March 8, 2005

Dear Colleague,

          Dr. Kevin Ward's Friday lecture on the "Expansion of Business Improvement Districts (BID)" has made me think--think, however, along rather unorthodox lines, perhaps because my exposure to this area of research is rather limited. I am struck, first of all, by the way these districts adopt procedures and values that are the hallmarks of quite another institution--the university. Like the university, BIDs believe in hosting seminars and conferences, in having a more bottom-up approach to governance, in the need for periodic evaluations, in being aware of one's competitors and one's ranking among them, and in creativity. I have skipped one word from the above list--entrepreneurship. BIDs love that word. Universities almost never use it. Yet the universities--the successful ones--are hotbeds of entrepreneurship, that is to say, of people who try to be original and creative, who try to develop, if you like, their line of product.

         How refreshing this is! is my second thought. Speaking as an academic, I am flattered that business institutions should use our values and vocabulary. Too often, it is the other way round. For example, from the 'sixties onward, faculty and students to the left of center tend to see the university as a factory with administrators as tycoon-employers and faculty and students as more-or-less exploited workers; those to the right of center, by contrast, see college presidents and deans as CEOs, faculty as floor managers, and students as customers. Both models utterly ignore the fact that the university is an institution in its own right, that it has its own communal standards and ways of doing things that go back to the Middle Ages if not to the ancient Greeks. Giving up its own tradition and taking up quite uncritically those of other institutions shows the degree that the university, in my time, is in a state of crisis, unsure of its true purpose and identity.

         In a state of crisis? Unsure of its identity? My third thought is: how can this be? Why would the business world adopt university procedures and values if these have led to a state of crisis, a loss of identity? But, of course, the university--the American university--for all its faults is not failing. To the contrary, it is one of the most successful (if not the most successful) institutions in American society. As evidence, note how European universities are seeking to imitate the American model, and how for decades hordes of senior scholars and students from all over the world (including the UK) have migrated here to do research, teach, or study.

         The BID culture has its critics, the tone of the criticism being set by its placement in the larger political economy of globalization and flexible capital accumulation. Who are the critics? They are primarily left-of-center social thinkers and geographers. The criticism they make is never frontal. It doesn't have to be, for social thinkers have been highly successful in giving a slightly sinister meaning to neutral words such as globalization and capital accumulation and even to good words such as evaluation and accountability, initiative and creativity, seminars and conferences. Next time students ask me to give a seminar, I might raise my eyebrow and say, "Seminar? Isn't that what BID executives do?" That, to me, is ironic. And this leads to my fourth question--one that carries irony a step further. Not all BIDs succeed. Many fail. But if BID is not a good thing, shouldn't I, as a social critic, call "failure" "success"? See where a postmodernist, reflexive frame of mind can lead me and, possibly, you?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu