The Frontiers of Research
Johns Hopkins closely embodies the relationship that the federal government formed with research institutions following the end of World War II. “The Endless Frontier,” a report written by the science administrator Vannevar Bush encouraging federal investment in basic research to drive innovation and invention, had been a catalyst for a relationship between research universities and the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, among other agencies. Hopkins, over time, became the largest institutional recipient of federal dollars among universities.
In many ways, Hopkins was a standard-bearer for the optimism of the American Century, acting as part of the nation’s soft-power arm, solving health problems overseas, in part through its work with the United States Agency for International Development. The university’s hospital symbolized progress domestically, too. Sending a gravely ill member of the family to Hopkins meant hope for a cure — or at least a few more years, says Alicia Wilson, the university’s vice president for civic engagement and opportunity.
When her father was diagnosed with cancer, most doctors said he had a year to live. Hopkins helped extend his life to seven years, she says, adding that his race did not affect his level of care. “This is a Black man that got bladder cancer because someone put a pesticide on the farm that he grew up on on the Eastern Shore.”
“If you don’t really understand the hopefulness that these institutions bring to really solving world problems, but also significant problems for America and for the advancement of America,” says Wilson, “you miss a big point of the role of institutions like Johns Hopkins.”
The future of American research institutions looks precarious at the moment. The Trump administration has cut billions of dollars for research, citing research on topics the administration opposes, including studies of racial disparities, climate change, the environment, and Covid-19. Although the cuts have been challenged in court, advocates for higher education say there has already been enormous damage done to American scholarship, as many of these interrupted and canceled projects will never be completed.
For individual researchers, this loss of funding has been personally catastrophic. But the ripple effects of the potential loss of billions of dollars to these key institutions will be felt across the cities they anchor. The Wall Street Journal recently covered worries about a “wealth spiral effect” in Boston as the Trump administration puts pressure on Harvard University, threatening to cut $2.2 billion in research funding (along with its tax-exempt status). Some 20,000 people work for Harvard, but the university is also an important node in the region’s biotech industry, supporting many companies and jobs.
An Economic Heavyweight
Hopkins lost $800 million when the administration cut its support for USAID; that led to a layoff of 2,000 people, three-quarters of them overseas. The university may lose another $200 million if the administration stops paying indirect costs on research.
The cuts sent a shudder through households in Charm City. Hopkins is a direct employer of close to 40,000 people and an indirect employer of an additional 50,000 people, making a $7-billion economic impact on Baltimore and a $15-billion impact on the State of Maryland, officials say.
Everyone in Baltimore knows at least someone employed by Hopkins — I can count a dozen friends off the top of my head who work for the university. In Hopkins, which has a reputation for being a supportive employer, those friends found a life raft, as other lines of work, particularly in critical civic institutions like newspapers and schools, dried up or became unmanageable.
Even people working in areas distant from the research funds targeted by President Trump expect to feel pain in years to come; one friend on the Homewood campus said that her office was not directly affected by the cuts, but she expected that she would someday have to lose a couple of positions to afford salary and cost-of-living increases for the remaining staff members.
Hopkins’s procurement and spending beyond salaries also buoys the city. Through HopkinsLocal, its economic-development program, it has invested more than $1 billion in local businesses, often companies owned by Black Baltimoreans. University officials point, for example, to Taharka Brothers, a popular local brand of ice cream that was able to scale up production after becoming a client of the university’s dining operations.
A third of that $1 billion has gone to building and renovation, with about a dozen new construction projects underway around the city. Wilson points to Mahogany, whose chief executive, Jeff Hargrave, has what many would consider a classic American story: He went to the same high school that she did in East Baltimore and started a construction company to employ local residents. Through HopkinsLocal, the university supported his business as a subcontractor to larger firms, like Whiting Turner. As a primary contractor in the city, he works alongside companies that once employed him as a second-tier subcontractor.
“Now he’s like an anchor institution in the community — and that happened in one generation, which I think just shows Hopkins’s intentionality about Baltimore and about its people,” says Wilson. “I’ve been around this country, and when you say Baltimore, there’s a couple of things people say: They talk about sports teams, if that’s their thing — Orioles or Ravens — and they talk about Hopkins.”
Tarnished Reputation
But people also talk about The Wire, the acclaimed crime drama on HBO, which details the corrosion of the city and the selfish motives of city officials, and they ask if that’s what Baltimore is really like. They talk about Homicide, or The Corner, or We Own This City, another crime drama about the Baltimore Police Department’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. Shows like these convey the sense of Baltimore as a great American city that has fallen from former glory — and feed into the Trump narrative that cities are apocalyptic messes.
