 I just read De'Varian Baldwin's book in the shadow of the ivory towers, and I thought, we need to have him here. He needs to be the keynote of a conference. People need to know what he has to say. We've had an amazing day, day one of our conference on the University of the neighborhood, a lot of truth has been told, a lot of challenging perspectives have been shared, and we are learning from colleagues from a number of universities around the country. Tomorrow, we're going to convene again. We'll have workshops over at Wake Downtown. You can find out more about those by going online and checking out our program. Say another word or two about that later. So day two is about learning how to do the work that day one told us we need to do. Before we go any further, I want to say a couple of words of thanks. My colleagues in the Humanities Institute, Amy Metham and Kimberly Scholl are extraordinary. I think, yeah, yeah, absolutely. If you are associated with Wake Forest, you know this already. Nobody keeps track of details better than Kimberly Scholl. Nobody organizes a day of like Amy Metham. If you never need anybody to organize a two-day conference with 10 or 11 out-of-town guests, they're the people to do it. Do not ask them to do it, please, but they are the people to do it. So I thank Amy and Kimberly. I should say my name is Dean Franco, and I am the Director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest, and on behalf of my colleagues and our co-host, the Office of the Dean of the College, I welcome you to tonight's program. In a moment, my colleague, Corey Walker, will introduce our distinguished guest, Dr. Bavarian Baldwin. Dr. Baldwin will speak for about 40 minutes, and then we will have time for a discussion. We'll pass around comment cards in which you can write questions or comments for Dr. Baldwin, and then we'll pick those cards up and I think Amy's going to bring them to me, and I'll try to relay the questions that are coming up a lot in the comment cards. But trust, because this is a two-day conference and tomorrow is the day of workshops and more discussion that anything we do not get to today is going to come up tomorrow during the workshops and other discussions. Following the talk and the discussion, we'll have a reception right over there, so please stick around, enjoy some food and drink, and talk with your colleagues and neighbors. Dr. Corey Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of Humanities with appointments in English and the Humanities. And he is the founding director of the African American Studies program, and it's a little funny to introduce Corey because I think everybody knows Corey here, and we know introduction, so I'm not going to so much introduce Corey as appreciate Corey. Prior to arriving at Wake Forest, Corey held several faculty and academic leadership positions at different universities. At Virginia Union University, Corey served as vice president, and dean of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, as well as professor of religion and society. Previously, he was the inaugural John W. and Anna Hodgin Haines Professor of Humanities and served as dean of the college at Winston-Salem State University. Earlier in his career, Corey served as a faculty member in theology, ethics, and culture in the Department of Religious Studies and African American Studies in the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African American Studies at the University of Virginia. He's helped appointments at Brown University where he served as the chair of the Africana Studies Department, which is why whenever I invite a guest and I tell Corey that guest is coming, Corey says, oh, yeah, we go way back. Corey's first monograph is titled A Noble Fight, African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America, and he's completing the much-anticipated disciple of nonviolence, Wyatt T. Walker, and the Struggle for Democracy in America, to be published by the University of Virginia Press. He is the editor of numerous books and journal issues, and there's really nobody better to step up and introduce Dr. DeVerion Baldwin and Corey. So I welcome Corey to the podium and introduce Dr. DeVerion Baldwin. Thank Dean, dear brother Dean, for being a friend, a comrade, and most importantly, a person you can always raise questions with. His generosity and his ability to just welcome you is truly amazing. And I want to thank you for that, Dean. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to truly a highlight of this gathering here in Winston-Salem for this conference. And I'm so excited to welcome truly a dear colleague, comrade, and committed scholar in the best sense of everything scholarly, a person who is committed, a person who continues to push the boundaries of knowledge, and an individual who has a de-ethical compass that the life of the mind is dedicated to the liberation of all humanity and the flourishing of all life. My dear brother DeVerion Baldwin. In the late spring of 2017, while serving as the Dean of the College of Winston-Salem State University, I met with several Wake Forest University professors in an informal seminar on Wake Forest and Winston-Salem. I titled my remarks for that occasion, The Twin Minds of the Twin Cities. The title was an attempt to capture the dialectics of Winston and Salem. Winston-Salem State and Wake Forest University, and the material and ideological forces shaping and informing the logics organizing individual and collective life in our area. Of course, this framing consolidated a number of other issues that have long preoccupied me as a both a citizen and a scholar. You see, the narrative of Winston-Salem, from its Moravian roots to a Piedmont City run on a tobacco economy, to an arts and animation hub, didn't quite capture the story of