I have young children, and for years taking them to school has been one of my greatest daily pleasures. We live about a mile from my children’s school, and the walk, a straight shot down one of the big avenues in Manhattan, is occasion for conversations about everything from homework to homelessness, fashion (it’s below Fourteenth Street, after all), family, and friends. It’s neither bucolic nor relaxing. There’s lots of street traffic and constant construction in downtown Manhattan. We occasionally encounter an aggressive panhandler or a trail of spilled garbage. But we all enjoy participating in the parade of humanity that animates the city’s sidewalks each morning. We’re together, with all kinds of stimulation around us, in a place that’s full of strangers but still feels like home.
The small, progressive school they attend in Greenwich Village is the kind of place that strives to create community. There’s lots of cultural programming and special events in the crowded, tenement-style building that, for lack of available outdoor space, serves as the school campus. But the real work of community development happens informally, if also by design. Parents of students in kindergarten and the early grades are encouraged to join their children in the classrooms for fifteen or twenty minutes each morning throughout the year. The official rationale for this practice is that it helps ease the students’ transition into the school day. But within a few weeks most new parents figure out that it does something more important. It gives them time and space to get to know one another, so that they can build relationships that will help everyone, adult and child, get through a rewarding but challenging time of life.
The hallways, stairwells, and common areas of the school are comically cramped and busy, so there’s no place in the building for parents to continue the conversations they begin in classrooms. By chance, though, there’s an unusually large patch of open public space just outside the front door, a place with benches, small trees, and enough room for people to break into small groups and linger. That’s exactly what parents do there, every morning, sometimes for just a few minutes but sometimes for much longer, because the workday starts late in New York City or because the banter is too good to end. Since it’s Manhattan, it’s no surprise that there’s a coffee shop across the street from the school. When children get old enough to go to their classrooms alone, parents drop them at the front door, find their friends in the public area, and head to the café patio. Countless relationships evolve in the social space around the school building. Parents schedule play dates (for themselves as well as their children), learn about school issues, talk about their marriages and friendships, commiserate about work. For many parents, the morning drop-off is the most social time of the day.
Recently, my family and I spent a sabbatical year at Stanford University, and we moved into an idyllic suburb near the campus. We enrolled our children in the local elementary school, an excellent public institution with the kind of campus that could never exist in Manhattan. It has large, open fields for soccer and baseball, several play structures and swing sets, outdoor basketball courts, a shaded courtyard for lunches and snacks, and a large organic garden maintained by teachers and students. It also has an active parent-teacher association, which champions diversity (there’s a growing Latino and Asian presence in the school, and many children with disabilities) and organizes social and cultural events for the community. The school could not be a more welcoming place.
But when the academic year began we quickly noticed some major flaws in the otherwise excellent social infrastructure. The campus, while beautiful, is mostly off-limits to parents, who are expected to drop off their children at the entrance and are allowed into classrooms on special occasions only. There’s some space for casual interaction on the sidewalk in front of the school, but it’s not designed for socializing, especially not at the beginning or end of the school day. The reason will likely be familiar to everyone who’s spent time in large suburban schools: the entryway is dominated by a long, roundabout driveway, and every day hundreds of parents drive through it to drop off their children and quickly pull away. It’s a remarkably efficient system—so efficient, in fact, that parents have little opportunity to get to know one another on or around the school grounds.
The infrastructure that makes this affluent suburban school less cohesive than it otherwise might be is probably not cause for serious concern, since families in the community have access to other well-run public institutions and marketplaces—swimming pools, libraries, athletic fields, farmers’ markets, and pleasant commercial corridors—that foster community ties. But in the many towns and neighborhoods that don’t have all these resources, educational institutions are essential parts of the social infrastructure. When they’re set up to promote social connections, they can strengthen the support networks and dramatically improve the lives of parents and children. When they’re not, each family is more likely to be on its own.
Of course, the design and programming of schools also shapes their core mission: educating children. The physical layout and organizational structure of a school affects how learning happens—in classrooms, on campus, and in the neighborhood where it’s situated. This is just as true for elementary schools as it is for elite universities. Consider, for instance, the difference between the traditional Oxbridge college model, organized around small rooms where individual students study with tutors, and the latest design trends in contemporary universities, which feature large, open, multipurpose spaces that encourage serendipitous encounters and promote collaboration with people from different fields.
Campus landscapes, teaching halls, research centers, and dormitories are the most visible elements of a school’s social infrastructure. But the edges and borders matter too, because they shape whether and how students learn to engage in public culture and interact with people who are not like them. Some schools—private as well as public—have open, accessible grounds with amenities for everyone in the area. Others put gates and security guards on the perimeter to ensure that only a select group comes in. In recent years, some high schools and universities have discarded the idea of a physical campus altogether, using the Internet as the main infrastructure for delivering education and eliminating most of the school’s social life. But the most notable improvements in academic achievement are concentrated in schools that have doubled down on the places where face-to-face interaction between teachers and students happens regularly. Small, intimate settings where people get to know one another well are not only ideal places for young people to develop skills for civic engagement and community building but also ideal places to learn.
In the 1980s, when American political leaders had grown anxious about a new “urban underclass” and local governments throughout the country deployed armed security guards to monitor high school campuses, public schools—particularly those in poor areas—had ceased to be ideal places for anything. With metal detectors at the gates and pass cards restricting the circulation of students, educational institutions had come to resemble prisons. And that’s where a growing number of students were heading, after failing out of schools that were set up to fail them.
