Corporatizing Our Universities?

One of the real horrors of the academic world in North America now is the corporatization of our universities -- even the public ones -- in which we are finding extremely highly paid administrators presiding over a system that increasingly exploits cheap labor, i.e. underpaid junior faculty and part-time adjuncts (graduate students and others who struggle to survive with teaching a far too heavy load spread over as many as three institutions). Both those underpaid and overworked AND their students are being cheated by these corporate practices unfit generally even for bottom line profit-making so far as the public interest is concerned, but fully out of order in what should be an ACADEMIC environment.

In addition our university administrators seem somewhat obsessed with putting our public revenues into buildings rather than people. At Brooklyn College, CUNY we have just completed a $79 million library reconstruction and now are replacing a 40-year-old building -- all to be paid for by you as NY taxpayer as long as you live -- the Dormitory Authority bonds -- http://www.dasny.org/ -- that we are accumulating at a massive rate. How is Columbia going to pay for its real estate ventures? Needless to say it is a tax free institution. It can raise tuitions, which it is doing. It can borrow against the future. All of America is doing that and sticking the kids yet unborn with the bills! Have you seen the debts that the typical college student and his/her family are carrying on their backs!?

Columbia in the past, and, I fear, in its more benign appearing reincarnation today, has been a monster from hell in its treatment of too many people who live nearby -- then as brutal landlord, now as the eminent domain dragon haunting Manhattanville and the mini-dracula of gentrification here in Morningside Heights.

Vice President Robert Kasdin,, presumably presides over the contemporary process at Columbia University. I imagine that he believes he is working in the public interest -- I have seen him once at the NYC Community Board #9 where he was speaking to Columbia's plan for Manhattanville, lower West Harlem where Columbia hopes to build a new campus extension. But I don't think he realizes what the implications of that plan are -- either for Columbia or its neighbors. If one checks out Robert Moses as the principal planner for NYC and environs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

one will discover a man who saw himself as a reformer. But the planning designs of Moses were cruel to poor folks. The parkways that he rerouted across Long Island zig-zagged to avoid wealthy (powerful) enclaves and chopped their routes through poorer communities. His re-do of our Riverside Park is instructive. From 72nd. St. to 125th St. the railroad line is comfortably covered over and children play safely in its environs. North of 125th St. (where Harlem begins and later planners located the non-functional North River sewage plant that should have been laid out no further north than the 90s), the railroad lines are bared -- a toddler wondered on to them a few years back and was killed by a train. At the moment a $7-8 million dollar bridge and disabilities ramp is being authorized at long last at 151 St. to give residents in that area access to the park which only those with cars (and bikes along the new bike trail) could reach from the parking lot there running off the West Side Drive. Others had to descend from the heights of the North River sewage plant on which a park was placed to placate the nearby residents running from 137th to 145th St.

The bottom line here is that Columbia clumsily progresses with plans to expropriate the Close from the historic St. Johns Cathedral, to expropriate by blight designation and eminent domain 18 acres in lower West Harlem which socially responsible planners through the Community Board #9 197-A plan are suggesting rather be used for synergistic community benefiting purposes.

I am charging Columbia here with playing the same game that Moses did -- expelling the less powerful residents for its own purposes -- benign or otherwise. Robert Kasdin is, I assume, the prime architect at work for Columbia in this matter. And he presides from on high, not on the ground where the rest of us live. Both he and Columbia can and must be held accountable for what they do. As a neighbor and one trained at Columbia in such matters, I am doing that.
--
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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