the communities and peoples I learned from and that I hoped as my colleagues and comrades in building a more humane world. That was just one narrative, the dominant narrative, but there is another narrative, a narrative of ongoing revolt and rebellion that escapes the calculus of the dominant narrative, a narrative of humanity and a narrative of a patience flourishing for all humanity. That narrative contains three nodal points. In the early morning of Monday, August 12, 1895, the news spread across the state of North Carolina of the Winston bright. The rally evening visitor recorded someone started a story that a crowd was going to take. Arthur Tuttle, the Negro who murdered policeman Vickers, last man out of jail and lynching. The news was given out at all of the colored churches during service and resulted in the formation of a mob numbering 250 Negroes. They marched to the jail to prevent the said lynching and they claimed that they would interfere with anyone who would try to harm Brother Tuttle. The crowd was armed with pistols and guns. Mayor E.E. Gray was advised an hour later of the situation. He went to the jail and munched the mob to disperse, telling the Negroes that they were violating the law and there was no danger of a lynching. His admonition appeared to have little effect. Sheriff MacArthur and C.D. Watson and J.C. Buxton made speeches advising the Negroes to disperse and go home. Judge Brown made an earnest talk. He told the Negroes that Tuttle was securing a fair trial and he would be responsible for his protection. Some of the Negro leaders consented to disperse if the sheriff would put 20 people on guard to protect Arthur Tuttle. The headline of the Winston-Sable Journal on the morning of Monday, November 18, 1918, screamed five are killed and 25 are injured. Here last night in a tragedy following an attempt to lynch a Negro at City Jail. The story covered the entire front page of the Winston-Sable Journal. The third page of the article reads under the headline, A Terrible Climax, the tragedy came to an end of a peaceful Sabbath day and everyone felt the joy of peace again and the singing of an arms race. A public meeting was in progress at the courthouse for all the colored people when the trouble first started and the white people were looking forward to the mass meeting last night at 1st Presbyterian Church. The 1967 rebellion had its roots in a branded racial segregation and transition discrimination and the outright murder of another black citizen. This citizen was named James Elder, killed by Winston-Sable police officer W.E. Owens. Owens was relieved of duty pending an investigation of Eller's widow who signed out a warrant for his arrest. Municipal court judge Leroy Sands dismissed the charges. On the day of Eller's funeral, members of the Winston-Sable black community marched to Eller's grave site and protest. Later the protests turned into a rebellion as black citizens took out their righteous anger on the city. The rebellion began on November 2nd and lasted until November 5th, 1967. Winston-Sable called on 1,000 National Guardsmen to police patrol and occupy downtown Winston-Sable and east Winston-Sable. Despite the ongoing rebellion in Winston-Sable, the 1967 homecoming at Wake Forest University would go off without a hitch. Students received police escorts to and from downtown Winston-Sable to visit restaurants and to drop off gates at hotels. The homecoming concert featured Simon and Garfunkel and the Saturday concert featured the soulful Smoky Robinson entertaining Wake Forest audiences while the city was effectively under military occupation. This dichotomy aptly captures what William Chafee terms the Carolina way. In 1967, Winston-Sable rebellion would cause some soul-searching at Wake Forest University. Two wrong worlds was the lead editorial in the whole Golden Black, the student newspaper. The editorial stated there were two worlds in Winston-Sable Thursday night and at one time the worlds were less than a mile apart. One was a mass of hand-clap-ing hip-genering Wake Forest students oblivious to everything but a glaring combo called the Fabulous Five. The other world was scattered here and there over the city led by Negro hoodlums. The citizens of both worlds were frustrated but brought up emotions were released in happiness and gaiety here and in anger and displacement there. There were two worlds in Winston-Sable, not only that Thursday night but also in 1895 and 1918 and the days and nights before and since 1967. It is within this backdrop that we critically and reflexively engage the university and the neighborhood. American higher education is in crisis. Public conversations about the state of the university range from nostalgia for an idyllic 19th century college on the hill to the outright dismissal of the university in favor of new flows of knowledge and learning facilitated by new technologies and new economies. To be sure, the current crisis is not just a mere repetition inspired by the tensions of Carl Neumann's idea or Clark Kerr's uses of the university. Rather, the crisis of the university is made more complex by our collective angst of decimated lives and deteriorating conditions for our social and political selves. This condition is only exacerbated by the specter of the end of organized human life and indeed of life itself with the imminent planetary collapse caused by climate change. To the very real issue, the issue at hand, how do flourishing urban colleges and universities act in the public good when the very people we pass on campus and pass on the way to campus are paying the cost of the school's prosperity? We seldom pass or respond with a convincing word. That is, until now. The very moment is a leading urbanist, historian and cultural critic. His work largely examines the landscape