Deborah Meier, a teacher, a principal, and an advocate with nearly three decades of experience in tough urban districts, belonged to a long tradition of education reformers who believed that schools worked best when they modeled the best practices of civic and intellectual life, with small classrooms serving as settings for safe but searching and honest debates. That’s how the most prestigious urban private schools operated; why shouldn’t urban public schools do that too? As Meier saw it, the move to militarize large school campuses represented a dangerous turn in American education, one that threatened to depersonalize the school experience and bring out the worst in the nation’s most vulnerable children. Instead of cracking down on schools, she called for administrators to carve them up into institutions with about one hundred students per grade and no more than five hundred total. The goal was to create smaller learning communities—again, roughly the size of private institutions—where students and teachers could grow closer, staff could nimbly respond to emerging issues and needs, and parents could develop deeper local knowledge and a greater sense of ownership over their child’s school. “Young people cannot learn democratic values in a setting that does not value individual achievement, that cannot notice triumphs and defeats, has no time to celebrate or mourn, or respond with indignation or recognition as the situation requires,” she wrote in an influential New York Times essay. “Small schools offer opportunities to solve every one of these critical issues.”1
Meier acknowledged that small schools would not solve all the problems in American education. Drugs, violence, and vandalism would not go away simply because students had been moved to a new environment, or because a giant campus that once held two thousand students had been transformed into a set of five campuses, each with four hundred students. But “hugeness,” she believed, “works against lively intellectual intercourse” and prevents both administrators and parents from improving conditions at ground level. “In small schools,” on the other hand, “parents hear about the same teachers, students and families year after year in a variety of formal and informal ways. Trust builds and issues that arise get settled handily. Accountability to parents, as well as to the community, is a less knotty problem. In a small school, strangers and strange behaviors stick out and can be addressed with dispatch. Trouble-making strangers can be identified and peer pressure has an inhibiting effect on violence or other antisocial behavior.”2
It was a compelling argument—so compelling, in fact, that in the 1990s and 2000s several large urban school districts began small school initiatives, and major philanthropies, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Annenberg Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, poured resources into small school projects. The Gates Foundation alone invested $650 million, hoping it would yield immediate results.
The experiments were indeed ambitious. In New York City, for instance, the Department of Education opened dozens of small high schools, including specialty schools—for arts, computers and technology, health, languages, and science, among others—that occupied portions of formerly large school buildings. Graduation rates at the new small schools quickly rose high above the city average, and in some failing schools, they spiked. In Flatbush, a predominantly poor, African American neighborhood in Brooklyn, the city transformed Erasmus Hall High School into the Erasmus Hall Educational Complex, with five separate schools. Before the change, graduation rates at Erasmus were around 40 percent. Within a few years they topped 90 percent. The change at the Evander Childs High School building in the Bronx was even more dramatic. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Evander Childs exemplified the problems of large urban school buildings, with high rates of violence, truancy, and, as of 2002, a four-year graduation rate of 31 percent. Some students, afraid of conflict, viewed skipping classes as a survival strategy, if not the best way to get ahead. Parents had no good options: they could either send their children into the fire or let their futures burn away slowly without a high school degree. Reducing the school size resulted in an astoundingly rapid transformation. Parents and administrators regained control of the campus. Attendance stabilized. By 2007, the combined graduation rate reached 80 percent.3
On a warm spring day in 2016, I joined a librarian from the Seward Park Library on an outreach visit to the Seward Park Campus, a six-floor, “vertical campus” in a hulking gray industrial building where five small schools occupied the space of one old high school. We were there to bring library programming—that day would be an arts class focused on manga drawing—into a school system whose budget could hardly cover basic needs. Fifteen years before, as the Seward Park High School, the institution was overwhelmed by the challenge of educating students from the Lower East Side’s poor, largely immigrant community. In 2001, its graduation rate was 32 percent. The small school experiment began there in 2006, and by 2012 the cumulative graduation rate from its five small schools—the High School for Dual Language and Asian Studies, the New Design High School, the Essex Street Academy (formerly the High School for History and Communication), the Lower Manhattan Arts Academy, and the Urban Assembly Academy of Government and Law—was above 80 percent.
I wasn’t around to observe daily life in the old school, but fortunately the great journalist Samuel Freedman spent a year there in the late 1980s, reporting his book Small Victories.4 Freedman portrays the students, 90 percent of whom were children of immigrants who did not speak English, as bright and ambitious; at least, the ones who attended were, since more than 40 percent of entering freshmen dropped out before graduating, which placed Seward Park High on a list of the ten worst schools in New York State. The physical campus and organizational structure, however, created all kinds of obstacles, so many that one boy ran for student government on the slogan “Are you ashamed to go to Seward?”5
Classrooms were impossibly crowded. There was a gaping hole in the roof and the ceiling of the faculty lounge was crumbling. Some two hundred windows were broken. The metal fence surrounding the school’s annex was in disrepair. Basic materials—books, pens, paper, chalk—were in short supply. Teachers were overloaded and exhausted. Jessica Siegel, the book’s protagonist, threw herself into teaching and helped the students accomplish more than seems possible. But she was an anomaly, and, regardless, the work was so taxing that she quit at year’s end. The principal, diligent, dedicated, and entirely admirable, was outmatched by the school’s problems. Most students were too.
The five schools I observed on my visit to the Seward Park Campus were neat and well organized, and students seemed to have a warm and familiar relationship with teachers and staff. External reviewers from the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs found something similar when they assessed the institution in 2011: “The tone throughout the building is calm. Hallways don’t get too congested during change of classes; students were relaxed and well-behaved during the lunchtimes we observed in the cafeteria. ‘Like any high school, we have our incidents, but the kids are good. It’s a safe place,’ a security guard said.”6 Each institution controls its own floor, and although their layout is identical, the schools distinguish themselves through their posters, announcements, fashion, and culture. They share some common facilities, including a gym and a small library on the sixth floor. But generally, they operate as separate institutions, and each is a good place to learn.
Reducing a school’s physical size does not solve all of its problems, but it has proven to make a tremendous impact on student attention, achievement, and college matriculation as well as teacher satisfaction and positive feelings about the school climate.7 A recent study of twenty-one thousand New York City students by the independent, nonpartisan research firm MDRC found that, compared with students in ordinary high schools, students who attended small schools were 9.4 percentage points more likely to graduate, 8.4 percentage points more likely to enroll in college, and even more likely to attend selective universities.8 These numbers may not sound high, but—as countless school administrators and academic researchers know from experience—producing meaningful improvements in educational outcomes is notoriously difficult; there’s a heated, long-standing debate, for instance, over whether spending more money on schools has any impact on performance at all. In this context, gains near 10 percent are extraordinary. There’s no magic bullet for improving school performance in difficult environments, but designing campuses that students, teachers, and administrators can collectively control is among the most effective techniques we’ve found.
