Universities: Studying the Urban Revolution

In Boston's mostly Negro Roxbury area, a woman wearily opened her front door, stared at the well-pressed youth with his clipboard and asked, "O.K., are you from Harvard, Boston University or Tufts?" Professors and students from all three institutions — as at most every urban university in the U.S. — are out pounding the streets these days, seeking facts and the means by which the schools can help their cities cope with what New York University President James M. Hester calls "the urban revolution."

Until recently, most urban universities tended to stand aloofly apart from the cities in which they lived. But the schools' hunger for more land, the traffic and housing problems they create, have sharpened old town-gown tensions — and have also made administrators more conscious of the fact that their institutions may possess the intellectual resources to help create what Hester calls "a renaissance in urban life." University of Pennsylvania's President Gaylord P. Harnwell believes that the modern university "is not beholden to any political or economic master," and thus is "the last major institution of urban life that can be called upon for unbiased, dispassionate information about the crisis of our cities."

The Real Issues. Universities are answering those calls in two ways. They are creating new interdisciplinary departments for the academic investigation of urban problems, and they are setting up field agencies that plunge into practical action to help ease those problems. The two usually mesh.

At the University of Chicago's Center for Urban Studies, an eleven-man faculty headed by Sociologist Philip Hauser is studying, among other things, the effect of urban renewal on small businesses, probing the finances of public housing to see if the money is most efficiently used. A Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies, created with Ford Foundation funds by former M.I.T. President Julius Stratton and former Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy —who, coincidentally, now hold the two top jobs at the Ford Foundation—advises a metropolitan council embracing 78 towns and cities. It gets so many requests for help that Director Daniel Moynihan says, "We could be the largest consulting firm in the country if we followed up all the inquiries we get—everyone wants universities to solve his problems."

N.Y.U., located in Greenwich Village, is putting its experts to work helping neighborhood artists and actors, creating smokeless incinerators, improving slum schools, and studying New York's complex fiscal situation. Columbia has contributed heavily to the redevelopment of Manhattan's Morningside Heights, including helping to hire private patrolmen for the crime-ridden area around the school; graduate students of its School of Architecture have worked out a beautification project involving the Hudson River waterfront between Yonkers and Peekskill.

U.C.L.A.'s Institute of Government and Public Affairs, now five years old, is studying the feasibility of subways for freeway-clogged Los Angeles, electric cars to ease smog. It also set up an "urban observatory" two days after the Watts riots to probe the causes of the violence. The University of California's Berkeley campus counts more than 400 community projects, many of them aimed at improving the education of