of global cities through the lens of African diasporic experiences. Baldwin's related interests include universities and urban development, racial foundations of academic thought, intellectual and mass culture, black radical thought, and transnational social movements, including the ways in which we understand the politics of heritage, tourism, art, architecture, and urban design. He is the author of the award-winning and the shadow of the ivory tower, how universities are plundering cities. In addition, he's the author of the award-winning and well-perceived Chicago's New Negroes, Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. And he's co-editor of the collection Escape from New York, the new Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem. He's currently finishing Land of Darkness, Chicago, and the Making of Race in Modern America. At Trinity College, where he is the Paul E. Rayther Distinguished Professor of American Studies, the various teachings bring together urban and cultural studies, 20th century U.S. history, and African American studies. He is also the founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab housed in the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity. The variant leads professional development workshops for school teachers with the national endowment of the humanities and other organizations including primary source and facing history and ourselves. He also serves as a textbook consultant for Monroe Hill and is currently formulating a video-based learning curriculum for the Great Courses series entitled, How the Great Migration Changed America. He is a prominent public intellectual in the best sense, a public intellectual committed to social movements and beyond just a glare of publicity. He has been featured on CNN, PBS, the History Channel, NPR, and several additional prominent national and international outlets. In addition to teaching and writing, the variant sits on the Executive Council of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of African American History, and the American Studies Journal. He is also co-editor of the Urban Life Landscape and Policy book series for Temple University Press, and he has appointed a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. This is indeed an extensive list of academic qualifications, but it is only matched by an ethic, a compassion, and a capacious openness for not only thinking differently, but doing differently. With the title, Building Innovation in Deep Town, what happens when your city becomes a campus? Please join me in welcoming the very involved women. Good evening, how you doing? You know, I know that we're social distancing still, but I feel a little lonely and people want to move up. I welcome you to take us on these seats in the front so we can be together in community. People in the back, come up. Don't be afraid, don't be shy. We are here, we're chilling, we're in community. I appreciate you. Thank you, my brother, Dr. Dean, Reverend, Corey Walker. We go back over 20 years. I'm sure you hear that all the time, but it's the truth. We go back over 20 years, so it's really a pleasure and honor to be here. I want to thank Dean Franco, Amy Kimberley from the United States for being such a wonderful host for my time here. I had a great time, even with the rain and the impending monsoon or whatever was coming down the pipe. We're here. We're in here. We're happy to be here. I'm excited to be here. And so I just want to say thank you for your time and for your capacity to be here with me. So as Corey mentioned, the title from our conversation for today is Building Innovation in Deep Town. What happens when your city becomes a campus? So just a few years ago, all of Winston-Salem was abuzz about the New York Times article celebrating the city's transition from tobacco to biotech. Like a Phoenix, here stands Wake Forest Innovation Board of rising from the ashes of literal smokestacks. Bright airy laboratories and classrooms of glass and steel pierce through the stifling dark concrete warehouses from a different time. We see here the building out of an architecture for the new knowledge economy of data analytics, health sciences and medical research. And these universities driven on innovation will serve as the anchor for a whole new corridor of what's been called the work, live, learn, play dynamic. It was even celebrated as a project of social engineering, storing these structures from the Reynolds buildings, retro-opinion for hotels and high-end residential units. The amenities of coffee shops, walkability and public art drawn in were students' tours and, of course, investors to create lifestyle. With Wake Forest as a driving engine, here the ad copy says it best, welcome to Deak Town. The Wake Forest Medical School, Biotech Place and downtown campus serve not only as a sign of the university's educational growth, but as the phase of operations for rethinking of the city's social and economic identity more broadly. But witness rebirth have also come so significant growing pains. One of the amenities of this new city is the public art dying to downtown. Just last year artist Nico Schmidt was commissioned to create a piece of art as part of the concrete campus mural festival. But his work depicted the Wake Forest Dean and Deacon mascot as the monopoly, walking over houses with a bag of money and the word Deak Town. Behind him, of course, has raised the ire of sponsors, but also revealed a darker underside to innovation. With Deak Town flags popping up everywhere, the expansion of the campus into greater swaths of Winston-Salem begs the question, what happens to the long-standing neighborhoods who stand in the pathway of innovation? First, community history remembers that many of these buildings in the innovation corridor in the