Join IRIS NRC for our April book club featuring Davarian Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower on Wednesday, April 17th from 4-5pm. The first 20 people to register will receive a free copy of his book (US mailing addresses only). Register at the “Register Here” button above.
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.
Davarian L. Baldwin is a leading urbanist, historian, and cultural critic. His work largely examines the landscape of global cities through the lens of the African Diasporic experience. Baldwin’s related interests include universities and urban development, the racial foundations of academic thought, intellectual and mass culture, Black radical thought and transnational social movements, the politics of heritage tourism, and 20th and 21st Century art, architecture, and urban design.
Thank you to the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at UW-Madison for co-sponsoring this event.
