “eds” and “meds” — Greater Boston’s universities, colleges, hospitals, research laboratories — are the region’s undisputed global marker. They’re magnets for billions in research grants. The ideas they generate are constantly spinning off new firms, producing some of the world’s most highly sophisticated devices and substances, vastly enriching the local economy. Their very special missions — the industry of the mind and the arts of healing — seem destined to be the Boston region’s sustaining force far into the future.

But is the base secure? Do the Boston region’s citizens — and political leaders — recognize how critical these institutions are to the entire area’s future fortunes? Is the Boston community cultivating its wondrous student base – and holding enough graduates to compete effectively with such magnets as Austin, San Francisco and New York?

The new Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT by Frank O. Gehry. Photo by Jonathan Wiggs, Globe Staff.

Perhaps most critical, do the eds and meds grasp the startling reality that increasingly, they are becoming the big show in town – lead employers and purchasers and economic actors? Business is still a huge force, with power to lead and join in leadership efforts. But in a global economy, business’s focus is increasingly outside the region, and it’s clearly not as dominant as it once was. The eds and meds, by contrast, are geographically rooted. From labor pool to public safety, transit systems to clean air and water, schools to neighborhoods for their faculty and staff, they rely heavily on the Greater Boston region that’s their home.

Clearly, the time has come for these institutions to start assuming some of the role accorded top dogs in every citistate across the globe: key regional conveners, policy leaders, project and deal makers. 

Across the region, in groups and individual interviews with university leaders and observers, we heard lots of rationales laid out to explain why universities can’t be regional leaders – or even talk much with each other. The big oaks – Harvard and MIT in particular – are said to be too busy fulfilling their missions as national and global research centers. Institutional pride blocks the presidents and chancellors from extensive collaboration – oftentimes, it would seem, from even talking together. Even when there’s a really big breakthrough – like the 2003 announcement of a $300 million joint Harvard/MIT teaching hospital institute to translate the human genome data into actual cures for disease – whispers are heard of agreements as complex as “negotiating the European Union.”   

And rarely do the universities collaborate on civic agendas. For them to act in a concerted or strategic way, one is told, would require some prestigious third party asking them to make the move. No individual university president or chancellor, we heard repeatedly, would dare step out in front, assume leadership, for fear of offending egos and institutional pride of the others in the pack. 

As outsiders, we find all the rationales unconvincing – and dangerous. If the leaders of some of the world’s  most preeminent universities, institutions founded for public benefit, can’t sit together to plan strategically for the benefit of the region they make their home, then what hope is there for any leadership anywhere in our time?

And the ground should be more fertile than ever before. The eight top Boston research universities’ own 2003 Appleseed research report, underscoring their |massive ($7.4 billion a year) economic impact on the Boston region, was a breakthrough in hard-to-achieve collective action. 

Helping to till that soil are some top institutions. Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, with its annual Governing Greater Boston report, is providing expert intellectual analysis of how the Boston region does and could cope with its challenges. Contributing a new wave of action-based research on the area’s housing cost crisis and general economic prospects are two excellent centers based at Northeastern University — the Center for Urban and Regional Policy and the Center for Labor Market Studies. 

Richard Freeland is setting a leadership marker by unabashedly using his platform as president of Northeastern University to raise sensitive regional issues to new levels of visibility – the peril of pending workforce shortages, for example. He consciously identifies his institution as “an urban university,” focused not just on strengthening the Boston community but “testing ideas of intellectual and policy significance for national issues.” The secret, Freeland told us, lies in the adage, “think globally, act locally.... We can use our involvement with the life of the city, in education, in health care, in small business development, in transportation, criminal justice and public safety– you name it – as the vehicle through which we develop and test ideas of intellectual and policy significance for national issues.” 

But are such ideas universally embraced across the region’s academic landscape? The answer is no. It is true, of course, that one can’t find any city or region where universities and medical institutions have fulfilled anything close to their full potential as community problem-solvers. Competing priorities – fund-raising, new academic programs, technology, buildings, faculty recruitment – often trump issues of community engagement. 