green at the upper quadrant sit on what once were black and working class white communities that were left to die through a practice of extreme divestment. And then all of a sudden, vacant lots and boarded up buildings were re-narrated as the community of the black and hence right for redevelopment salvation. Nothing was going on. And these were investing themselves. Here comes Wake. We're going in the wake. We're going to stay in dog. To bear, but to put the bear phrase, a line from the Game of Thrones, the east, the north, and the south, they remember. With this backdrop in mind, innovation-driven development had had two dangerous consequences. On one side, pockets of public and private monies are flowing into the sea behind the excitement of new possibilities. But like in other urban locales, from Baltimore in a harbor to Midtown in Detroit, all of that capital is being contained to very concentrated areas of development to the detriment of the surrounding neighborhoods of extreme need. This is differing most clearly with the construction of these very buildings, with their backs facing the east, letting you know that innovation is not for you. The building serving as a form of innovation-based fortification, circling the wagons around innovation, investment, and prosperity in these concentrated areas, these new blocks to the detriment of those all around the perimeter. The north, the south, and the east, they remember. And so on the other side, these neighborhoods just on the fringe of innovation are starving for investment. Neighborhoods just east of 1st University Parkway and further east, 52 have some of the highest rates of poverty concentration in the nation. Local hospitals, universities, and nonprofits attract high skilled outsiders, but these longtime residents endure rising rents and get sluggish wage growth. This all opens the door to increased eviction pressures, some at the hands of the university-owned buildings. Let's keep it real, as their neighborhoods are targeted for revitalization. Just as the innovation corridor looks for theater neighborhoods to extend its reach. So as we sit right here in the middle of the visible footprint of this story, we must be compelled to ask, innovation for whom? No matter where you stand on the promise and pitfalls of the innovation corridor, one thing is for certain. The act, this act of university-driven urban development in Western Salem is part of a much larger story. And if we open up this for discussion later, I hope that my remarks this evening spark conversations about how innovation and detail does and does not follow much broader national trends. So the bigger story. Right before our eyes, colleges, universities, and their medical centers have become the biggest employers, real estate owners, health care providers, and desk policing agents. In major cities and colleges, in college towns, all across the country. With this kind of influence comes the possibility that universities make cities and towns more vibrant places to work, visit, learn, and live. And from New York City's Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island to base those recent Arizona State University sat at my campus, everyone wants a campus. And to be sure, colleges and universities, they bring ideas and people together. And they generate new jobs and new innovations. There's that word again, right? Innovations, innovations. University developers also often involve transformative commercial corridors like USC Village in the renamed South LA. Those were from the 89s though, the South Central, right? South LA is the new name. There's the USC Village. The University of Cincinnati's Innovation Corridor. Cortex in St. Louis. Are you seeing a similar architectural pattern here? Let's keep going. The Biomedical Campus Innovation Center in downtown Phoenix. West Philadelphia's UC Square. Miami Converge in South Florida. And we can also expect newly constructed facilities like the glittering glass and steel that we see in the proposed partnership between Virginia Tech and Amazon in Northern Virginia to follow suit. And just in case you missed it or you don't know, it should be noted that five of the seven commercial developments that this shows you are being led by a small community by the herd of experts in science and technology who's also the developer for this project. More about that later. But the point here is that these projects, in these projects, have seen higher education going in control over the economic development and political governance in urban America. But what I call the rise of the universe sees. Higher education has become big business. In our cities, there are company towns. In this context, a new layer of the company town. In this, there is a cost for those living in the shadows of these average hours. Couple of examples. Campus expansions also raise housing costs and displace residents in the neighborhoods large of color that large is around campuses. Higher education is broad control over labor, not just universal labor, but citywide labor. Can lower wage fees and suppress collective bargaining efforts as universities engage in subcontracting their labor. Non-profit university medical centers emphasize profitable UT services, high-profile research, or prioritize student services to the detriment of indigent care, which is a requirement of their taxes and status. And finally, campus police forces surveil and profile the same residents and are rarely held to public account. So even if schools in every case don't hold all this power, we are witnessing greater swaths of our cities being turned into a campus. So how do we get here? How does this come to be? So in the 1980s, we put in a period of white flight, which is really a misnomer. This is actually white folks being the only ones able to