Designing campuses that promote learning and community building may be a relatively new priority in public education circles, where resources are scarce, but it has always been a central concern of universities, which play an outsize role in modern societies. The late Richard Dober, a renowned scholar at Harvard and MIT who designed college campuses throughout the world, estimated that, as of 1992, about 40 percent of the American population had spent at least one year as a full-time student on one of the nation’s 3,500 or so college campuses. “Campus design is a civic art that resonates with meaning and significance for our culture,” he wrote. “The Greeks had their agora, the Romans their Forum, the Middle Ages their cathedral and town square, the Renaissance their palaces and enclaves for the privileged, and the 19th century their centers of commerce, transportation and government. The campus is uniquely our generation’s contribution to communal placemaking and placemarking.” When designed well, it should “promote community, allegiance, and civility, while at the same time encouraging diversity in discourse and vision.”9
The time we spend on college campuses shapes our ideas about what we want to pursue and who we want to become. It changes our social networks and work opportunities. It breaks down ethnic and religious divisions, leading to what we once called “mixed marriages” between people who’d otherwise never form families together.10 And even as a growing number of people on both sides of the political spectrum express concern that colleges—and particularly partisan student groups—have become inhospitable to civil debate about controversial topics, there’s no better institution to prepare us for civic life in democratic societies, giving us the tools we need to understand difference, evaluate evidence, and engage in reasoned dialogue with people who don’t share our perspectives or values.
This hasn’t always been the case. Many of the earliest European universities were designed to solidify social boundaries, not open them. In Campus: An American Planning Tradition, the Stanford professor Paul Turner recounts that the first universities, in Bologna and Paris, were part of the city, and students typically lodged with their families or with townspeople.11 As universities developed, local entrepreneurs built halls and hostels for the students. But many school administrators disliked this arrangement, as did the aristocratic parents of university students, and universities began to erect gates and walls to separate their sacred grounds from the profane communities in which they had been embedded. New College, at Oxford, built the first enclosed quadrangle that housed all university functions in 1379. Many schools followed, giving rise to the model of the college as a segregated residential community as well as an educational institution where students studied, largely in private rooms, under the direct tutelage of a learned instructor.
Turner identifies several reasons for the use of the enclosed quadrangle in British colleges, from efficient land use in crowded towns to the influential tradition of the cloistered monastery. “Simply from an architectural point of view,” he writes, “the monastic and collegiate ‘programs’ were nearly identical: the housing of a community of unmarried men and boys, with space for sleeping, eating, instruction, and religious services.” The walls that divided the college campus from the town served defensive purposes, protecting students and faculty not only from occasional wars and local conflicts but also from townspeople. “The early histories of Oxford and Cambridge abound in incidents of town-gown antagonism leading to fighting, warfare, and murder on both sides,” Turner reports. “The ability to close off a college at a few gate-points also gave college authorities the advantage of greater control over the students, a concern that was a major factor in the growth of the collegiate system.” By 1410, Oxford required all students to live in colleges rather than in the town, and that policy remains intact, albeit only for freshmen, today.
Oxford and Cambridge opened up in other ways, however. In the sixteenth century, when a graduate of Cambridge named Dr. John Caius raised concerns about the health risks of confining students to stagnant, foul air, the university built its first three-sided courtyard. (Some attribute the form to rising fashions in France’s new chateaux.) Whatever its origin, Turner writes, the new, open campus spaces “suggested a more sympathetic and less defensive attitude toward the world outside the college.”12 So too did the schools’ push to reform admissions policies. During the seventeenth century, the great British universities made their first efforts to incorporate local, nonaristocratic children, and a larger proportion of the general population entered higher education than at any time except the twentieth century. These trends influenced the first American colleges, which were more accessible and expansive than anything in the Old World.
Since 1963, when Richard Hofstadter published Anti-intellectualism in American Life, but especially today, it’s hard not to worry about America’s weak commitment to intellectual culture. But early American colonists were interested in the pursuit of ideas, and soon after they settled here they began building colleges to support higher education. “By the time of the Revolution there were nine degree-granting colleges in the colonies,” Turner writes. Harvard College was founded in 1636; the College of William and Mary in 1693; Yale College in 1701; the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1746; the College of Rhode Island (now Brown University) in 1764; Queen’s College (now Rutgers University) in 1766; and Dartmouth College in 1769. These schools built grand buildings, the largest in their regions. They tended to be located in rural, frontier areas rather than distrusted, irreligious cities, and they encouraged students to spend time in pure, natural environments, “removed from the distractions of civilizations.”13
The campus is an American concept, probably coined around 1770, to describe the open grounds around the College of New Jersey. Turner reprints the first recorded use of the term to refer to the area around a college, from a letter written by a student in 1774: “Last week to show our patriotism, we gathered all the steward’s winter store of tea, and having made a fire in the Campus, we there burnt near a dozen pounds, tolled the bell and made many spirited resolves.”14 After 1776, the word gained popularity at colleges throughout the new United States, and by the mid-nineteenth century it had become the most common term to describe the grounds around American universities. Eventually it would take on new meaning for the grounds around corporate offices as well.
There has never been a dominant architectural style for American college landscapes or buildings. Brown University doesn’t even have a dominant style on its own campus. But most American schools adopted the British residential college model and built dormitories to promote a robust campus culture. Old College, the first building at Harvard, had a spacious hall on the first floor that served as the hub of most activities. It was, at various times in the day, a lecture hall, a dining room, and a general living space. A library and a set of dormitories lined the second floor. Students shared bedrooms, and even beds, which was not unusual at the time. But, following the English model, they were each given a private space for studying, because most educators believed that learning happened when an individual was alone, memorizing facts and silently contemplating the day’s lessons.
Yet from the beginning, the architects of America’s universities rejected the monastic model that influenced European institutions, and designed them to be deeply social places. The primary motivation was intellectual. American campus architects wanted to build universities where knowledge from different fields would circulate freely, across academic domains and into the world as well. The intellectual life they promoted was never meant to be contained or disciplined. They aimed for cross-pollination, and the campus—its classrooms, libraries, dormitories, and dining halls—was an instrument of convergence.
American campus designers were also intent on building new communities, and they had novel ideas for fostering social ties. Harvard was but one of many American schools to organize student life around colleges, each with its own spaces for dining, studying, and fraternizing. Princeton developed dining societies, which later became eating clubs, as the foundation for college social activities. Students played a role in creating campus culture too. In 1776, five men at the College of William and Mary started a new student society, Phi Beta Kappa, which eventually added chapters at universities across the country, becoming the first intercollegiate fraternity.