Even so, a scan of best practices reveals a number of colleges and universities — Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Trinity in Hartford, and Clark in Worcester, for example — that have scored dramatic breakthroughs  in community impact. Cumulatively, Boston universities lag in best practices on outreach to their surrounding communities and formulating conscious strategies to build the region (beyond its reputation) as the place more young people will want to come for college and stay to build their careers. 

A New Focus? 

Boston College Commencement.  Photo by Michael Robinson-Chavez, Globe Staff.

Our friend John W. Gardner, the late founder of Common Cause, the Independent Sector and other civic institutions, pronounced in 1998: “Our colleges and universities need a healthy and vital society in which to flourish. The cities and metropolitan regions of this nation are studies in social fragmentation. ... The colleges and universities cannot stand aside and let others struggle with these problems.”

So how are Boston area universities doing? In some ways, they seem more socially engaged than ever. Since the 1960s, we were reminded by Boston College Chancellor J. Donald Monan, there’s been a “sea change” in student attitudes, with thousands now engaged in community service. Monan’s lead example is university-encouraged student community engagement in the community.

“Over 50 percent of our kids are engaged in various types of volunteer service, both here in Boston and abroad. A lot of this is social help to underprivileged people. But also a lot of intellectual assistance the projects provide. Our school of education works with school facilities, our school of nursing with health care issues, especially children, our law school provides counseling for immigrant families with citizenship problems, our school of social work provides psychological assistance.” 

Check in with Boston University and you hear similar tales of one outreach program after another – for example the 17-year old Boston Community Service Center in which some 1,100 volunteers (faculty, staff, alumni) spend some 57,000 hours a year in such programs as youth tutoring, collecting food for shelter, delivering meals to homebound people with AIDS, and recycling. Outgoing Chancellor John Silbur boasted to us of how BU has adopted Chelsea’s public schools and given scholarships to Boston high school graduates. BU’s most famous outreach may be its part-  nership to administer Chelsea’s once-floundering public schools, now 14 years old – a longevity and depth of university-public school involvement without precedent in the US. 

But the achievement John Silber seems to prize the most is BU’s scholarship program for Boston public high school students, which he and then-Mayor Kevin White invented in 1973 in a troubled time of court desegregation orders and riots in South Boston. BU had to wave its standards for the first high school graduates selected; by contrast, the group of 48 accepted this year had average SAT scores of 1259. Since 1973, close to 1,500 students have received scholarships, at a cumulative cost of $88 million. “Seven hundred of the graduates are living in Boston, so we are making a difference,” says Silber. 

Olin College volunteers in service learning.  Photo by Wendy Maeda, Globe Staff.

These efforts are not isolated. Harvard has 240 community service programs in operation. MIT’s range of outreach activities includes intensive engagement with Cambridge public schools in a field MIT really knows a lot about – science and math instruction. UMass/Boston students are deeply involved in community projects — from community-based research to exemplary leadership programs. 

MIT has also been trying to give the region significant assistance by cosponsoring, with the Boston Globe, major supplements examining specific challenges to the city. In 1984, MIT collaborated with the Globe to produce a special supplement on the impact of the ‘80s real estate boom. In 1994, the focus was the region’s intermodal transportation options; in 1998, the future of Boston Harbor; in 2002, it was “Beyond the Big Dig,” a look at the options for the Rose Kennedy Greenway. For the 2002 project, MIT’s Department of Urban Studies went as far afield as Barcelona, Paris and San Francisco to find relevant examples for Boston to consider. Typically, the studies – imaginatively directed by MIT research scientist Tom Piper – have involved major series by WCVB-Ch5, public forums sponsored by the Boston Foundation, and in recent years a dedicated web site.

