Project: Building an Abolitionist University: Freeing Higher Ed from Its Current Conditions
About the project
This roundtable event was organized as part of Institute of Advanced Studies IAS Thursday's series. In this installment, Professor Davarian L. Baldwin discusses his new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (2021), which examines the profound influence that universities, increasingly operating in a corporate mode, hold over almost all aspects of urban life, including policing, labor practices, and housing, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Baldwin calls attention to the ways that this influence has led to the reproduction and deepening of social inequities, especially racial injustices. Prof. Baldwin joins colleagues working on university-community relations in Minnesota to address how we might build more equitable relationships between universities and cities—relationships built not on extraction and exploitation, but on a collective movement toward justice and liberation.
Partners and collaborators
Featuring Davarian Baldwin (Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity College); Misty Blue, MPH (Citizen of the White Earth Nation & Indigenous Researcher); Jae Yates (Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar); moderated by Tracey Deutsch (Minnesota Transform).
Presented by the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota and Minnesota Transform: A Just University for Just Futures, and co-sponsored by the Department of History; Department of American Studies; Design Justice Collective; Heritage Studies and Public History Program; Department of American Indian Studies; Department of African American & African Studies; Department of Chicano & Latino Studies; Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; and Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Center.
