This event was presented in collaboration with Center for the Humanities, Center for Campus History, and the Department of Geography at UW-Madison.
Born and raised in Wisconsin, Davarian L. Baldwin is an internationally recognized scholar, author, and public advocate. He is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His academic and political commitments have focused on global cities and particularly the diverse and marginalized communities that struggle to maintain sustainable lives in urban locales. Baldwin is the award-winning author of several books, most recently, In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities and served as the consultant and text author for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle (2022). His commentaries and opinions have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, BBC, and HULU to USA Today, the Washington Post, and TIME magazine. Baldwin was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his work.
Other Events
International Book Club: Rethinking the Relationship Between Cities & Urban Communities
Organized by the Institute for Regional and International Studies National Resource Center (IRIS NRC)
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
4pm-5pm
Online via Zoom
Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages.
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable.
Cops on Campus: Who Keeps Us Safe?
Who defines campus safety (and how)? What happens at the intersection of policing and higher education and how does that affect the university’s teaching mission and student life? How does the history of policing at UW-Madison resonate with larger histories of policing on and off campus? Join Davarian Baldwin, Simon Balto, and Kacie Lucchini Butcher for a panel discussion about the history and present of campus policing at UW-Madison and beyond.
Organized by the Departments of African American Studies, Community & Environmental Sociology, Educational Policy Studies, English, History, and the University Lectures Committee.
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
6pm-7.30pm
Pyle Center, Room 209