When Your City Becomes a Campus: What Good is Higher Education for Our Cities
Davarian L. Baldwin, Trinity College
In conversation with Nicole King, Associate Professor, American Studies, UMBC
This event is part of the Spring 2024 Humanities Forum

With an eye to local Baltimore developments, like the Eager Park and UMB BioPark projects, Davarian Baldwin will discuss what he calls the rise of UniverCities—higher education’s growing control over the economic development and political governance of urban America. From housing and wage labor to health care and even policing, colleges and universities have become big business and our communities their company towns. He will explore the costs when our cities become campuses and how we can think through a more liberatory way forward.

This lecture is in honor of the legacy of Ed Orser, American Studies. UMBC.

Davarian L. Baldwin is an internationally recognized scholar, author, and public advocate. He is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His academic and political commitments have focused on global cities and particularly the diverse and marginalized communities that struggle to maintain sustainable lives in urban locales. Baldwin is the award-winning author of several books, most recently, In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, and served as the consultant and text author for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle (2022). His commentaries and opinions have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, BBC, and HULU to USA Today, The Washington Post, and TIMEmagazine. Baldwin was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Admission is free.

The event will be held at the University of Baltimore, Learning Commons, Town Hall, 1415 Maryland Avenue (entrance on Mt. Royal Avenue). Street parking is available on Maryland Avenue and garage parking behind The Fitzgerald at 80 W. Oliver Street.

A free shuttle will be provided between campuses. Please register via this link.

A collaboration with the University of Baltimore’s History Program. UMBC co-sponsors: Department of American Studies; the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture; and the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health; the School of Public Policy; and the Public Humanities Program.

Books will be available for purchase on site courtesy of Greedy Reads.

Photo by VisionMerge Productions.