The Long March Away From the Institutions (Part I)
Prologomena to a few thoughts on civic decline and the face of philanthropy
Where have you been?
That is a very good question, especially for my one paid subscriber. I promise I will have a post outlining onshore DIY geoengineering costs in the near future, for some value of ‘near’. I have been working two jobs while living in a basement apartment that isn’t located near either of them and chomping at the bit to do Anything Else. In my spare time, I have been working on an esoteric website for philological and linguistic analysis of the Eliot Bible.
I haven’t had the time or energy to work on much else—though I’m newly underemployed after deciding that spending two-and-a-half hours in the car a day at a temp job was just not workable1—so let’s instead expand on a Tweetstorm from yesterday.
Here is a somewhat garish map of the largest cities in the United States.
And here is a map of US News and World Report’s 2022-23 ranking of the top universities in the US.
The geographic gulf between the nation’s largest cities and its best colleges is—of course—no surprise; it’s background information that Americans barely think about. Of the 50 top universities in the country, only twelve are west of the Mississippi2—a slight uptick from the 2014 ranking, which didn’t include UT Austin. Nine of those twelve are in California, six of which are UCs. America’s center of population hasn’t been as far east as its center-of-elite-educational-gravity—about the longitude of Cleveland or Atlanta—since before the Civil War.
It’s worth, of course, stepping back a bit and asking whether or not this is really a problem in and of itself. All decent universities and most shoddy ones are either nonprofits or publically-funded, and the publically-funded ones have endowments to cover for the vagaries of state politicking. University endowments take a long time to get big, so it’s only sensible that a majority of really well-off universities would be located in the East. That money is feeding back on itself with dividends now, but originally, somebody had to donate to get it started, and most of the time that ‘somebody’ was an East Coaster.
It’s very difficult to create a new university from scratch that anybody will respect, unless you’re a state government. Every institution on that map founded since 1900—except for CMU, established that very year—is a UC.
But I think there’s something else going on here. Here’s the League of American Orchestras as of 2023.
Here’s a map of the country’s public libraries, as of 2009.
Public libraries are obviously funded by and for the public. But private funding’s key, too, at least historically—Andrew Carnegie famously founded a lot of them.
What makes this all the more odd is that you’d never guess to connect these maps to either of the following two charts:
Charitable giving nearly doubled in the late 1990s, for some reason (maybe a change to tax law?), and it’s currently sitting at about $500B a year—enough for ten Harvards. It’s highest in the South and interior West. Much of that is donation to churches, but surely not all of it.
Of course, the average person doesn’t make anywhere near enough money to donate more than a few windows to a new university, and philanthropy takes many forms. It’s not surprising to learn that a map of active nonprofits, like a map of top universities and a map of public libraries, looks like a map of Puritan settlement: the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Bay Area, with North Carolina again punching above its weight for some reason (you can’t see it on the college map, but there are three institutions in the state that make the top 50).
And again, all of this has only a tenous connection to where Americans actually live. Phoenix is the fourth-largest city in America, but on all of these maps it’s about on par with, say, Des Moines or Albany at best. Arguably I’m cheating by looking at city limits, which tend to be larger in the West than in the East, but even if we go by metro areas, the pattern still holds if a bit more weakly: the only new Northeastern city that shows up is DC, and it’s only quite recently Northeastern. Phoenix (#10) still has more people than Boston (#11). The Inland Empire has more people than Seattle, San Francisco or San Jose, but when was the last time you thought about going to Riverside for the cultural scene?
Enough with the maps. Just one more.
A map of institutions in America doesn’t look like a map of where people live. It looks like a map of where people used to live in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Here is the motte of this and the next post (two posts?): at some point in the 20th century, philanthropy stopped being about building institutions to do things and started being about doing things directly3. While many things have indeed gotten done—who could possibly be opposed to eradicating guinea worm?—this shift probably bears a decent chunk of responsibility for the atomization of American society.
That’s vague and not at all new. We could just have Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule make us all go to church.
Here is the somewhat less shaky bailey: the problem with American society is that I don’t have a Drones Club to go to, and we need more social clubs in private townhouses. They, or something like them, are load-bearing pillars of civil society. I speak from experience.
More anon.
No, really. If you’re in the DC area, especially Northern Virginia, and looking to hire somebody for pretty much anything that’s not data entry at a job I can afford a real apartment on, I can (amateurishly) connect Javascript to a database, use an Excel spreadsheet, write an elegant and surprisingly concise brief, and have original thoughts. I’ll put up commuting an hour a day to one job, but two and a half hours a day to two jobs is just miserable.
Tulane is on the north bank of the Mississippi, and therefore technically in the East.
A nonprofit, as I’ll explore later, isn’t always an institution. It’s just a general-purpose legal vehicle.