Porous Borders
Reprinted from Open Campus, The Weekly Dispatch
One of Nancy Cantor’s soap boxes about higher education has long been this: College leaders tend to do inside-out planning. But they’d be better off if they opened the window sometimes.
Let in some more outside-in thinking, she says. You could do more good.
Never, Cantor says, has that been more true than now.
One thing the pandemic is making clear is just how porous the borders are between town and gown. That’s true from both a public health standpoint and from an economic one. Their fates — as they reel from the pandemic now and as they look to rebuild down the road — are intertwined.
Here’s what Cantor, the chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, means when she talks about inside-out versus outside-in thinking:
Colleges make a lot of decisions in isolation. They first decide what’s best for them and only then, sometimes, do they go out and talk with the other people in their cities and regions who are affected by what they do — the major companies, small businesses, nonprofit groups, performing-arts organizations, museums, K-12 schools, community-based organizations.
Instead, Cantor says, higher ed leaders should think about listening first more, working in tandem with the people around them who have shared interests, like the health of their communities.
An Anchor Institution
That concept is baked into her university’s mission statement, which talks about Rutgers University-Newark as an “anchor institution” that is “not just in Newark but of Newark.”
“We think of anchor institutions as place-based organizations that persist in their communities over generations,” the mission statement reads, “even in the face of substantial capital flight, serving as social glue, economic engines, or both.”
Rutgers is part of a Newark Anchor Collaborative — a collection of local public and private actors like Prudential, Audible, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center — that share a commitment to together “drive inclusive community economic growth, create more economic opportunity, build a healthier community, and generate a richer quality of life for all Newark residents.”
Now, take all of those lofty concepts and apply them to a pandemic. Everything on that list is threatened — and everybody, too. Shared problems intensify. Disparities become stark. Basic health is interdependent. Everyone’s business is unstable. The core question becomes urgent: What can we do to bolster one other?
“This actually makes those commitments more central,” Cantor says, “as opposed to just charity.”
One thing the pandemic has shined an especially bright light on, she says, is racial inequities. Even she has been struck by what this crisis has revealed about how deep this inequity runs, and how many dimensions there are to tackle.
Take the digital divide. Nearly one out of four undergraduates at her university, she learned, either lacks high-speed access to the internet or has no home computer at all. “It sounds stupid to say this now,” she says, “but it never would have occurred to me to make sure we get laptops and internet access to our large numbers of low-income students.”
To Be ‘Of Newark’
Here’s what else it means to see the crisis through an “of Newark” lens:
University efforts get turned in new directions. A business professor who’s an expert in supply chain management, for example, is mapping out how all businesses can follow through on commitments to buy more locally.
Some programs become even more important to protect. That includes a financial-aid program for Newark residents. The more Newark residents go to college, the more the city’s education levels rise and the more all of the city’s anchor institutions benefit in the long term.
Decisions about the fall and about public health are a two-way street. New Jersey is in the middle of a hot spot for the virus, and the university’s still deciding what to do about the fall. Bringing students back to campus would put people in close quarters and could create new public-health problems. At the same time, the university has to worry about what health risks the students would bring back to them. About 80 percent of the university’s undergraduates are commuter students.
Public health is an immediate concern, but an even greater one is supporting and improving the social context in which learning takes place.
“We are not going to have a thriving business model if our local and regional economies don’t thrive,” Cantor says. “We have to thrive in the long run. What good is it to solve a public health emergency only to see a social mobility crisis of even greater magnitude than before?”