follow the money as it leaves the core of the central core. So it's really white folks following the money. That's not illiterate to it enough. It's white flight. That's what it really is, right? So we have white flight, but one institution that's not nimble enough to be able to leave, even though they tried in many cases, is the university. In the case of the sale, actually, this is the period when the university comes to see it. So we have interesting, very different, regional level dynamics. But the broader story is a period of white flight, university being stuck in the city, not being able to follow, and in response, buffering themselves in behind institutional walls or state-funded demolitions. They get rebranded as anchor institutions. The economic engines almost becoming a deindustrializing economy, even then, in the 50s and 60s. So we flashed forward 30 years. And by the 1990s, the grandchildren of the purpose crawl up there in the suburbs. They're bored. They tie the 7-Elevens and track housing. They put some urban experience. They put schools in the cities. They put a stay. And so the young professionals, empty nested retirees and recent graduates want to come back or stay in the city. And what is their idea of urban life? Coffee shops. Museums. Lectures. Walkability. Density. Fully wired. So these new urbanites are part of the back to the city movement. Their notion of urban experience is what? A canvas. It's a canvas. And so you have cities like New York where I live in 95 at the height of this. Underwriting tech and startups. Kicking out people out of sanitarians. A bit of help facilities. And turning with the high-end housing. Arresting people. Thinking of more than one seat on subway trains. The Quad... You guys. Quadlight campaigns. Making way for NYU Columbia and its relatives to come and resettle the city. That's just one example. So you got cities competing with each other. For these new retirees rushing to retrofit and redesign their city blocks. And you have press releases. And I have in the book and in research, they're actually celebrating that the ivory towers have become America's new smokestats. Now we have that literally here. But that was the language even in the 1990s. On the other side though, you have universities in the 90s, 2000s that are finding themselves facing reduced contributions from the states. Timeout public universities. But let's be clear. Well, public and private schools give public money. Both of them. But especially public universities where at one point in time their operating budget annually came to about 70% from the state dwindled down to between 10 and 12% from the state. So they're looking for a new revenue stream. And you begin to hear the language of the correspondent about becoming more entrepreneurial. So they're trying to figure out ways to monetize academic research and also the blacks of the campus. So in this 90s moment between the ambitions of city leaders that attract new urbanites and universities looking for new revenue streams there becomes this moment of interest convergence where they share in this idea of the benefits of turning the city into a campus. At the heart of this conversation is, of course, being these four materials that I am, is the story of Operation Capitalism. Because at the center of this story is the new face of capitalism has become what we call the knowledge of economy. At the center of knowledge of economy is this idea that academic research is being used to create profitable commercial goods or patents in a range of fields for pharmaceutical industries and software products to health services and military defense weaponry. That's how Stanford got made. So you have this moment, this is the only thing possible because a group of universities got together and created a lobbying group in 1980. And they said, yeah, we know that 95% of our research dollars come from publicly funded federal grants. Yeah, we got that. But can we maintain private ownership of that research? Can we turn that into IP? In the lobbying group, they were pushing through this act called the Baidul Act in 1980 that gave universities the right to take publicly funded research and developments and keep it as intellectual property. And then all of a sudden, it's the explosion of transfer technology divisions churning out pre-packaged research and development, selling it on the market under a patent of security and repeating the wars back to them in the form of revenue from IP. So this new economic development of the knowledge economy becomes a driving engine around what I call knowledge communities because key to recruiting the best students, faculty, and their families to do this knowledge work is creating an array cluster of laboratories, housing, retail, and marketing. This is the origins of liberal play and oh, yeah, I learned too. These variously called innovation districts or what Wexford calls knowledge communities sit right in the middle of existing communities of color, surrounding campuses where the land is built cheap or in areas of high profitable value in their hospitals where you can transfer the research directly to private investors and nearby laboratories and knowledge communities. So the campus as a planning mechanism has been used to build out university cities by retrofitting neighborhood blocks to maximize wealth extraction based on land control, labor management, and the privatization of city governance. So what am I being like that? Throughout the U.S., most citizens and politicians are beginning to rethink what makes all this innovation good for the public. So in a time remaining, I want to bring this down to you in three key areas, land, labor, and policing. Are we good? Are we all right? We good? Okay. Y'all with me? Okay. All right. So, first, land. Universities have