And to be sure, the university’s presence hasn’t always been positive. Like any university dominating a city, Hopkins can act like an 800-pound gorilla in its ambitions. For example, in 2001, the city and Hopkins made plans to redevelop Middle East, a largely Black neighborhood in East Baltimore, to make way for an expanded medical campus and biotech hub. Residents of the community said that neither the university nor the city had informed them of the plans — that they read about it in The Sun. That kicked off a years-long standoff between the university and neighborhood residents, who said that the university had initially low-balled offers on their houses at $22,500, making it difficult for them to relocate — which many did not want to do because they saw their neighborhood as home. The project languished in controversy for more than a decade, until the university, under Daniels, worked out a deal with the homeowners.
Historically, the university’s reputation as healer has been tarnished many times. The Baltimore Lead Paint Study of the 1990s, for example, intentionally exposed low-income, Black children to homes with lead-paint risks in an effort to research lead-abatement techniques. The university was also implicated in the case of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells, taken from an examination at Hopkins, showed the ability to endlessly reproduce. These HeLa cells became a standard material of biomedical research, but her family was never informed about this.
And Antero Pietila, a former Sun journalist and author of The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins, tallies the many ways that the university’s history complicates the picture: Although the university made an early commitment to serve the indigent and to educate doctors, regardless of race or sex, Pietila notes that the university excluded Black students until after World War II.
When East Baltimore started deteriorating in the 1970s, following the riots associated with Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Johns Hopkins considered relocating to Columbia, a new development in the suburbs south of Baltimore. It stayed put. The reason, Pietila explains, is that if Hopkins moved, “it would not have had ready access to clinical material, people with whom it could experiment — whereas in East Baltimore, in poorer black East Baltimore, there was lots of clinical material.”
Making Baltimore Great Again
In the quest to “Make America Great Again,” the question always centers on which era of greatness we’re striving for. Is it the 1980s, when a widely popular Republican president was in office and Donald Trump was a popular focus of books and tabloid covers?
More likely, in the minds of many MAGA voters, we’re talking vaguely about an idealized version of the 1950s — when America was a world power, the nuclear family was held up as the ideal household configuration, race relations were simpler (on one side of that power dynamic, at least), and heavy manufacturing was a muscular industry. The Trump administration’s tariffs are ostensibly a strategy to bring back that manufacturing glory.
In the 1950s, Baltimore was thriving, with a growing population about twice its current size and a range of manufacturing and port jobs, including Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant, which was once the largest steel plant in the world, employing 30,000 people at its height. “That’s not far off of the impact that Hopkins has in the city right now,” says Mac McComas, program manager for the 21st Century Cities Initiative, a program at Hopkins that researches urban conditions to create policies for change in Baltimore and similar cities. (Although the number of employees is similar, Hopkins’s impact is actually far greater, given the city’s population decline.)
Sparrows Point and other domestic-heavy manufacturing began shedding jobs in the 1970s, as the work was automated or sent overseas. For Black Baltimoreans, this shift was particularly difficult: Having moved to Baltimore during the Great Migration of the mid-20th century, Black families did not have enough time to build wealth to save and invest money, own real estate, and prepare to send the next generation to college. Redlining and white flight (encouraged by the “blockbusting” techniques of real-estate agents) further eroded the neighborhoods and schools, leading to the Baltimore we have today.
The question is, What are we trying to get back to? The work at Sparrows Point was dangerous, even deadly, but former steelworkers still mourn the decline of the steel plant, feeling the loss of “not only the plant’s high-wage union jobs, but the sense of pride and purpose they shared,” as one article in Bloomberg’s CityLab put it. McComas believes part of that wistfulness for the heavy-manufacturing era is a yearning for basic economic security — that America once had solid jobs for people with only a high-school education. Some of it might stem from the notion that manufacturing is “real work,” McComas says, while the national shift to office jobs in research, education, public health, community development, and other high-skill, high-tech roles hasn’t benefited everyone.
“There is this idea that if we could just return to the era where you could graduate high school and get a manufacturing job,” he says. “But it completely ignores that you can’t rebuild the Bethlehem Steel plant in five years, with all the capital that’s required to do that. You can’t just kind of flip a switch and all of a sudden there are 20,000 jobs in steel manufacturing in Baltimore.”
McComas, along with the economist Matthew E. Kahn, diagnosed the problems of cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Detroit in their book Unlocking the Potential of Post-Industrial Cities. Manufacturing never really left the United States, but it has become more sophisticated and automated, requiring fewer people with higher levels of skills.
The key to forward progress in cities like Baltimore: many of the things that we are now cutting and diminishing, like basic research, investment in schools and colleges, and the difficult national conversation about race. Baltimore seemed to be turning around, having gained population for the first time in years. “A more sustainable, longer-term approach would have been to invest in public education,” says McComas, adding that Baltimoreans also must face how we have “set ourselves up for failure in how segregated this city has been.”
People with certificates short of a college degree can now land living-wage jobs in pharmaceuticals or tech. “They’re not making steel — they’re making robots, they’re making drugs,” he says. “Baltimore’s next competitive advantage could be some mix of some manufacturing jobs — pharmaceutical, tech, biotech — but it kind of has to reinvent its economy.”
Chances are, it will need Johns Hopkins to do that.
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