The University in the City

After All These Years
What was once a small Baptist school on the outskirts of a large village is now a major research university in the heart of a modern city. A lot has happened—and changed—since 1821. The terms of the relationship between the school and the city have altered many times as Columbian matured into The George Washington University, and the tiny city of Washington swelled to fill the entire District of Columbia and reach into the suburbs. But the relationship between them has always endured, however profoundly its terms were redefined.

GW’s “fortunate location” in Washington really has proved over and over to be the heart of the University’s endowment, and the University in turn has endowed the city with the benefits and blessings of education, medical care, culture, employment, sports, and innumerable voluntary actions from a grateful University community. GW is not only a presence in the District of Columbia, but it has an impact on the city of its birth and a maturity that is wide, broad, and deep. That impact takes several different forms—financial, intellectual, and social. While these forms often overlap—health research makes an intellectual as well as social contribution—it is convenient to describe them separately.

The Economic Impact
No one is bigger than Uncle Sam in Washington, but The George Washington University is the largest private employer in the city. It has about 8,300 regular employees (the GW University Hospital employs another 1,300) and has a total payroll of $330 million; $86 million of that total went to employees who live in Washington. And GW spent some $430 million buying goods and services, more than $260 million of that total from vendors in Washington. Using standard economic multipliers, the economic impact of the University on metropolitan Washington is around $1.5 billion annually. All these figures are for the fiscal year 2001; and all these figures have been growing steadily in recent years. Students’ personal expenses, expenses by faculty, staff, visitors, and retirees bolster these figures by hundreds of millions more.

GW’s active building program of the last few years—including the new hospital, Elliott School of International Affairs, and Media and Public Affairs buildings, the Health and Wellness Center, an addition to the Law School, and a major renovation of the Marvin Center—has created or sustained many jobs in construction and supply. And the new buildings all need maintenance and staffing, creating new jobs in the University.

The University’s material contributions are obviously considerable and important to the well-being of Washington. It is, moreover, a pleasure for GW that it can make such a contribution, especially considering how poor and hungry it was for most of its first 100 years. When Columbian had to close its doors in 1827, Washington didn’t feel a thing. Were the same to happen today, Washington would certainly be affected. That will not happen, and the city and the University can count on their future mutual prosperity.

The Intellectual Impact
The intellectual impact of GW on Washington is rich and very complex. GW is part of the critical intellectual mass of a city that relies on the mind—rather than on manufacturing—to make its living. The five largest private employers in Washington are universities and hospitals; they each have more employees than the local newspaper, phone company, power company, or supermarket chain. The critical mass attracts more talent, produces more knowledge and information, and makes Washington a more attractive place for enterprises driven and guided by thought and analysis.

GW’s part in the intellectual life of the city is widespread. It touches Washington in many ways, but it is possible to characterize its impact and influence under two very broad headings: first Research and Teaching, then the Bully Pulpit.

Research and Teaching
GW’s research and teaching do not stop at the classroom door. They turn outward to the benefit of the city and its residents. If most research is intended to add to the store of human knowledge and inquires into everything from the bottom of the sea to outer space, a great deal of it is still aimed at improving life in the University’s own community. Here are some examples.

The biggest business in Washington is government. It is fitting that GW should both cast a critical eye and extend a helping hand to its foremost industry. It is doing so. The GW Federal Performance Project in the School of Business and Public Management has been evaluating and grading agencies of the federal government according to how they manage their finances, human resources, information, physical assets—and particularly how they manage for results.

So far, the project has looked at 27 different agencies and is revisiting several to see what changes, if any, have occurred since its first evaluations. Project members are currently looking at the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly the Health Care Financing Administration), the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service.

There is more than one government in Washington. The smaller one, the District of Columbia’s, has often floundered in what one city booster was sorry to call “a managerial wilderness,” which became famous after the city was put under the direction of a Financial Control Board in the 1990s. Instead of joining in the jokes and the hair-pulling, GW’s School of Business and Public Management collaborated with the Fannie Mae Foundation and the District to create the Center for Excellence in Municipal Management.

