Leadership is needed from Boston `eds' and `meds'
(Second in a series)
OUTSIDE OF Red Sox celebration and Big Dig turmoil, what makes today's Greater Boston globally famous and distinctive? Answer: its universities, colleges, and research hospitals and laboratories, a collection of intellect arguably without peer on Earth. Take these institutions away and the regional economy would shrivel in the face of an exodus of hundreds of thousands -- faculty to staff to students, MDs to lab workers.
OK, it's not going to happen -- great academic institutions, unlike today's footloose corporations, are geographically rooted. Still, the health of academia is critical to the Boston region. The eight top universities alone enrich the Boston area's economy by $7.4 billion a year, according to the 2002 "Appleseed" report. Even when town-gown issues rankle, citizen groups and politicos do well to remember how their bread is buttered.
Conversely, smart universities and their hospitals -- the "eds" and "meds" -- have to keep in mind how very dependent they are on the region -- for workers, community safety, public transportation, water and sewer, schools for staff, and much more.
And, we suggest, these great institutions have to start thinking of the regional leadership role they've always shunned. In today's economy, they're the big show in town -- the lead employers, lead purchasers of goods and services, lead economic actors. They need to assume the role accorded top dogs in every citistate across the globe -- to be key regional conveners, policy leaders, deal makers. They need to fill in for the "absentocracy" of leading business firms that are no longer headquartered here, or far less civically active.
If the region has a severe housing affordability and supply problem, for example, academic leaders ought to be in the fore, not only acknowledging that their own students are part of the supply problem, but banging on political doors, seeking zoning changes, offering some capital of their own -- whatever the problem requires. If state investment in public higher education lags seriously -- as it clearly does, notwithstanding rising distinction of the University of Massachusetts -- then the universities, collectively, need to warn publicly about the perils of a skill-short regional work force.
But are they ready? In our university interviews, we heard repeatedly: Someone must ask us to take leadership. Otherwise, we were told, no individual university president or chancellor would dare step forward for fear of offending others or being rebuffed.
Just maybe, that's about to change. Thirty-seven colleges and universities located within Route 128 have signed up in recent months for a Carol R. Goldberg Seminar series focused on Boston academia's civic role. The effort, cosponsored by the Tufts University College of Citizenship and Public Service and the Boston Foundation, recruited top-level leaders -- Northeastern President Richard Freeland and former House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran.
The group has started inventorying university community outreach efforts. We know they'll find lots. Flying under the region's political radar, little noted by the media, multiple initiatives are running -- 240 service-based programs at Harvard alone, for example. MIT's range of outreach activities includes engagement with Cambridge public schools in a field MIT really knows about -- science and math instruction. Boston College Chancellor J. Donald Monan reports over 50 percent of BC students are engaged in volunteer service. Outgoing Boston University President John Silber boasted of BU's adoption of the Chelsea public schools and the close to 1,500 Boston high school graduates who've received full BU scholarships since 1973, at a cumulative cost of $88 million.
Yet as a high MIT official noted, referring to the entire university sector: "We have lots of community-oriented programs and efforts . . . but no strategy."
We found the admission astounding -- world-famed institutions, with immense stakes in Greater Boston's collective future, failing to even consider getting their collective act together. Because the fact is that the Boston region has plunged into a serious, deepening wealth gap -- on the one side college-educated people with comfortable homes and rising incomes, and on the other less-educated folks earning dramatically less, increasingly segregated from the mainstream, renters not owners, isolated in poor neighborhoods or troubled mill cities. The question is: Can Greater Boston hold out hope for all its people? Can this supposedly progressive region build a true civil society in this century?
The universities clearly couldn't and shouldn't produce one master plan for greater social cohesion. But they could take a dramatic first step by launching an annual conference focused on how they are addressing the social disparity divide. For high visibility, to telegraph a message of seriousness, all the university presidents would need to participate -- including Larry Summers of Harvard and Susan Hockfield of MIT, leaders of the two most globally known institutions.
With the top-drawer imprimatur secured, the goals conferences would be an ideal platform for interested faculty to do what faculty do best -- develop and debate new ideas, challenge accepted wisdom, add to the knowledge that's critical for informed action. Model university-neighborhood outreach efforts, including Clark University's in Worcester and Trinity College in Hartford, could be debated. Faculty could illuminate new approaches in early childhood, K-12, community-college level education and compare notes on radically broadened ways to involve students in community service learning that bridges society's social divides.
We believe university communities across the United States would be inspired by seeing the Boston citistate use its signature strength, its intellectual base, to confront a central, perplexing problem of 21st century American society.
On a companion track, the universities might create an ongoing council on town-gown issues, including best ways to calm student-community run-ins and handle real estate expansions (like Harvard's into Allston) in ways that accommodate rather than infuriate nearby communities.
And they could look to, maybe emulate an effort like Philadelphia's OneBigCampus alliance of top schools (the University of Pennsylvania included) and local businesses. The goal is to promote Philadelphia, already 265,000-students-a-year rich, not just as a premier college destination but also a place for graduates to start a career. Frosty Boston, already troubled by loss of trained youth, could do its students and itself a huge favor by rolling out a welcome mat just as innovative in design.
Jointly developed strategies among great universities may not come naturally. But they owe the region -- and themselves -- no less. Next Monday: Growth/housing/home rule
Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson, authors of the book "Citistates" and principals of the Citistates Group, were commissioned by the Boston Foundation to evaluate Greater Boston's 21st century challenges. Their report, "Boston Unbound," is available at www.tbf.org. 
