Bankruptcy Musings: What If The University Of Michigan Were In Detroit?

07/22/2013

Bankruptcy Musings: What If The University Of Michigan Were In Detroit?

The Atlantic asks:

Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon. In Cleveland, there's Case Western Reserve. What if there had been, say, a Henry Ford University in Detroit?

Here's the hypothesis:

A big research university probably couldn't have turned the ship of many of Detroit's fundamental problems. It offers no obvious antidote to political corruption, nor to the apparent blessing that proved a cancer to Detroit: jobs that gave not just middle-class whites, but working-class whites and eventually their black counterparts, the means to move to the suburbs, eventually leaving only the black underclass in the city.

But it might have offered some inoculation against economic monoculture, which both left and right can agree was central to Detroit's catastrophe. And it could have anchored neighborhoods, like Cleveland's University Circle, that provide urban islands of relative stability during rough times and then a base to build out from - exactly what Mayor Dave Bing is desperately trying to seed in Detroit. Had someone a century ago donated the equivalent of $1 billion today to start a "Stanford on the Great Lakes" in Detroit, the effect might have been profound.

Whatever you think of the hypothesis, the history recounted in the story is pretty interesting.

Art: University of Michigan by Jasper Cropsey, 1855

Art: University of Michigan by Jasper Cropsey, 1855 - See more at: http://sbmblog.typepad.com/sbm-blog/2012/10/happy-birthday-michigan-law.html#sthash.7LAyaa3a.dpuf

Posted by State Bar of Michigan Blogs at 12:45 PM | Permalink

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