By: David A. Smith
With a quarter of a million students living in the immediate metropolitan area, more than half of them in universities domiciled in the city, Boston has as good a claim as any to be the world’s university capital, counting 60 institutions of higher learning, eight of them (BU, Harvard, Northeastern, BC, UMass Boston, Suffolk, Tufts, and MIT) with enrollments of 10,000 or more, and five of those with their campuses wholly in the city proper.
And that’s just some of them
[In the map above, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline are independent cities, but everything else is a neighborhood of Boston: that is Allston/ Brighton, Fenway, Back Bay, Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, South End, Dorchester, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain – Ed.]
As there aren’t enough dormitory beds for all the students, they spill into neighboring areas, particularly the Fenway, Jamaica Plain, and especially Allston/ Brighton, which has turned into largely absentee-landlord off-campus housing zones. Among other things, this puts tremendous upward pressure on rents, which makes student dormitories – or the shortage of them – an issue of city housing policy, one that new Mayor Walsh appears ready to take up, as reported in The Boston Globe (October 9, 2014):
Boston offers a plan to help colleges add dorms
Mayor Martin J. Walsh of Boston wants to cut in half the number of college students living off campus by 2030 and is calling on Boston colleges to collectively add 18,500 new dormitory beds to make that possible. The city envisions 16,000 for undergraduates and 2,500 for graduate students.
The concept was laid out in a report, Housing Boston 2020, prepared by DND, the BRA, BHA, and the Mayor’s office.
Last year, of the 136,000 students enrolled at four-year colleges and universities in Boston, an estimated 36,300 lived off campus, while 36,500 lived on campus, [according to a report the city issued]. The rest [63,200 students] resided in a mix of on- and off-campus housing in other municipalities.
Of the cities and towns ringing Boston, those I expect have the largest student populations are Waterford, Brookline (only the eastern half, near Allston-Brighton), Cambridge, Somerville, and Quincy.
Despite abutting Boston, Milton has virtually no students
Walsh’s predecessor, Thomas M. Menino, sometimes clashed with leaders of local colleges as he pushed them to house more students on campus.
Imagining the scene between Mayor Menino and the real estate departments of (say) landlocked BU and Northeastern, I recall what I said, a long time ago, to someone who made an analogous request (personal digression in shaded box).
The problem of space: a personal tale from 1971
Once upon a time, 43 years ago, I was a freshman needing a job and was sent, among other university-provided jobs, to Harvard Business School’s dining room, Kresge Hall, where dined the future captains of industry, hedge fund titans, cable television aggregators, and others whose names now adorn dormitories their donations endowed.
And it looked basically that way 43 years ago, too
I was a dishwasher, and the machines were institutional-kitchen class, so they could handle large loads, but only at a set speed, and what came out of the dishwasher was blistering hot.
Guys like that were at HBS when I was a dishwasher
One evening the diners were treated to an after-dinner speaker, someone important (I forget who), and instead of the normal scattered arrival of trays, everyone was spellbound (or polite) so the trays came not in a stream but in a tidal wave. My dishwashing partner (a countercultural lad with fiery red long hair and beard and a wry sense of humor) were running the machines as fast as we possibly could, taking in the trays and stacking them anywhere we could think of, pulling the racks out as soon as they cleared and setting them somewhere, anywhere to cool off (we had a limited number of racks and had to unload the hot stoneware plates before we could refill the rack to go back in), and generally scrambling at warp speed. And still the new trays arrived, wedging into the aperture like tardy passengers squeezing into a subway car.
Amid all this frenetic motion, into the kitchen rushed the shift boss, whom if memory serves had previously been mess hall manager in the air force. “It’s piling up out there!” he said angrily. “They’re waiting! You’ve got to clear that entry and take in those trays!”
For a moment I looked at my coworker, sweat pouring off him as it was pouring off me – then I swept my arm grandly around encompassing the scene – where on every available surface precariously perched coffee cup racks, stacks of plates, teapots with vapor steaming from their sides like sweaty skulls, the approach conveyor belt filled with trays jostled against each other as if a train derailment had piled up, the window stuffed so that one could not see through it – and said in an emphatic voice, ”Where would you like me to put them?”
“Where would you like me to put them?”
The universities, you see, are landlocked:
“Where would you like me to put them, sir?”
And none is more landlocked than Boston University, whose 31,750 students make do with this footprint:
Dominating a sliver along the river
The overcrowded footprint is the legacy of John Silber, who ran BU from 1971 through 2003, and as his New York Times obituary grudgingly put it:
Tough talk, tough action, and a university legacy
John R. Silber [] transformed a faltering Boston University into one of the nation’s leading private schools in a volcanic 25-year presidency that promoted innovation, crushed opposition [The Times has to editorialize, it can’t help itself – Ed.] and made him America’s highest-paid educator and one of its most divisive.
He built B.U. into a world-class research center and one of the nation’s largest private universities, with a faculty boasting Nobel laureates like Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow and Derek Walcott and distinguished economists, historians and physicists.
He raised endowments to $422 million from $18 million and research grants to $180 million from $15 million, and balanced the budget every year. He raised tuition to Ivy League levels and tightened admission standards, but enrollments nevertheless climbed to 30,000 from 20,000. He also financed $700 million in new construction and tripled the university’s property holdings.
All of that left BU, today Boston’s largest university, with a tiny campus (135 acres, roughly one-fifth of a square mile, not counting the 80 acres of BU’s medical campus) and the highest university density I’ve ever encountered (amazingly, 76% of the undergraduates live on campus, but note that says nothing about graduate students), which also makes Kenmore the highest-density residential area in the City of Boston.
The Huntington hounds of Northeastern
Nearby – practically across the street (Commonwealth and Huntington Avenues, to be precise) is Northeastern, with 24,400 students – to say nothing of:
Suffolk (12,000 students, and training ground for future Massachusetts politicians):
Suffolk: sprinkled in among the pols and Brahmins of Beacon Hill
Bunker Hill Community College (8,800, made briefly famous by Good Will Hunting)
Where Good Will Hunting matriculated
Simmons (4,900), Emerson (4,500), Berklee (4,050), and Wentworth (3,800), all of them within the heart of Boston’s urban environment.
Corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street
Wentworth: fighting for space next to Northeastern
For a city seeking to grow a modern economy, a university has got to be one of the top potential land uses. It brings in people who spend money while sitting, talking, and thinking. Its output is purely intellectual and produces no sulfurous fumes or toxic waste. It employs locals by the thousands. The business model is reliable, annually renewing. Over time, it builds up donation expectations that contribute to the built environment.
No American city has capitalized from universities more than Boston. Boston’s cluster of educational asteroids creates its own global gravity, bringing students from all over the world, because not only is there enormous intellectual and cultural diversity, Boston is a fantastic city to be a university student – with such a preponderance of students everywhere, the city’s cultural life orbits around the universities. Directly or indirectly, the universities drive the Boston economy. The city’s future economic success – and with it, economic growth and any other form of prosperity – requires them to be healthy, and if possible to grow.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]