Fraternities whose agenda was more social than academic are, of course, another hallmark of American universities. The first, the Kappa Alpha Society, was started in 1825 by a group of male students at Union College in New York who wanted to form an exclusive collegiate organization that would mirror the social clubs for affluent white men that were prominent at the time. In 1846, a chapter of Chi Psi at the University of Michigan opened the first fraternity house in a wooded area off-campus, where they could operate without official supervision. At the time, most college fraternities were secret societies, and administrators—at Union, Princeton, and Brown, among other schools—tried to prohibit them. But fraternities slowly gained acceptance as legitimate social institutions, in part because they were so popular among elite students, and in part because they offered universities a free solution to an emerging problem: housing the growing ranks of enrolled students.
By the late 1890s, fraternities and the women’s equivalent, sororities, began to open chapter houses on or around university grounds. Eventually they’d become a staple of the US undergraduate system. Today, there are more than six thousand fraternity chapters across roughly eight hundred college campuses; about 10 percent of all male, degree-seeking college students join a fraternity each fall, and millions of young adults frequent their parties and social events.15 The Greek system, as it has become known, is beloved by students and alumni for whom it defines the collegiate social experience. Its advocates claim that those who participate in fraternities and sororities have higher graduation rates than those who shun them. But this achievement comes at the expense of campus health and safety, and the system has increasingly come under fire from university administrators concerned about its effects on campus life.
Fraternities, both as organizations and also as physical places, are an exemplary form of exclusive social infrastructure. The residential houses often contain dining facilities, indoor and outdoor recreational areas, bars, common rooms for entertainment, and ample party space, all of which encourage members to anchor their lives around them. Since most fraternities select people with similar backgrounds and interests—ethnicity, race, religion, class, or often sports (and occasionally academics)—joining one is an effective way to avoid the diversity and difference a university offers. Members gain brothers and sisters, but too often lose the chance to be part of something greater.
Fraternity houses are typically embedded in “rows,” the vibrant social spaces that sustain a campus’s Greek life, particularly on party nights. They are also dangerous spaces—sites of rampant discrimination, violent hazing, excessive drinking, and, too often, sexual assault. The National Study of Student Hazing, which includes 11,482 surveys with students from fifty-three American colleges and universities, reports that half of all students involved in Greek organizations experience hazing, most commonly involving forced alcohol consumption, humiliation, isolation, sleep deprivation, and sex acts.16 In 2013, Bloomberg News reported that more than sixty students had died in fraternity-related activities across US campuses during the previous eight years, at schools including Penn State, Baruch, Northern Illinois University, and Fresno State.17 Studies consistently find that men who are associated with fraternities are several times more likely to perpetrate sexual assault than those who are not.18 And health scholars have shown that fraternity membership is a significant cause of binge drinking, even after controlling for background factors.19 In other words, the high incidence of trouble at fraternities is not merely due to the people who join them—it’s also about the places themselves.
In recent years, concerned faculty, students, and the victims of violence on fraternity rows have called for universities to reform the Greek system. After completing a massive study of sex on college campuses, however, the sociologist Lisa Wade concluded that nothing short of abolition would stem the damage. “Reform is not possible because the old-line, historically white social fraternities have been synonymous with risk-taking and defiance from their very inception,” she writes. “They are a brotherhood born in mutiny and forged in the fire of rebellion. These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood—right alongside secrecy and self-protection.”20 It’s difficult to abolish a social institution that has so many loyal and influential champions, and equally difficult to unbuild a social infrastructure that shapes so much of university life. But fraternities have earned an expulsion.
Fraternities are not the only divisive social infrastructures on college campuses. American universities rarely built the kind of high walls that protected colleges at Oxford and Cambridge from the communities around them, but many schools, particularly those in cities, have buttressed their exclusive admissions standards with elaborate physical and organizational systems that separate students and faculty from neighboring people and places perceived as dangerous.21 Today, large campus security operations reinforce these perceptions at universities throughout the country, and make the distinction between insiders and outsiders especially sharp.
Conventionally, college administrators and city planners think of “town/gown” divisions as especially bad for residents, not students, because they’re the ones excluded from campus amenities and stuck dealing with a raucous population of young people who haven’t learned to be good neighbors. But universities that cut themselves off from surrounding communities also hurt students, giving them a false sense of superiority and depriving them of opportunities to learn from their neighbors and develop the civic skills that they—and all of us—urgently need.
In recent years, several schools have begun experimenting with new models of civic engagement. In 2017, for instance, Colby College announced that it would lead a collaborative urban revitalization project that includes business owners, philanthropic organizations, and civic groups in its struggling hometown of Waterville, Maine. Colby announced that it would invest $10 million to purchase five properties in the downtown area, which it would convert into a hotel, a tech hub, and a 100,000-square-foot, five-story, mixed-use dormitory that would bring about two hundred students off-campus and into the community. When completed, the complex will include retail outlets as well as a public meeting space on the ground level, facilities designed to bridge the historic gap between town and gown. To bolster the effort, Colby faculty and administrators are developing a new “civic engagement curriculum,” which will involve partnerships with the Waterville Public Library and a local homeless shelter, for all students who live in the downtown dormitory.
Partnering with the local community is more complicated at the University of Chicago, an affluent and prestigious school with a long history of excluding its African American neighbors. Despite a rhetorical commitment to liberalism and tolerance, during the 1950s the university’s leaders established a fund they could use for “area protection” against what the former director of community interest called “negro invasion.” The university president incentivized the board of trustees to support this initiative by taking members on a bus tour of “typical colored neighborhoods,” which was designed to provoke anxieties about what would happen in Hyde Park if the university didn’t acquire more real estate in the area surrounding the school. The scheme worked, as the trustees donated $4.5 million to a fund that would, as the chancellor, Lawrence Kimpton, put it, “buy, control, and rebuild our neighborhood.”22 class="not_indented"
Substantial as it was, the fund proved woefully inadequate to secure the area around campus from the crime that pervaded Chicago’s postindustrial ghettos in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, university leaders had largely given up their efforts to control adjacent real estate. They invested in policing instead of property, a move made possible by the Illinois Private College Campus Police Act of 1992, which gave universities in high-crime areas all the legal powers of a police force but few of the public reporting obligations. Within a few years the university had built one of the nation’s largest private security forces, and it made sure all prospective and entering students knew how well they would be protected once they arrived on campus.
But only if they stayed on campus: although the university’s officers had jurisdiction to patrol off-campus, former students report that school officials advised them not to cross into the black neighborhoods around them, including Woodlawn, Washington Park, South Shore, Kenwood, and Oakland, because they’d be targets of crime.23 As compensation, the University of Chicago invested heavily in its own, internal social infrastructure: libraries, bookstores, cafés, art museums, theaters, and athletic facilities. It assured students that everything they needed was right on campus—or, if they felt adventurous, in the wealthy neighborhoods far to the north.