The chief premise of the center is that all cities, and especially Washington, need to encourage and advance the qualities of leadership and management among their employees. In Washington, protecting Home Rule, i.e., local control of government, has made the need for first-rate leadership and management more urgent. To do this, the center runs an academy to teach these qualities and provides both advice and up-to-date research on the best management practices to the D.C. government. More than 300 senior managers from the city’s government and the public schools are in or have passed through the center’s programs. After five years, there are encouraging signs that the center’s work is paying off and the city’s managerial health is getting better and better.

There are other kinds of health in the community that are of great importance to the University. The GW Medical Center recently launched its Cancer Initiative. The purpose of the initiative is to recruit the best cancer researchers and to reorganize cancer research at GW to focus on breast, lung, colon, and prostate cancers in addition to melanoma. The choice of these cancers is not random. Breast, lung, colon, and prostate cancers are all alarmingly prevalent in the District of Columbia, especially among people of African descent. Since the population of the city is approximately 60 percent black, the Cancer Initiative is a direct response to a pressing medical need right at home.

The Cancer Initiative is simply the University’s latest contribution to improving the city’s health and well-being (see “Healing the City”). But it is hardly the only one.

Many kinds of research are valuable and interesting to our Washington neighbors. The University houses the Africana Research Center within the Gelman Library. The center increases the library’s collection of documents and personal papers by, or about, black Washingtonians—both those born and raised in the city and those who spent significant parts of their lives here. The documents, memorabilia, and artifacts in the collection will support research by scholars at GW and elsewhere and will bolster the University’s Africana program. Ultimately, the center will make its research materials available on the Web, fostering even more research focused on Washington.

The Africana Research Center is the latest outgrowth of a longstanding tradition in the library of supporting research through its special collections. The Washingtoniana Collections include books, periodicals, maps, manuscripts, prints, photographs, tape recordings, and transcripts relevant to the history of the city from its first days—and to the earlier histories of Georgetown and Alexandria, which were already established when the District of Columbia was laid out.

For anyone interested in Washington’s past and development, these collections are essential, including the archives of the Greater Washington Board of Trade; the papers of Mitch Snyder and Carol Fennelly of the Community for Creative Non-violence; the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection of more than 18,000 volumes on religion, philosophy, classics and art; the records of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington; the records of the Friendship House Association (a settlement house in Southeast Washington dating to 1904); the papers of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City; the archives of the Washington Theater Club (now gone and lamented); papers on the War of 1812 and the Civil War; and the papers and records of various Washington citizens and neighborhood organizations, cultural groups, and politicians.

While the Graduate School of Education and Human Development has a significant national role in education and policy—it is the manager, for example, of the ERIC clearinghouse—it has its hands on Washington. Its Institute for Education Policy Studies is collaborating with the National Council of La Raza and the National Latino Youth Center on an Upward Bound program for students of different cultures and languages in the District of Columbia Public Schools. Its Center for Curriculum, Standards, and Technology has won funding to lead the District of Columbia, as well as Maryland and Virginia, in supporting teachers who are seeking certification from the National Board of Teaching Standards.

And for 10 years, the school’s staff have cooperated with the GW Hospital on Project CAPS (Caregiver and Parent Support), a program to aid premature babies and their families. Given Washington’s dismal record of infant mortality and of low birth-weight babies, this program goes to the heart of solving a terrible local problem. As Jack Evans of the District of Columbia City Council has said, “GW’s Project CAPS provides a tremendous service to D.C.’s youngest at-risk citizens by providing the necessary continuum of care for these infants and their families at no cost to the city coffers.”

And so it goes in every part of the University—and so it will continue to go, as academic research and expertise bring daily benefits to the city and residents of Washington.

The Bully Pulpit
Many eminent and interesting people are here in Washington, and many others want to come. Washington provides the place, and GW often provides the forum in Washington for the eminent and the interesting to air their views, give their counsel, and make their case. The results are livelier discussions in Washington than there would be otherwise, a benefit to anyone here who cares for public affairs, news, and ideas.

