PSU Magazine Spring 1990

former Georgetown University president Father Tim Healy in illustrating the urban setting: ''At first blush what cities give to universities seems to outweigh what universities give back. The first gift is an infinite variety, since America's cities hold this nation's deepest well s of talent , and also hold, in uneasy peace, a rich mixture of colors , religions, and origins . Another gift any city makes its university is its alternative rhythm. By that I don't mean the fifty-week years contrasted with the lazy rhythms of semesters and summer vacation . I mean rather the pressure, the hurry, and the general fuss of business and commerce. The rhythms of trade and commerce impose themselves even on the life of the university, and once out of class its students face the hard and demanding deadlines of jobs." Such are the realities of 1990s America, and perhaps they .will become more applicable to tomorrow's college student than the go-away-to-school experiences of their parents . Said Langenberg, "There is something like a sect working and growing in the catacombs of American academe. Its true believers espouse versions of the following dogma: The United States is no longer an agrarian nation . It has become an urban nation . Most of its people live and work in urban agglomerations, fragmented perhaps into ' suburbs' and ' inner cities ,' but nonetheless urban . For better or worse, the future of our country will largely be determined by the economic and social success or failure of its cities. " Langenberg said universities will play a critical role in that future, and the univer– sities that will occupy center stage "are those which are both in and of our cities. " . "It is upon these urban universities that the future of our cities, and hence our nation, depends, " he said. The University of Illinois at Chicago traces its roots to 1893 when the Urbana- In 1946 the University of Illinois founded the Chicago Circle Campus, a two-year college for returning World War II veterans . It became a four-year institution in 1965, and in 1983 university officials merged it with the medical school to become a more complete urban university. "We in the urban universities are trying to do a much tougher job than our colleagues in more traditional institutions, and get less respect for it... " P art of what defines an urban university is its student body. Kinnick and Ricks pointed out the urban university's greater percentage of women, older students , minority groups , part-time students , commuters and students enrolled in evening courses. For the university itself, the task of meeting their needs boils down to access . Urban universities see a large part of their mission as being accessible to the urban population - a group "that would not look like a typical profile of a land grant or a typical residential campus," said Kinnick . Access issues include geographic accessibil– ity, financial accessibility, transportation accessibility, financial aid , scheduling of whole programs at night, and so on . Ironically, this mission creates one of the biggest hurdles urban universities face in terms of gathering the respect - and the dollars - they so often deserve. Traditional views of higher education dictate that the more exclusive a university is, the better it is, and since urban universities are in the business of opening doors rather than closing them, they, the thinking goes , must not be as high quality as their non-urban based institution began leasing a medical counterparts. school in Chicago, 140 miles from the main campus. The lease arrangement developed into a full merger of the two institutions in 1913, and since then the University of Illinois College of Medicine has developed into the largest health sciences center in the United States, according to campus historian Patricia Spain-Ward. PSU 4 Kinnick said this narrow, categorical way of evaluating an institution's value is beginning to break down , but has a long way to go . Rather than placing all urban universities in a class lower than non-urban colleges, she wants each institution, no matter how small , to be judged on its own merits: What makes an excellent commun– ity college? What is an excellent research university? What is an excellent small liberal arts college? 'Tm real tired of the hierarchical notion of American higher education ," said Kinnick. "It's a very elitist, restrictive set of values that are imposed on how we view the whole landscape of higher education. The time for that is well over because education has become too important in the variety of roles it's playing right now." Langenberg takes the argument a step further, decrying what he said is a widely– held notion that "the urban universities will deal with the urban problems, whi le the flagship universities will deal with the important problems ." "We in the urban universities are trying to do a much tougher job than our colleagues in more traditional institutions , and get less respect for it than we ought to ," he said . Only by making itself accessible to students , can a university be worthy of its name, according to Kinnick , Langenberg and others. A respected university also must perform research . The emerging urban universities are devoting themselves at a growing rate to both basic and applied research. The 32 urban universities studied by Kinnick and Ricks increased their number of doctorate degrees in the last 10 years by 23 percent, while the percentage of change in all institutions taken together was 2.9 percent. Meanwhile, graduate enrollment increased 10.6 percent among the urban universities while it went down 3 percent in all public colleges and universities.