UIC's Broski is Gone. So what now?
by Steve Balkin, Vice President of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition, <mar@openair.org> , 9/19/99
UIC's Chancellor David Broski has resigned from his post as Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). See "UIC leader quits; may have been shoved out." by Patrice M. Jones, Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1999. Sec. 1, P. 1.
We have no personal animosity towards Dave Broski. He was a product of his environment. He did not create the mess at UIC and it won't go away with his banishment. The problems go deeper. They are part of UIC's institutional culture that was created when the University moved from its Navy Pier Campus in the 1960s into the near West Side to destroy the homes of thousands of Italian, Greek, and Mexican families.
That institutional culture believes UIC is special, like the military. UIC can transcend ordinary morality -- its mission is so important that it can take shortcuts; that it is more important than neighborhoods, local businesses, homes, cultural continuity, poor people's jobs, historic preservation, or even truth. It is entitled to a first priority command over resources. Nothing is more important than UIC's growth and expansion. Even though no research labs are planned, as was claimed in 1994, and that half the South Campus Expansion area is for luxury private condos, this is ignored by UIC's supporters. UIC can do whatever its administrators want.
While it is true that public universities are important, it does not follow that UIC administrators' judgement of their institution's self-importance means they can run roughshod over community opposition to any of their policies. It is possible, after all, for win-win outcomes to occur if creative friendly discussion could take place, where power is balanced rather than one-sided.
The mindset of UIC is and has always been US vs. THEM (the community).
It was this institutional culture at UIC that caused Broski's downfall. Mayor Richard M. Daley has spoken many times that his Dad, Mayor Richrd J. Daley, considered the creation of the Circle Campus his greatest accomplishment. UIC administrators, hearing that so often, started to believe they were special, invincible, and entitled to their arrogance.
UIC's existence began in turmoil with a huge outpouring of community resentment which made UIC officials feel it is "us against them"; that every community argumentation is going to be confrontational so hard-ball bullying politics becomes administrative strategy. UIC administrators are not elected officials and the University of Illinois Board of Trustees are now appointed. They are not business people who have to meet a bottom line. UIC is a machine of lobbyists and public relations specialists. They have three goals: to maximize control, minimize hassle, and enhance their own prestige. Their strategy is not to enhance prestige the old fashioned way, by earning it and educating working class Chicago students. Their way is to conjure it by such things as merging the medical campus with the Circle Campus in 1982, buying academic stars from the outside rather than generating them inside, reducing affirmative action and the number of minority students, and acquiring resources off the backs of poor minorities in the Maxwell Street area.
Maybe, if the medical campus was still a separate entity and UIC administrators felt some sense of accountability to the surrounding community, the University of Illinois hospital might not be in jeopardy and the protocol for human experiments might have been followed. What happened and is happening to Maxwell Street is a reflection of the human experiments protocol problem. When you don't fully inform people of their participation in human experiments, you are acting unethically, claiming you are doing something in someone's own voluntary and best interests when that may not be the case at all. You are tricking someone into doing something that could be harmful. That trickery is what UIC has been doing on Maxwell Street: destroying a community while claiming to "save it" and claiming real estate development is the same as community development.
UIC has been buying old buildings, kicking out rent paying tenants and then letting the buildings sit vacant, dirty, and in disrepair. UIC then goes to the State legislature and City Hall to get the power of Eminent Domain and TIF subsidies to clear off this "blighted" area, blaming the minorities who live and shop in the area as filthy people. UIC wanted the land where Maxwell Street's St. Francis of Assisi Church sits. So UIC made a deal with the archdiocese for the archdiocese to kick out parishioners, tear down the Church, and convey the vacant land to UIC. All the while, UIC says, "it's not us; it's the archdiocese that is doing this."
The near West Side Side is one of hottest real estate markets in the city. Development in the Maxwell Street neighborhood would have occurred years ago and the City's tax based increased, had not UIC gotten political and legal control of the area.
Maybe, Mayor Daley would less likely be contemplating a property tax increase, if Maxwell Street's properties were not taken off the tax roles for so long. Development would have occurred through the private sector and real estate markets, gradually and with the recycling of historic buildings. Local businesses who could adjust to changing market conditions would survive. That is the American way. But UIC administrators are totalitarian. They think of themselves as a powerful, though alien, force and therefore act that way. What could be more alien in behavior that forcing people from their own land and tricking people into having experiments performed on them?
Only if Governor Ryan, the State Legislature, and Mayor Daley encourage UIC to change its institutional culture, can we expect improvement and good outcomes for UIC, the City, and the surrounding communities.
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