The first broad survey of the history of urban higher education in America. Today, a majority of American college students attend school in cities. But throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, urban colleges and universities faced deep hostility from writers, intellectuals, government officials, and educators who were concerned about the impact of cities, immigrants, and commuter students on college education. In Universities and Their Cities, Steven J. Diner explores the roots of American colleges’ traditional rural bias. Why were so many people, including professors, uncomfortable with nonresident students? How were the missions and activities of urban universities influenced by their cities? And how, improbably, did much-maligned urban universities go on to profoundly shape contemporary higher education across the nation? Surveying American higher education from the early nineteenth century to the present, Diner examines the various ways in which universities responded to the challenges offered by cities. In the years before World War II, municipal institutions struggled to “build character” in working class and immigrant students. In the postwar era, universities in cities grappled with massive expansion in enrollment, issues of racial equity, the problems of “disadvantaged” students, and the role of higher education in addressing the “urban crisis.” Over the course of the twentieth century, urban higher education institutions greatly increased the use of the city for teaching, scholarly research on urban issues, and inculcating civic responsibility in students. In the final decades of the century, and moving into the twenty-first century, university location in urban areas became increasingly popular with both city-dwelling students and prospective resident students, altering the long tradition of anti-urbanism in American higher education. Drawing on the archives and publications of higher education organizations and foundations, Universities and Their Cities argues that city universities brought about today’s commitment to universal college access by reaching out to marginalized populations. Diner shows how these institutions pioneered the development of professional schools and PhD programs. Finally, he considers how leaders of urban higher education continuously debated the definition and role of an urban university. Ultimately, this book is a considered and long overdue look at the symbiotic impact of these two great American institutions: the city and the university.

Singer, Allison Starer, Wim Wiewel, Eugene L. Zdziarski II

This book contains an innovative and important series of studies of the complex relations of major cities associated with key moments in the history of higher learning in the West. By exploring the interplay of university learning and civic culture over the centuries, Bender provides a novel perspective on the history of both universities and cities. The theme is pursued in studies of Bologna, Paris, Florence, Leiden, Geneva, Edinburgh, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Chicago, and New York by several distinguished scholars, including Gene Brucker, Carl Schorske, Edward Shils, Martin Jay, and Nathan Glazer.

This lively and wide-ranging study of the men and ideas of late antique education explores the intellectual and doctrinal milieux in the two great cities of Athens and Alexandria from the second to the sixth centuries to shed new light on the interaction between the pagan cultural legacy and Christianity. While previous scholarship has seen Christian reactions to pagan educational culture as the product of an empire-wide process of development, Edward J. Watts crafts two narratives that reveal how differently education was shaped by the local power structures and urban contexts of each city. Touching on the careers of Herodes Atticus, Proclus, Damascius, Ammonius Saccas, Origen, Hypatia, and Olympiodorus; and events including the Herulian sack of Athens, the closing of the Athenian Neoplatonic school under Justinian, the rise of Arian Christianity, and the sack of the Serapeum, he shows that by the sixth century, Athens and Alexandria had two distinct, locally determined, approaches to pagan teaching that had their roots in the unique historical relationships between city and school.

18 -1905 include the Annual report of the superintendent of public schools.

Not merely institutions of learning, schools have increasingly become a sign of a neighbourhood's vitality, and city planners have ever more explicitly promoted 'good schools' as a means of attracting more affluent families to urban areas, a dynamic process that the author critically examines in this book. Focusing on Philadelphia's Center City Schools Initiative, she shows how education policy makes overt attempts to prevent, or at least slow, middle-class flight to the suburbs. By asking what happens when affluent parents become 'valued customers', the book uncovers a problematic relationship between public institutions and private markets, where the former are used to leverage the latter to effect urban transformations.

This review finds that Lombardy is the most prosperous region in Italy. But the region faces long-term challenges emerging from an ageing population, immigration and slow adaptation of practices and technologies to enhance productivity.