become the biggest landholders in their cities. Not in Temporarius, in their entire cities, the land bearing on their cities and towns. All the time, we presume that schools are adhering public good. They teach classes. They offer clinics, health clinics, law clinics. This is most clearly marked by their 501c3 property tactics and status. But this non-profit designation as a non-profit is precisely what allows for an easier transfer of public dollars into higher education driving developments with little public screwing. Through the tax code exemption, the very same blocks that have become for-profit laboratories are also financial shelters because they're considered to be educational spaces. So, private investors flock to work in parking universities under the cover of educational marketing. Does that make sense? So this is why Wexford is here. This is why Wexford is our only partner because the tactics and status because a reduction of overhead costs in their prime modes of blind eye were disturbing as a developer. So these schools pay virtually no taxes on their increasingly prominent footprint that they reap the benefits of city services. Public schools for their kids, snow and trash removal, road maintenance, the maintenance of the electrical grid. And while they reap these benefits of municipal services, residential property taxes and rental property tax costs go up beyond the means of long-standing reference. And then their public schools, which comes from property taxes, get under funding. So we stand on the watch and we let these beautiful towers of license field and we look out and we're like, why are the public schools so morally? And we don't connect the dots and say that the very conditions under which your prosperity is created is an extraction from the money that would come to support public schools. Your prosperity here is built on someone else's property. There's a direct connection here that we are seeing and then we offer tutoring from the school. Pay your taxes, how about that? Right? In the top of that, the turkey giveaways and the cleanup days, all of that actually being underwritten by the tax system, or just don't pay. So the communities are paying for the dirty services that they may have to receive. Are you getting me? Okay. So for example in 2016, he's spoken by neighborhood that was doing taxing in New Jersey. They wanted $18 million lost to the Princeton University. Why? Residents, these are home-only residents, they were noticing that their taxes on property was going up and yet there were no improvements on the introduction. What the hell is going on? And through some research, the newly group discovered is because they sit next to Princeton University buildings that are generating millions of dollars of revenue from their partnership with the multinational magnet, Eli Lilly. So Eli Lilly, hey stupid, they're at Princeton because of the financial shelter of non-profit taxes and status. But their very prosperity is pressing inflation of land and limited value and limited services into the surrounding neighborhoods. So they wanted $18 million lost to one resident so disgusted at the big switch that was going on here under the notion of higher education that he dismissed Princeton as a cash fund that conducts taxes. And let's do things just private elite schools. The biggest private development in the state of Arizona, State Farm Insurance Regional Headquarters, sits on Arizona's state university land because they know they can sit there for free. But that ain't all of it. ASQ, they go to the game so they charge State Farm a slightly smaller rate than what they would only be charged with our property taxes. They take that money and they're able to build a football stadium. They're able to hire, it's got fired, able to hire HIRM efforts from the NFL and pay them a general size salary without the scrutiny of the state legislature because they're paying for it from the charges they offer and they offer State Farm insurance. So this is like, this is space age campaign. Right? This is old sheet hustle. I want you to understand the game here, right? So, that's land. Labor. Sorry. Labor. We think about workers in the knowledge factories that are our campus buildings and we think about tweeted up, leather, elbow patched, cocktail drink in university faculty living a good life teaching one or two classes a semester. Maybe a year. Let's be clear. 75% of university faculty are non-tenured limited benefit contingent workers. They are glorified day laborers with middle health benefits driving from school to school to a piece together of life with no health benefits. But then on top of that they are even the biggest workforce on campus. The biggest workforce are the Ivy Tower low wage workforce of medical assistants, janitors, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, maintenance and security staff that keep this whole economy going at poverty wages. Some of them have they face summertime downsizing working on over the ninth cycle to the point they can have a full-time job and still be eligible for public assistance. The university is subsidized by this. You understand? And then on top of that if they do have the capacity to unionize during the last two years' break when university are shifting to subcontractor so that a subcontractor with a third party employer or job-raining program is even to secure a union contract those subcontractor employees are exempted or not subject or available to the benefits crew for the union contract. That is labor. Again suppression of wages and benefits becomes an underwriting for this. For this. Just to be clear. Finally police most schools have campus police nearly all carry guns about nine to ten have jurisdiction and patrol off campus sometimes through a memorandum of understanding the