The People’s Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League

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This article is one of several on fixing education. For more, read Putting the Public Back in Public Education, America 101, and the online exclusive Educational Success: Stories of Innovation from the Utne Library.

The lecture hall is nearly dark, lit only by the faint glow of a dozen laptop screens. Suddenly, a projector comes alive and a painting appears above the chalkboard. Seventy-year-old professor Dennis Dalton—his bald head, trademark sneakers, baggy jeans, and button-up denim shirt barely discernible at the front of the room—announces with glee, “Ahhh! There it is! The School of Athens!”

Half of the 150 or so Political Theory I students giggle at his zealousness. “My favorite thing to do when I go to Rome is to stand in front of this painting and have all kinds of thoughts and reveries,” he says, stepping back so he can get a better look. “After a few hours, I get kind of diminished from lack of food and drink and I imagine the people, depicted so expertly here by Raphael, talking to one another.”

More giggles.

The professor turns to face the students, whose eyes are directed upward at the great thinkers shown in his favorite painting. “Raphael was trying to capture a community engaged in the philosophy of the mind. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and all the other philosophers depicted here began a long tradition of street philosophy, a tradition that lives on in the streets of Harlem—the exchange of ideas, a passion for education and idealism, a community of learning and teaching.” Then his tone shifts to disdain. “If only Columbia—the school on the hill—understood the importance of it.”

Professor Dalton has taught for 38 years in the political science department of Barnard, the all-women’s school of Columbia University in Harlem. Like many Ivy League schools positioned near low-income communities, Columbia has a strained relationship with its neighbors, working-class people who are not only kept out, but are threatened with displacement by the grand vision of the university’s leadership. The school wants to seize property through eminent domain in its plans for a new $6.3 billion expansion into West Harlem.

Columbia says the project will create more than 6,000 jobs over the next 25 years. But Manhattan Community Board No. 9, which is the voice of many West Harlem residents, says it will displace 300 people’s homes and 900 people’s current jobs, not to mention destroy a neighborhood known for its rich history and culture.

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