The university’s student body has grown more diverse in recent decades, but today African Americans constitute less than 10 percent of the undergraduate population, compared with 85 percent in the adjacent neighborhood of Woodlawn, 68 percent in Kenwood, and 96 percent in Washington Park. In the twenty-first century, college leaders have made serious efforts to pierce the bubble of student culture and help the young people who study on its South Side campus engage their neighbors. In 2000, it released the Midway Plaisance Master Plan, which revitalized parks that are heavily used by local African American communities as well as students. In 2005, it launched the Urban Health Initiative, which improved access to public health programming and high-quality medical care in underserved areas around campus. It opened an Office of Civic Engagement, and declared that the school would now act “as an anchor institution on the mid–South Side.” Leaders promised that they would “partner within our city and surrounding communities to share talent, information, and resources to have a positive impact on our city’s well-being.” They maintained the strong police presence in the area, but they stopped advising students to avoid neighboring communities.24
More recently, they even began building social infrastructure that bridges the divide.
In the late 2000s, the celebrated local artist and University of Chicago faculty member Theaster Gates persuaded the university to purchase a string of abandoned buildings on Garfield Boulevard, a corridor in the Washington Park neighborhood just west of campus that was once a hub of commercial activity but had been hollowed out by decades of depopulation and economic decline. The plan, which the university hatched with the City of Chicago, Cook County, and several neighborhood organizations, was to transform the zone into an “Arts Block.” The University of Chicago Arts Incubator, which would include galleries, studio space, classrooms, a community room, and a garden, would reside in the largest corner building. The two adjacent buildings would be leased to Gates for two for-profit, entrepreneurial projects: the Currency Exchange Café and BING Art Books. The university promised that the complex would stimulate economic growth and add cultural vitality to the struggling neighborhood. The Arts Incubator would offer extensive programming for local children and paid fellowships for local artists. The businesses would generate new jobs and attract more people into the community. And, as Gates and other University of Chicago leaders envisioned, they would bring students off the “safe space” on campus and into a place where they would interact with people whose race, class, and status were different from those they had grown up with at home.25
When I first visit the Arts Block, in early 2017, I can’t help but notice how much the streetscape resembles places like North Lawndale and Englewood, where the decrepit social infrastructure led to such high death tolls during the heat wave and degrades the quality of life every day. Garfield Boulevard is lined with empty lots, shuttered factories, and boarded-up businesses, and the residential blocks stemming from it are similarly depleted, with large grassy fields where grand homes and apartment buildings once stood. I park in front of a beat-up hardware store, one of the few open businesses near the Arts Block, and see two homeless men salvaging garbage from the lot next door. We nod at each other, I cross the street, and the men get back to work.
The Arts Incubator, which opened in 2013, is on the west corner of the complex. There’s a bright, open gallery encased in large glass windows on the ground floor, but when I pull on the front door it’s locked—a sign that the management remains on guard. Immediately, though, a young woman with long, wavy hair and a wide beige scarf pops out from a back room and motions that she’s coming. She smiles warmly, opens the door, and introduces herself. Her name is Nadia, and she’d been working there for a year after leaving her job in a public school. There’s a student art exhibit there, and Nadia tells me that it was entirely produced and curated by kids from neighborhood schools. “You should have come last week, for the opening,” she says. “We had more than 150 people.”
Nadia closes the door behind me, walks me around the exhibit, and offers a tour of the building. As we leave the gallery a group of middle-aged women carrying yoga mats comes downstairs. “We have classes two days a week now,” Nadia explains. “They’re free, so people just pop in from the neighborhood. I’m jealous!” We walk down a long hallway, past the private studios and into a backyard that local students and staff are turning into a rain garden. Next to it there’s a large woodshop, where the staff runs a design apprenticeship program for teenagers, thirty of whom come each day. Theaster Gates is involved in the program, and the shelves are full of his objects and supplies. Nadia points to a set of ceramic tea-cups. “Theaster made these,” she says. “And now every design class begins with a tea ceremony. It’s just a way of marking the time as special, of getting everyone to truly be here.”
The Arts Block, I can discern, is wholly dedicated to that project. Gates, renowned for recovering decaying objects from abandoned city buildings and transforming them into “urban interventions” with aesthetic and economic benefits, is the creative force behind the initiative. And while he oversees the university’s community arts programming, on Garfield Boulevard he’s focused on his two small businesses, the Currency Exchange Café and BING Art Books next door.
After my visit to the Arts Incubator, Nadia points me next door to the café, which Gates, in signature style, decorated with the original, hand-painted signage from the down-market neighborhood financial institution that once occupied the space. Megan Jeyifo, the café manager who joins me for a lunch of jambalaya and corn bread, explains that “it’s no accident that the most visible, public-facing places that Theaster has developed used to be commercial establishments.” The biggest aim of Gates’s project is to provide stable employment to local residents while also proving that small businesses on Garfield Boulevard can be successful. “Theaster always says that this has to work because he has skin in the game!,” Megan tells me. “It’s not a community organization. It’s not just an art project. We want it to be a model for entrepreneurs who believe in this neighborhood. And the first big challenge is getting people here.”
It seems to be working. The café is bustling and there’s a diverse clientele: students poring over books, freelancers on laptops, retirees sipping coffee. “The café was more of a formal restaurant when it started,” Megan explains. “That appealed to some of the older clientele. But most people were coming in and hoping to stay awhile, and they didn’t need to be bothered by waiters every few minutes. We switched to counter service and loosened things up.” They also started to do more special programming, including a regular Jazz Monday series that has become a popular neighborhood social event and Story Time, a reading program for local kids.
Most of the customers are local residents, but Megan has worked hard to get the university community there as well. “They invited me to do a panel on community service at the first-year orientation,” she tells me. “And the fact that they did is a sign of how things have changed. All the other panelists talked about volunteering, so I just said: ‘The only thing I ask of you is to come and sit at our communal table. Just visit. Get something to eat or drink. That will make a difference. And I bet you’ll come back after that.’
