MIT Reads is an all-MIT reading experience that aims to build community and foster understanding. Events and discussions are open to the entire MIT community.
Fall 2024 book selection – In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower
We invite you to join us in exploring our fall selection, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin. Here are some options:
- Attend A Conversation with Davarian L. Baldwin, a dialogue featuring the book’s author and MIT Barton L. Weller Professor of History Craig Steven Wilder. Tuesday, October 29, 5:00-6:30 pm. In person or online options; both are free and open to all, but registration is required.
- Participate in a small group discussion over lunch. Wednesday, October 30, 12-1. Registration is required. (MIT only)
The MIT Libraries are committed to making these activities accessible. ASL interpreters and live captioning will be available during the author’s speaking event; accommodations for the small group discussion may be requested during registration.
More details may be found at the above links.
About the book
Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow.
Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages.
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable.
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.