But as praiseworthy all these efforts surely are, the test of true effectiveness of university involvement in Greater Boston is a high bar. It’s whether the engagement goes deep, to the universities’ core academic programs. It’s whether, says Liz Hollander, head of the national Campus Compact effort (headquartered at Brown University in Providence), the academic departments are open to making the region around them their laboratory. And whether they engage students actively in discovery and analysis, moving them toward “systemic insights.” The result, she adds, can be “a wonderful marriage of theory and practice– truly great learning.” 

And waiting to be addressed is an overriding issue: do all the university contributions and engagement add up to a strategy? The compelling reality is that the United States now has the greatest income disparities in the developed world. Boston region income divisions, between educated “haves” and less fortunate “havenots,” are vivid and potentially fatal to hopes of a strong civil society built on opportunities for all classes. 

In the spirit of academia’s own value of constant discovery, isn’t the early 21st century the time, and the Boston region the place, to conceive and deploy a global model and best practice of intense university-community engagement that addresses core problems?

Knight Foundation president Hodding Carter III, on a 1998 trip to Boston, pulled no punches on the challenge to its universities. “The academy (here) has been extraordinarily good at creating mandarins who were able to  speak power’s truth,” said Carter, citing such Harvard originating heavyweights as McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger. “But,” Carter continued, “what of nurturing community? And addressing our deep and deepening levels of economic inequality?” Carter pointed especially to the schools, “in the cities, where public education is a disaster area and the academy is central to its redemption.” 

Precisely to the point, studies by the Harvard Civil Rights Project show massive racial resegregation of the schools is impacting Greater Boston. In the public schools of Boston and the region’s inner core communities, the public school enrollment is heavily minority. Hispanic children are heavily concentrated in the 17 blue-collar satellite cities ringing the region — Lynn, Lowell, Brockton, Gloucester and others. By contrast, in the residential suburbs, school enrollment is overwhelmingly white.

And there’s little doubt: segregated schools equal a segregated society; without massive efforts to bridge the gaps, class fissures and massive income inequality simply deepen.

One is led to ask: Can this challenge really be brought to the universities? Is it realistic to tell them they’re central to the “redemption” of struggling urban schools? And, by extension, to suggest that they address the dilemmas of the deeply troubled neighborhoods where most failing schools are located? 

Before a torrent of “it’s too hard” or “someone else’s” problem statements are heard, let’s note that an immense amount of society’s treasure – in government appropriations, in the federal and state tax deductibility of contributions, in exemption from local property taxes – flows into the universities. The community deserves clear payback, more than tokenism.    

The new UMass/Boston Campus Center.  Photo by Pat Greenhouse, Globe Staff.

So what could the Boston region’s colleges and universities, collectively, aim for and achieve? 

No one would expect (or want) them to prescribe a single strategy to combat the region’s deep economic, educational and societal disparities. Yet the area’s universities are already edging into the game, through a plethora of outreach programs – from after-school tutoring and recreation programs to assistance to immigrants in gaining citizenship, from computer labs to scholarships for high-performing city high school students. 

Why not, then, assemble a small university secretariat to keep track, first of all, of what might be called the “society healing” outreach, intervention and assistance programs underway and being planned in the Boston region? And then, with the blessing and active participation of university presidents, and with faculty broadly invited to participate, challenge accepted wisdom, and raise and debate new ideas at an annual Goals and Progress conference? 

Faculty would have an opportunity to report – not only describing their own outreach activities but also challenging each other to define, based on hard research, what programs and activities really promote better results from education? Or successfully educate families to avoid fiscal disasters? Or promote equity across the high walls of divided or disinterested municipalities? Or how – through advance community outreach and other methods – to break down the suspicion, and sometimes rejection, that academics are known to encounter in Boston area communities that have learned to be leery of university motives.

We believe such conferences would represent a powerful signal of concern, competence, and preparation for action, first to the people of Greater Boston itself, and second to a wider world that expects excellence and models for the future to be nurtured in this great “citistate.”