“The next week this kid, blond and baby-faced, came and sat at the communal table. He sat right next to one of our regulars, someone who’s pretty active and entrepreneurial in the neighborhood too. Well, one of our servers saw the kid and got worried. He thought it was a twelve-year-old here without a parent and wanted to make sure he was okay. I went over to say hello, just see what was going on. And the kid said he’d seen me on the panel and wanted to take me up on the request! And, you know, now the students are coming. Sometimes too many come and they’re working here at the wrong time—like on a Saturday, when we actually need the tables! But they show up. They’re hanging out. And that’s beginning to make a difference. It’s a long, complicated history, the university and this neighborhood. We’re not going to change it overnight, but we’re going to make a start.”
No one thinks that the deeply rooted town and gown conflicts in places like Chicago’s South Side will be resolved quickly, but there is one set of higher-education institutions that’s attempting an immediate, radical transformation of the way that colleges interact with the outside world: new online universities that rely solely on massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Rather than building traditional campuses, or any kind of physical structure embedded in a larger town or city, these schools use the Internet as the lecture hall and seminar room, and as the core social infrastructure too.
MOOCs first gained public attention in 2011, when a handful of prominent professors and administrators from elite universities suggested that they could help reduce costs and expand access to higher education. Initially, universities opened select courses, free of charge, to anyone with an Internet connection, and enormous numbers of people signed up. When the Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun offered his artificial intelligence class as a MOOC, more than 160,000 people from 190 countries enrolled.26 Stanford, and several other universities, quickly set up nonprofit online ventures to supplement their offerings.
The extraordinary enrollment numbers also attracted the attention of entrepreneurs in the technology industry, who saw MOOCs as a natural way to “disrupt” the roughly $500 billion higher-education market. Silicon Valley venture capitalists partnered with the first stars of online education, including Thrun and his Stanford computer science colleagues Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Soon several commercial, for-profit ventures were competing for student dollars, including Thrun’s start-up, Udacity, and Coursera, cofounded by Ng and Koller. On the other coast, Harvard and MIT partnered to start a nonprofit MOOC business, edX. Many of the world’s leading scholars signed up to record online versions of their lecture courses, and millions of people around the world registered to take them.
As MOOCs gained press and popularity, college administrators worried that online education really would disrupt their operations, taking students—and their tuition dollars—out of the university and into the pockets of new technology firms. But their anxieties waned as the first waves of data on student performance went public. Although, according to a Pew Research Center survey, 16 percent of American adults reported that they’d taken at least part of an online course in the previous year, the great majority of them had already completed two-or four-year college programs.27 They were taking individual classes to develop new skills and knowledge on sites like KhanAcademy.org, a free online learning platform created by the entrepreneur Sal Khan, not enrolling in certificate or degree programs. Moreover, as several studies have concluded, only a small fraction of the students who enrolled in MOOCs actually completed the courses. A research team that includes Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller and the University of Pennsylvania professor Ezekiel Emanuel, for instance, reports that “just 4% of Coursera users who watch at least one course lecture go on to complete the course and receive a credential.”28 The courses reach millions of people, many of them in the developing world, who otherwise would not have access to leading professors in the United States and Europe, but they have not succeeded in their threat to take down brick-and-mortar colleges, at least not yet.
One reason that online universities have failed to develop long-term, degree-granting programs is that they lack a strong social infrastructure. Students who enroll in Coursera or Udacity, which as of 2016 had twenty-three million and four million registered users, respectively, simply cannot build the personal relationships and career networks that make a university education so valuable, nor can they participate in the campus activities that make a college experience so rich.29 Online universities have tried to address this deficiency. Some offer online discussion forums, others have virtual laboratories, and a few—following the model established by the Open University, Britain’s massively successful distance teaching project—organize regional meet-ups. None of them come close to reproducing the social experience of a residential college, nor even the thinner campus life at commuter schools where flesh-and-blood, part-time students study together for shorter terms.
In 2012, the tech entrepreneur Ben Nelson assembled a small team of education experts, including the former Harvard president Lawrence Summers; Stephen Kosslyn, director of Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and Bob Kerrey, former US senator and president of the New School, to try a different approach. Billing itself “Higher Education for the 21st Century,” Minerva promised to combine the best features of online education with a truly global university experience. Students would take all of their courses online, in small seminars conducted through an active learning interface that allows faculty—who work from locations all over the world rather than near the students—to give individual feedback in real time or after class. Each cohort, 120 at first and then larger as the program developed, would spend the first year in San Francisco, where Minerva leased dorm space in a renovated residential hotel. They would spend each of the following six semesters living in a different city—Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hyderabad, London, Seoul, and Taipei—where together, in leased dorms and hostels, they would share an immersive, collective, flesh-and-bones experience. And the entire four-year education would cost a fraction of what students pay for a traditional American college degree, because, as the Minerva website explains: “Instead of investing in maintaining the expensive buildings, campus facilities, and amenities found at other top universities, Minerva uses the vast resources of major world cities as its infrastructure.”
I first visited Minerva’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco in the spring of 2017, toward the end of its second academic year. Jonathan Katzman, the chief product officer, told me that his team designed the school’s infrastructure to match contemporary lifestyles and learning styles. “We had two tenets,” he explains. “First, if we house students in a city, we should take advantage of the city’s features and amenities. Students should use the city library for studying, or else local cafés. We don’t need to build a symphony hall, a theater, or an athletic complex, because the cities where our students go have all of these things, and we can make sure they know how to use them. We can do more too. Major cultural institutions here have staff that do outreach and education. Our students got to learn how to sing opera … in the San Francisco Opera House! They performed plays … on the stage of the A.C.T. Theater. They volunteer to work on homelessness, public health, all kinds of things. They interact with the real city, every day.” Clearly someone is paying for the social infrastructure being used by Minerva, but it’s not the students.
Though it’s a new university, Minerva is trying to establish its own rituals and traditions, which it layers onto the social infrastructure. “There are a few big things already,” says Capri LaRocca, the city experience manager. “We have legacy groups, which are kind of like the Sorting Hat groups in Harry Potter. They’re named for things in San Francisco, like Ocean, Gate, and Tower. The students meet in special places, and they’ve been making videos and stories to pass on to the next cohorts. And the big common thing is the 10:01. Assignments are due every Sunday at ten p.m., and so we started a weekly ritual meal that everyone attends. The students are from all over the world, and each week a group from one of the countries or regions makes dinner and does some cultural programming. Usually it ends with their favorite party music, and everyone dancing until way too late.”