entire city. I see you both tomorrow coming. What's the idea here? Campus police are marketed as agents of student or community safety. But let's think about one of the major crimes that's your job campus and community safety one of the main crimes on campus is substance abuse sexual violence campus police are an utter failure when it comes to policing those activities substance and capacity we need more police but we look and follow the dynamics it is not capacity it is intention because what predominate by school wants to admit that they have a campus school is bad for the brand and so we look from a brand perspective this is why we have criminal and amnesty on campuses and over policing in the surrounding blocks because they want to make it clear that the brand of the campus is safer schools on campus and safer investment markets and that's what we have in common around policing as a branding mechanism when I spent time with mayor of the senator Mary Washington who's transition is over at Johns Hopkins University she said to me that when Johns Hopkins was pushing still pushing for a private police force private police force any form for that this was the creation of an independent republic this is a private university private university police are not subject to freedom of information act laws the FOIA extension of the university is transferred to the police right and so this would be an independent institution with its own governance and its own regime of enforcement and she said I quote this is like putting a Vatican city in the middle of Baltimore so take this together land layer policing schools and their host communities as you mentioned before we are at a crisis and I would say a crossroads I would advise you to work crossroads in crisis because there is another way and I'm here to tell you that there are other pathways just one small example New York City for the thing to the north the fire new they created a whole new framework of university around this vision of sustainability and those would not just be deserted by buildings but it would be economic it would be social and it would be cultural as the university sits in the middle of a historically indigenous what they call First Nations community now they didn't do that because of their own hearts let's be clear the demographic that we all know of the official H2 white, suburban, full payers as what's happening here now was happening about 15 years ago earlier in Canada when the university went to pay their families ain't having babies so that demographic of the right middle class full payer it just ain't happening but in the 2000s the university went to pay the population of Canada exploded from 6000 to 10,000 we wasn't these white students it was what they call New Canadians what we call immigrants and indigenous represent parents and families that come into college surrounding the campus and to their benefit again they're more enlightened self interested but they recognize that if we want to address and engage with our new community we have to change how we do college that we can't look at university students as individuals of commerce and control because if we do that they won't stay, we can't retain them we'll invest in the entire family if we want these individuals to stay here for example here's the university commons building the downtown commons this is a building of residence for both students and local mid-paying residents it is housed at four price points the 12 balcony apartments are at premium range they pay for the other three levels of market range affordable range and even more affordable range here to income the university with its leverage got an exemption from the local housing authority that even with tax credits and support from the province that each unit would be interchanged except for the 12 premium range so when you come into the development you don't know what you're getting into there is no premium range there is no premium range they're all interchanged the leverage of the university was able to buy or rent a EV charging station so that everyone that has an electrical vehicle can get a discount because the charging station is controlled by the property if you can't afford wifi in your individual units all of the common areas have access to free wifi and because neighborhood is largely indigenous the visualization allows for an indigenous practice to function this is the university doing this right they've had a contract with one of the multi-national food companies like Eramark, Marriott Sinesco Eramark 16 dollar chicken sandwiches for they fired and they had Eramark too they fired Eramark and started their own company called diversity foods on the labor side the diversity foods 60% of the workers come from what they call difficult to rent or difficult to employ communities at LGBT Plus First Canadian recently incarcerated single mothers low income from wage earning to profit sharing in the company on the procurement side 70% of the raw materials for this kitchen come from small farms within 100 kilometer radius I was there they had compost bins next to each working station and they take the cooking oil and send it out to be converted into biofeed again a university driven by a different set of principles a different mission a different orientation this broad vision of sustainability that's being budgeted by the fact they have a new population demographic that they must serve that's coming to us too it's coming so from this to create my smart cities lab originally it was supposed to be a what in general is we research and consult for the best practices for building equitable urban communities we look at urban communities more broadly but specifically focus on university driven development initially it was meant to be a realm of what we do in academia, knowledge