GW’s new Media and Public Affairs Building houses the school of the same name, part of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. While all the schools contribute to the intellectual impact that GW makes on Washington, the new building is surely the biggest and most obvious monument to the University’s contribution to the public life of the city. Its Jack Morton Auditorium, one of the finest broadcast facilities in Washington, is now the permanent home of CNN’s “Crossfire” program, which airs live in front of a studio audience five nights each week. The auditorium makes news and newsmakers, with this program and other events, available
to GW and the public in Washington.

And the same is true elsewhere in the University even when the outlook is national or international. For example, the School of Business and Public Management’s Institute for Global Management and Research sponsors the annual Robert P. Maxon lecture. These lectures bring to Washington, and to local scrutiny, speakers like Chairman Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve (actually, he’s a neighbor); Sir John Browne, chairman of British Petroleum; and Arminio Fraga Neto, Brazil’s chief central banker. They were heard live on Bloomberg and CNBC.

Another example: The Elliott School of International Affairs sponsors the Robert J. Pelosky, Jr., Distinguished Speaker Series, which brought to campus former Secretary of State William S. Cohen and two experts in foreign affairs from outside academia, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly, for a discussion of globalization. Thomas Homer-Dixon, a University of Toronto professor and author of numerous books examining the enormous complexities and challenges faced by societies today, gave the fall 2002 lecture. This mix of the academy, the media, and popular writers produces the sort of provocative, and often unexpected, observations that enrich thought and debate about politics and policy.

One last example: Washington makes news, broadcasts news, loves news. But it often needs expertise to make sense of all its news. Interpreters—or “talking heads”—are just what Washington needs, and GW provides them.

The Law School has been particularly talkative, providing in just three months (September through November of 2002) 133 print, 31 TV, and 10 radio appearances in major media here and abroad. Law professors have spoken on the politics of, and American policy towards, the Middle East (Stephen Saltzberg), the unique issues that the war on terrorism presents under international law (Sean Murphy), immigration and its implications for individual rights (Alberto Benítez), corporate greed and malfeasance even before Enron (Lawrence Mitchell), the kind of fat McDonald’s uses to cook French fries (John Banzhaf), and many other topics.

The Law School does not have a lock on expertise. For example, Professor Darryl Jenkins, who leads the Aviation Institute at GW, has given testimony on issues ranging from airline safety to the business of airlines and offered expert opinion on television.

All these instances are simply examples. It is impossible, of course, to weigh and measure GW’s intellectual contributions to Washington and it would be unwieldy anyway to list them all. But this sampling should give some sense of how pervasive those contributions are.

The Social Impact
GW is so literally a part of Washington that it is easy to take its social impact and influence on the city for granted. Thus, people who attend a concert at Lisner Auditorium, still one of the best halls in the city, may barely be aware that it is a GW facility. The campus police patrol on public streets, since GW looks outward, not in on courtyards and quadrangles, and add a measure of public safety to Foggy Bottom. The hospital’s emergency room serves all comers. It all seems part of everyday life.

And so it is. But GW’s everyday impact on the city of Washington is not accidental or casual. When the University buys a bus and donates it to St. Mary’s Court, a residence for the elderly in Foggy Bottom, it is actively helping a neighbor. When it makes the Marvin Center available to local organizations for their meetings and activities, it is consciously fostering the work they do. When it hosts the Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund workshops and the Cyber Youth Network summer camps, it is purposely improving the outlooks of young residents of the city. When its members work to improve the public schools and when its hospital provides $17 million a year in uncompensated care (see “Schooling the City” and “Healing the City” earlier), it is deliberately contributing to the city that has made its growth and success possible.

The University, its schools and departments, and its individual members all are involved in improving life in Washington. For example, its president, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, was elected chair of the District of Columbia Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, enabling him to expand his service to the D.C. community. Taken together, these activities are extensive and they are documented in a GW publication called “Community Commitments”; GW students, faculty and staff volunteered more than 401,000 hours to community service in 2000 as reported in a survey of service hours. Visit the “Community Commitments” Web site for a few examples of some of the voluntary activities that have a social impact on Washington.