Minerva is serious about the social side of university culture, but school leaders want the school to become prestigious because of its academic offerings, and they’ve built an infrastructure to support that. Katzman tells me that the second tenet of the school design is that the teaching technology, a portal that his team developed, must deliver an educational experience that’s at least as good as what students get from an in-person seminar, possibly better. “We have excellent professors, faculty from all over the world who can teach for us because of our technology,” he explains, “and we only do small seminars [live, highly interactive, and usually including only twelve to eighteen students], not lectures, because that’s the best way for students to learn.”
I’ve spent my career teaching in person, not on the screen, and naturally I express some skepticism. “Honestly,” Katzman pushes back. “These are some of the most intense classes you will ever see, and the technology helps, because you see everyone’s face on the screen, all at once, unless the instructor wants to do breakout groups or some other layout. Everyone is on the same level. There is no back row, no place where you can disappear. And there’s this incredibly rich interaction between students, and between students and faculty. Also, every class is recorded, which means professors can literally review what happens when someone is struggling with the material. They can give the kind of feedback you just don’t get in a traditional classroom.”
Recently, Minerva released some data that backs this up. In 2016 and 2017, the school administered the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that assesses how much students learn during a single academic year. In the fall, Minerva freshmen ranked in the 95th percentile compared with freshmen at other schools, and, because the program is highly selective and students are quite advanced when they enter, they ranked at the 78th percentile compared with college seniors as well. After eight months of intensive instruction at Minerva, the freshmen performed at the 99th percentile—not only among college freshmen but also when compared with seniors across the United States. “The average score of our students at the end of their freshman spring term was higher than the scores of senior graduating classes at every other university and college that administered the test,” writes Stephen Kosslyn, the founding dean and chief academic officer. “Minerva’s performance is unique in [the Collegiate Learning Assessment] history.”30 The new school was already ranked number one in the measure it takes most seriously: helping students learn.
I asked Minerva if I could speak to some of the students, and they introduced me to three who are finishing up their first year. Each of them seems older and more mature than the first-year students I’ve taught in Manhattan, and perhaps that’s not surprising. Although about twenty thousand people applied for one of the 160 spots in the class of 2022, those who get accepted, and then select the school over more conventional options, are clearly unlike the typical freshman.
In some ways, though, they are just like most university students. They’re looking to discover things, to build relationships and have experiences that will shape them forever. “We’re a close-knit community. Pretty much everyone knows everyone,” says Zane, a precocious eighteen-year-old from Southern California. “But we’re also incredibly diverse. I keep thinking that if I’d gone to UCLA, where a lot of my high school friends are, my life would have been totally predictable. I’d have studied computational mathematics. I’d have hung out with my old friends, stayed around California or LA. But this is an adventure. Everything is open and uncertain. I really believe that where you are shapes who you will be. And I am going to be all over the world, getting to know these different places and cultures. I already know that I’m going to be very different because I’m here. And I can’t believe how much I’m learning.”
When we finish our group conversation, Zane asks if he can walk me to the garage and get some advice. We leave the Minerva office, head up Market Street, and cross over toward the San Francisco Civic Center. We see another student, and he and Zane shout out to each other as they approach, slap hands, make plans for later. There’s a man drumming on a plastic bucket, and Zane uses the moment to tell me he wants to spend the summer in New York City, doing an independent study on drumming circles. “I can bartend. Couch surf a bit. There are some Minerva students from there and I’m sure they can help me out when I get there,” he explains. “Like I told you, we’re all pretty tight.” The advice he wants turns out not to concern academic research; he wants to know if I have friends or students who can give him a place to stay.
We stop at a traffic light and scan the plaza in front of us. There are government types in jackets and ties, European tourists, homeless people walking toward the library, cyclists whizzing past. Zane breathes out and his body relaxes, as if he feels at home.
Minerva students, like those at most universities, live close to a library, but theirs is run by the City of San Francisco rather than the school. It’s a fitting arrangement, since in San Francisco, as in so many contemporary cities, the library may well be the single institution that’s most responsible for inspiring people to learn. When I’d done fieldwork in the Seward Park branch of New York City’s library system, Andrew, the library worker who called for more “palaces for the people,” told me that helping children learn how much there is to learn in the world is the most rewarding thing about his job. “In three years here I’ve seen a lot of this neighborhood’s children grow up,” he explained. “I’ve seen kids learn to read. I’ve seen teenagers become regulars. I’ve seen some get in trouble, then turn things around. And it’s great to witness growth in people, to watch kids become adults.”
I observed this myself in various branch libraries. In Seward Park, most days began with groups of children from local day care centers and elementary schools parading through the building hand in hand, or with each small person holding on to a common line. They headed directly to the second-floor children’s space, where a team of librarians and thousands of books awaited them. In Chinatown, where most parents are immigrants, often with limited knowledge of English and little money for buying books, the library is the key site for teaching literacy. The library staff offers classes for children, parents, and caregivers throughout the day. Among the programs I attended: story time, bilingual sing-along and reading, arts and crafts, basic computing, how to do research, homework help, college preparation. I watched teachers from elementary schools that, due to funding cuts in the public education system, no longer have their own libraries bring their entire class to Seward Park for special projects and to simply borrow books. I spent afternoons in the company of high school students who hung out, studied, and played computer games in the dedicated teen space because it was better than being out in the streets. I saw children’s librarians organize special programs for families with an incarcerated parent, so that kids whose sense of shame and isolation made it hard to focus on schoolwork and build solid friendships could meet other kids in their situation. I met young people who said that outside the library they faced a world of constraints, whereas inside they saw only abundance, and permission to take whatever they wanted.
I interviewed dozens of people about their memories of growing up in libraries and learned about all kinds of ways that the experience mattered: Discovering an interest that they’d never have found without librarians, open stacks, or a video collection. Feeling liberated, responsible, intelligent. Forging a new relationship, deepening an old one. Sensing, in some cases for the first time, that they belong.
Sharon Marcus, for instance, grew up in a working-class family in Queens where money was tight and everyone was busy. “Home was not peaceful,” she recalls. “And the park, where I spent a lot of time, was rambunctious. There was never really any spot that you could just sit and be by yourself. I was an introvert, and I needed some time when I wasn’t gonna talk to anyone. I wanted to read for as long as I wanted, to be completely in charge of my time, my energy, how I was using my attention, where I was directing it, for how long. And the library was a place I could go and ignore people, but also know that I wasn’t alone. We didn’t go on vacations, we didn’t travel. So the library was where I went to escape everything, and where I could glimpse a better reality.”
