On a sunny January afternoon in 2015, hundreds of students and locals attended a community meeting at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee to discuss plans for a new homeless facility.
The meeting was the result of a push by local businesspeople to create a homeless shelter—which they predicted would be a boon to the city and an economic boon for the area. The proposal had been years in the making, but as one of the locals who attended put it, "the university was involved at all levels, and there was this feeling that, 'Hey, our kids go here.'"
This sentiment—along with a newfound willingness on the part of local leaders to turn to university officials for help on issues involving social ills—is central to one of the most striking developments in the study of American higher education over the past decade: a close alliance between many colleges and universities and urban centers.
In these areas, local politicians frequently turn to colleges as they try to deal with issues that range from a spate of robberies to a drop in test scores to a rise in the number of homeless people. While university officials might be reluctant to use a phrase like "policymaking," the partnership is not hard to see. In many cases, universities act as advisers to local governments and agencies, provide data to help officials understand problems, and offer training and research assistance. The relationship seems symbiotic in other ways, too: Colleges have increasingly found themselves in the position of being regional anchors and employers. For some higher ed institutions, a large number of local students is necessary for the bottom line—for both college presidents and elected officials, partnerships make sense.
The new partnership has emerged amid new levels of urban activism in communities around the country, where locals are increasingly seeing themselves as stewards of the city, and sometimes even more ambitious than many of their city's elected officials. Whether to preserve the quality of life in the city or to revitalize it, people in these communities are taking a more active role in guiding the future of their neighborhoods, and universities have often become a part of that discussion.
In Milwaukee, the university sits alongside the Medical College of Wisconsin, which opened in 1956 as a community hospital for the large, poor Irish Catholic population in the area. (In fact, UWM is the only institution that was already open when the hospital was created.) When the first major waves of immigration hit the area—Irish, Polish, Italian—communities in Milwaukee started having less interaction with the local hospitals, which were often Catholic, and more interaction with Catholic institutions, like St. Vincent de Paul (which also became a university in the 1960s). To people who grew up in those neighborhoods, being served by a local university with a medical program was an important selling point.
"Most Milwaukeeans didn't understand the university system, didn't understand they could do anything with it, couldn't see the possibilities of it," says Eric Miller, who studied at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and now directs the Milwaukee Area Technical College (a technical school associated with the university), which was started in the 1970s to serve low-income residents.
In the 1960s, in Milwaukee, the university was a place where African-Americans "didn't feel so uncomfortable," Miller says. Today the school has "a large urban population, a huge number of minorities, the most diverse student body in the country." But like other large urban universities, UWM hasn't always been good at talking to the city and the communities around it.
"The problem is that once you get your hand in the cookie jar, there's no easy way to get out," says Miller. "There's a certain amount of arrogance that is part of the university system, and UWM definitely has that problem."
On a recent morning I visited UWM's main campus, which is a pleasant fifteen-minute drive from downtown. The university is an easy drive for both students and researchers to make. Its research center, the Milwaukee Public Museum, is about a mile away. As in other cities, Milwaukee sees its university as a center of innovation, particularly in tech fields like medicine, engineering, and computer science.
In 2014, the University of Wisconsin System, which operates UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, and a number of other universities, came under fire from state legislators who accused it of giving special financial incentives to some campuses and failing to meet state-mandated levels of spending. Then, just a few years later, the system was criticized for giving lavish new buildings to its top administrators, including campus presidents, and for allowing some campuses to offer courses online that some legislators saw as unnecessary luxuries.
"It's a mixed message," says Chris Ahmuty, executive director of the Association of American Universities (AAU), which represents the world's top thirty research universities. "Wisconsin wants to have it both ways."
But as universities face budget cuts across the country and more scrutiny of their spending, they have become keen to explain how they work with local communities.
UWM, with just over 30,000 undergraduates and 14,000 students in its professional and graduate programs, is smaller than most of its peers in the state. But like many large universities in the country, it has seen an influx of international students and a new emphasis on entrepreneurship. The school serves both the inner city and areas nearby—which are increasingly gentrified and wealthier. The median family income in Milwaukee County is just $26,610, and about 60 percent of the population has a high school diploma.
UWM serves as something of a hub for entrepreneurs who are trying to apply cutting-edge technology to local industries. The school hosts the Wisconsin Advanced Manufacturing Center (WAMC), which serves as a research hub for firms, from the University of Michigan to a former Google executive, who are trying to help Wisconsin stay at the forefront of the state's economy.
"It's a really unique model," says Steve Miller, the CEO of the WAMC. He explains that "all of us are trying to get to the same place in Milwaukee, so it becomes easier for us to collaborate."
For example, he said, tech entrepreneurs from Google—which has been funding some of its R&D activities in Milwaukee—are collaborating with a former Microsoft executive who is interested in using data analytics to understand crime in the city.
In addition to collaborating with businesses, the university has worked closely with local officials, both as they address problems like homelessness and as they try to make life better for their residents. Miller said that he often tells the elected officials, "I'm not here to tell you what to do, but I'm here to help."
In the same vein, one of the goals of the WAMC is to "make Milwaukee the most entrepreneurial city in the country," he adds.
In Milwaukee, the WAMC serves as an academic anchor for all of the collaborations. Miller's mission statement suggests that the WAMC is interested in the long-term impact of its work. But when I asked him about the difference between the lab and the business environment, he had an answer.
"Our lab is the best lab in the world," he says.
UWM became especially important to the city after it opened its medical school. While there are always some medical students from the city, Miller says it's easier to get someone from Milwaukee to UW than anywhere else. "The medical students from Milwaukee feel at home in the campus," he says. "They don't get out of it the way they would elsewhere."
Miller himself attended the medical school and has worked closely with a number of elected officials, including Milwaukee's current mayor, Tom Barrett. "They were happy to hear from me," Miller says, "but it was usually not because I was an expert in their space."
The University of Wisconsin's involvement in the city has helped the school stay relevant in the years after some of its other neighbors in Madison went through waves of downsizing. "A lot of people will tell you that Milwaukee is the best place they've ever been," Miller says.
UWM's growth is one example of how urban universities around the country are trying to adapt to changing landscapes. While colleges and universities were once seen as institutions that only served big cities—with large student bodies from an affluent or middle-class background—they have increasingly grown more urban, or at least local. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), which enrolled 2,600 international students in 2016, is one example of a school that caters to students who come from places like China, Korea, India, and Nigeria, with a total of 43 percent of its students hailing from out of state.
In some ways, university officials were happy to have more students with different backgrounds on campus. But increasingly these students' backgrounds influence the university as well. They come with different sets of experiences and cultural norms.
"There's always going to be students who don't understand that when you give out your ID, you are sharing that personal information," says Chris Ahmuty, who was previously executive director of the AAU. "There's going to be some pushback there, even among students."
But Ahmuty says this is different from some communities' perception that their universities were largely populated by people who were privileged or middle- or upper-class. "If the campus itself isn't a hotbed for urban issues, that perception will follow them everywhere," he says.
Milwaukee is a city where schools in many neighborhoods were closed when they fell