sharing convening clearing house for materials but then the black summer 2028 people were in the streets and they began to see if we're fighting for police abolition then wait a minute what are the biggest police forces in our own backyard it ain't city PD it's campus police department they picked up the book my book and they said you know what that advocacy stuff is cute information sharing is cute but we need your advocacy we need you to be here on the ground in the streets with us deploying this information to create transformational change and so since 2021 I've been with for like the last year going across the country from New Haven Chicago from Berkeley to Miami to build out what can be called abolitionist work organized around repairs to clear reparations and the campus an insatiable expansion in our primary site of interrogation and struggle we were victorious in New Haven helping organize campus labor and community groups pushing Yale to provide the additional 52 million dollars over the next 6 years for its increased portfolio of tax and zen properties that sucked life from the city budget I'm organized with residents in the Black Bottom neighborhood of Philadelphia who are still suffering from the University Black Demolition Project from the 1960s now sites of innovation University C is the Black Bottom the current battles preserved in UC Town Homes the last piece of low income housing in the university development area has become the foundation for our broader campaign for community reparations the research in the lab has assessed the town and town landscape across the country and it brings us to a series of large-scale conclusions collectively be called for reparations for higher education an explicit role in slavery indigenous land seizures gym cultivation and urban renewal practices so I'm cool with University Studies that's cute but we need more to study we need repair we need dollars on the line but we also call for payments in lieu of the university tax position we call the schools to reserve a portion of their tax incentive endowments for community projects and a transfer of investment to community-serving financial institutions we call for university medical centers to honor their mandates of indigent care that provides for their tax existence status schools to attach a community beneficiary to any campus expansion project that could include affordable housing mandates ZIPCO specific jobs they'll give you a city-wide delivery no ZIPCO specific jobs job training scholarships and access to campus facilities under a community charter governed by the community as we saw in Winnipeg their rec center is governed by community charter with hours repeat hours for university community control one thing to hear we assist on the build out of community-based zoning and planning boards so we saw what happened in to the south on the hill to the north with plaza parks to the east without our consent we need community-based zoning and planning boards whereby any university-based project or affiliate project must come through the oversight of these boards we assist at all campus development governed by a community charter we watch schools grow by food and demand that they pack that food into healthy meals for community-based I dated the talk six months ago at U Penn this young medical student this month has begun to make that happen with socialist organizations are the only ones that will work with them to convert food from cafeteria into healthy meals for community in the well-skilled healthy community so finally sorry so finally we call to divest in campus police police abolition and invest in teams of preventive outreach in trauma care alongside investments in housing and food security programs that actually do harm for everyone campus police are irrelevant when it comes to community safety universities are purposeful boys to offer true and actual public safety through the medical schools nursing programs that wasn't sale convert these programs into advocacy for true public safety and community health and services ultimately a discussion about the university and the neighborhoods must come to terms with how much higher education expense in the people's lives already in ways that have nothing to do with tutoring programs turkey giveaways this project legal clinics or even education and therefore it is my position that we must put a politics of abolition at the center of our discussion the university has become the shop floor for all workers the land married over residents the political boss of city budgets the facilitator of the city's land labor and capital and so if the university is all encompassing the nation's vision must free the campus from its current editions free the classrooms free the capital series free the laboratories free the residence halls and free the budgets from the profit university and put them in service to a people's university we must free ourselves from the myth of the schoolhouse campuses have become sites of much broader struggle living wages IV rights universal healthcare wealth redistribution police abolition and we many of us are just standing by watching looking like we don't know what's going on but the gulf the south and the east they remember and therefore it's in these same halls that we also have the building blocks to set the foundation for a different path we want the cafeteria to the hood we want the distribution network we want the classroom we want the residence but building it towards a people's university listen one of the primary claims of higher education is to serve the public and solve the world's most difficult problems if we just follow that claim to a logical conclusion then why wouldn't we start by trusting the university's hands in creating the problems in our own backyard thank you