CUED
Center
for Urban Economic Development
University of Illinois at Chicago
Harvard
on Halsted Street:
Dilemmas of Neighborhood Advocacy in Academia
Project Number: 172
Report Date: November 1985
Author(s): Wim Wiewel
Halsted street is the longest and perhaps most urban street in Chicago, stretching for over 20 miles from the patchwork of Uptown, with its Appalachians, Vietnamese, Blacks, posh lakefront condos, neighborhood activists and derelicts, through the gentrifying De Paul area and the remnants of Greektown, through Hispanic Pilsen, Mayor Daley's Bridgeport, and South Side slums, to the quiet suburban lawns of East Hazel Crest and Riverdale. About midway, on the site of the neighborhood where Jane Addams started Hull House, sprawls the modernistic campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Started as the younger and decidedly lesser sibling of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to serve the needs for urban mass education, it now ranks 62nd in the nation in federally funded research. Its newly appointed Vice-Chancellor for Research has been given the task of helping the university reach the top 50 and join the ranks of "major research universities" as soon as possible. Expressing this institutional goal, its bookstore recently began selling T-shirts emblazoned with the motto "Harvard on Halsted."
The motto expresses the institutional commitment, but also its dilemma. The "urban mission" of the university has often been seen as diametrically opposed to the pursuit of academic excellence. The campus itself was built over the strong opposition of the residents whose neighborhood was demolished to make space. For some period of time the urban commitment expressed itself in the admission of many under qualified students from Chicago's increasingly poor and minority population. But without adequate remedial education assistance, few graduated, solidifying some people's belief that an emphasis on the special ties between the university and the city would lead to deterioration of academic standards. In this paper, I will address just some aspects of these larger issues, focussing on how these tensions affect the efforts of a university-based technical assistance and research center to work with neighborhood residents and organizations. I will argue that such applied work should be an essential ingredient of research and teaching in planning schools, rather than being justified as part of the University's public service function. The recent reemphasis on the need for universities to become involved in the problems of their state or region, especially in regard to economic and technological development, may open up some new opportunities which were closed off during the "ivory tower" decade of the seventies. I will use the experiences of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a case study throughout this paper, although much of it will apply elsewhere as well.
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