A Study in Contrasts

In many ways, Baltimore is a city of contrasts: Black and white, wealthy and poor, highly educated and underserved. An early proving ground for redlining and segregation, Baltimore has carved its socioeconomic contrasts into the design of the city. You can still see those lines if you travel through the estates of Guilford, with its private-security cars and manicured tulip gardens, and then cross York Road into the largely Black and poor neighborhood of Pen Lucy, where Tupac Shakur lived as a teenager. (It’s easiest to walk between those two neighborhoods, because walls and one-way roads block your entrance to Guilford by car.)

In a city that struggles with illiteracy and health disparities, the Johns Hopkins University stands out as the biggest contrast of all — and a beacon of hope. The university and its health system is the largest private employer in the city and the state. For more than a decade, under President Ronald J. Daniels, Hopkins has refocused its financial and intellectual resources on Baltimore’s economic, health, and educational challenges. Daniels has staked his presidency on efforts like a “partnership” school in East Baltimore.

“The success of our university and its hometown are deeply intertwined,” Daniels said when announcing the hiring of a new vice president for public impact initiatives late last year. “As goes Baltimore, so goes Johns Hopkins, and vice versa.”

In part, such moves were born of self-preservation following the riots connected to the death of Freddie Gray. Universities are placebound, with their reputations and potential tied to their surroundings — just look at decades-long rise of New York University in New York City or Northeastern University in Boston.

Which makes the recent assault on research universities so unsettling — but it’s especially jarring here in Baltimore, where Hopkins’s largesse has historically come largely from federal grants for its globally recognized health and science research. In a city that has struggled to emerge from its identity as a manufacturing port town, the university offers Baltimore its best and perhaps only realistic shot at keeping pace with a changing economy.

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