UCLA

The ascendance of the global knowledge economy has led many research universities to heighten their focus on attracting stellar applicants, luring super-star faculty, and attaining world-class status, leaving many unanswered questions about how university efforts are affecting local communities. Universities are expanding their geographic footprint to create new research facilities and accommodate increasing enrollment. These expansion efforts can damage their public reputations, as adjacent communities feel disenfranchised and immobilized by a powerful institution. This dissertation analyzes the East Baltimore redevelopment project (EBDI) neighboring Johns Hopkins Medical campus to illuminate how academic capitalism shapes university-community relations in the new economy. I argue universities driven by an academic capitalist impetus to expand and gentrify local communities—uprooting residents from their homes for the sake of improved facilities to accommodate students, faculty, and donors.

Critical race counterstories give voice to predominantly Black university-adjacent neighborhood residents, who are literally at the margins of Hopkins and the larger system of White Supremacy. Qualitative interviews and document analysis confirmed that Middle East neighborhood residents did not see themselves reflected in the lifestyle amenities prioritized by the redevelopment plan. Residents expressed a lack of accountability from the “corporate” university and its complicity with the municipal government to disenfranchise undesirable communities (read: Communities of Color).

Geo-statistical analyses of economic indicators from the US Census were used to test for gentrification. A spatio-temporal difference-in-differences approach explored how median income, educational attainment rates, and racial demographics were affected by expansion for census tracts within one-mile of the university, compared to similar census tracts across Baltimore. Spatial Regression models confirmed that post-expansion, areas in the EBDI footprint experienced changes in median income, rent, and percent White population beyond the rate of change elsewhere in Baltimore. University-driven redevelopment in East Baltimore clearly contributed to gentrification.

This study highlights tensions to be reconciled as White, elite, urban universities encroach upon poor communities of color, e.g., global ambition and local impact, marketization and the public good, and questions of race and class. Rather than a simple redevelopment process in an economically distressed community, the EBDI project illuminated complex legacies of racial segregation, exploitation by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes, forced decay through land-banking and vacancies, and historical governmental failures to redevelop the Middle East neighborhood. These combined processes of racial subordination inform and are perpetuated by EBDI expansion.