Sharon has vivid memories of the books she read in her branch library. It started with stories about ordinary kids in New York City living lives very different from hers, and in time she grew interested in books about female actresses and film stars. “I remember finding a whole bunch of biographies of women who were queens and saints. Even now, I can physically see where this section was in the building. I was interested in queens because, well, why wouldn’t I be? They were like men who had done something. I got interested in Queen Elizabeth the First because she was Henry VIII’s daughter. I used the card catalog and found a book, and then next to it there was some other Elizabeth, some crazy Hungarian Christian saint who got leprosy deliberately or something, I remember reading that too. I don’t know how they organized that section but it was basically about women who had achieved things. I devoured it.”
The library became even more important to Sharon when she entered adolescence. “I was so excited when I realized you could read old newspapers on microfilm, and watch old movies at the library too. The librarians always let me, and they didn’t ask a lot of questions. That was so important,” Sharon tells me. “I never, ever encountered a librarian who said something like ‘Why would you want to do that?’ or ‘I can’t let you use that machine, you’re too young.’ I was shy, but they never made me feel weird. Nobody treated me like I was special or supersmart, either. They were just neutral. And that, I think, was a real gift. It made the library a space of permission, not encouragement that pushed you in a certain direction, where you feel like people are watching you and like giving their approval, but just freedom to pursue what you want.”
No other place in Sharon’s life worked that way: not home, where her parents monitored her choices; not synagogue, where she felt intense moral pressure but no sense of belonging; not school, where teachers and staff were quick to judge. The library, she learned, could accommodate nearly all of her interests, especially if she left her neighborhood and visited the main Queens Library or the stunning central library on Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “I remember going there to do a big research paper in high school,” she explains. “It was before the Internet, and finding things took so much more effort. I remember feeling really good then. I was so far beyond the children’s room, and even the collection at my little branch library. I realized that there were all these things I wanted to understand about how the world worked, and that here I could find the answers through books and reading.” She remains a regular, to this day, though now that she’s the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, finding time for public library visits isn’t as easy as it was when she was a kid.
Jelani Cobb, who grew up in Hollis, Queens, during the 1970s, also believes that the most important part of his education happened in his neighborhood library. His father, who migrated from southern Georgia, was an electrician who started working at age nine and had only a third-grade education; his mother, from Alabama, had a high school degree. “This was a middle-class African American community with a lot of migration-generation folk who had southern accents,” he says. “They’d found a foothold in the city and were beginning to make some progress for themselves. They hadn’t been able to get formal education, but education was very important to them. They’d take a great deal of pride in reading the newspaper every single day, going to the library, taking out books and so on, supplementing what they didn’t get as kids.”
Jelani remembers getting his first library card. “I was about nine years old and going to a new school, and on the way back we stopped at the public library on 204th Street and Hollis Avenue. We went in and my mother told me to tell the woman what I wanted. I said that I wanted a library card and the woman couldn’t quite hear me and so she leaned over to hear better and my mother said to her, ‘No, sit back up.’ And she told me to speak loudly so the woman could hear.”
“And so I did. I said I wanted to get a library card. I think if you were old enough to sign your name you could get a card. And she gave me the thing! I signed my name and the card was mine!”
One of the first books he took out was about Thomas Edison, and it reported that as a child Edison read a one-foot stack of books each week. “I set out to do the same thing, and of course, I don’t think I did it,” Jelani recalls. “But that sparked a lifelong habit of spending many hours reading, which is amazing. And I remember being fascinated by the idea that as a young person, you could go to this place and read anything that you wanted. All these things were on the shelves! It was almost kind of like, ‘Do people know about this?’ It was like, ‘Is the jig up?’ I was worried they’d find out what happens here and shut it down!”
Jelani and his mother spent a lot of time together at the library. As he got older, she went back to school, getting a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s at New York University. One time, he remembers, “my mother took out a small book. It was maybe thirty pages and I couldn’t believe that this was like a book for grown-ups. I thought that grown-ups read books that were really big and so I was interested in this book. I wanted to read it but she was like, ‘No, this book is for grown-ups.’
“And I was like, well, ‘I can read it! I can!’ And so I read it, and it’s about this man who has this bag of gold and he’s going around with it and he wants to go swimming but he can’t, and he wants to do something else but he can’t. And all these times the bag of gold is getting in his way. And eventually he loses the bag, but then as he was looking for it, he winds up doing all these things that he couldn’t do while he had it. I was like, ‘Okay, this is a nice story.’ And my mother was like, ‘Do you get it?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, the man lost his bag and then he did this and then he did that.’ And then she said, ‘No, this is what is called a metaphor.’ And I specifically remember that. It was when I learned what a metaphor was and how it functioned in literature. She explained that the reason the story is so short and is still for grown-ups is that it’s actually making a deeper point, that a book is often more than what the story is saying on the surface. That was quite a thing to learn!”
Jelani also spent a lot of time alone in the library, exploring politics, art, and literature, and sometimes delving into controversial topics that he’d grown curious about during conversations at home or in church. “I was raised Catholic, and when I was fifteen I somehow got interested in euthanasia and began to form an opinion about it. I had to do a report for school, and I started by interviewing my priest. He had baptized me, actually. And he explained that as Catholics, we were opposed to euthanasia, and I was kind of like, ‘Okay, right.’ But then I went to the library and started reading these things on my own. And I realized, you know, I think I disagree with this! People should have the right to choose when to die. And it wound up being an opinion that I hold to this day. And honestly, had I not kind of gotten into that topic on my own and actually just done that reading at the library, I probably would have just said, you know, this is what we believe as Catholics, and that’s it.” The library, he says, helped him become his own person, free to question authority and think for himself. Today, those are skills that he uses often. He’s a staff writer for the New Yorker and a professor of journalism at Columbia.
Jelani’s mother died in 2011, and he wanted to do something to honor her love for the library and his memory of the time they spent there together. “The year she passed away, I purchased a computer at our branch of the Queens Library, the one where she’d taken me to get my first library card. I put a little plaque on it that says ‘For Mary Cobb.’ I thought it would be a contribution to a place that my mother felt was valuable. And I felt like it was the right thing to do because it was so central for both of us. I mean, everything I do started from being able to read all those books when I was nine or ten.”
Today, our communities are full of children whose future, like Jelani’s, will be formed in the places where they go to learn about themselves and the world they’ll inherit. They deserve palaces. Whether they get them is up to us.