The early answers were dire. By using the sensor equipment to run more realistic models than what was available to my predecessor in 2011, we learned that the original plan would cost more than we had thought—nearly a billion dollars altogether. That meant almost ten thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child—in a city whose per capita income in 2017 stood at $19,818. The only way to pay for these improvements would be for people’s rates to go up, meaning that if we carried out the plan with no changes, one in ten of our households would be paying 14 percent of their income on their sewer bill alone. Worse, the models showed that the highly expensive plan wouldn’t actually achieve the level of control and environmental improvement that was intended—we could do the whole thing and still be in violation.
But the data also unlocked a better way. Because the simulations could tell them the likely level of water flow at every key node in the network, the team could develop a much more efficient and effective solution. Based on this information, engineers created an alternative plan, costing about $500 million less, and began a process of renegotiation with the EPA that continues to this day. The outcome is not certain, but the stakes are in the hundreds of millions of dollars; overall it stands to be a pretty good return on the $6 million or so that it cost to put the system in to begin with.
More than just a clever use of sensors, it proved how a city could gain by allowing itself to be a guinea pig for an interesting new technology. The researchers benefited from the chance to deploy their work in a real-world environment, while the city wound up getting key technology at a deep discount that ultimately saved us a tremendous amount. Best of all, in the case of EmNet, the intellectual property that was created became the core of a company that now has offices in South Bend, where skilled workers are developing this product and selling it to cities all over the world. Hoping for more positive experiences, we have since intentionally styled South Bend as a “Beta City,” sitting at just the right scale and level of complexity for new ideas and technologies to be tested.
By the time we put our proposal together for the new round of EPA negotiations, it was clear that I had inherited not just an interesting technology, but the building blocks of a completely different architecture for university-community relations. This style of city-university collaboration has become the pattern for what I would call College Town 2.0, a framework in which cities look to universities not only for the size of their endowment and the capacity of their students to spend money, but in terms of the substance of their work.
In 2015, I found myself speaking at a White House event, sponsored by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to preach the value of this kind of collaboration for other cities across America. Together with officials from Pittsburgh, who had undertaken a comparable project with Carnegie-Mellon University that involved improving traffic congestion, we inaugurated the MetroLab Network, an association of city-university pairs across the country that committed to work together along such lines. Soon the network had over forty participants, working on issues from bus reliability in New York to air quality detection in Portland, Oregon.
This and other efforts have yielded a breakdown of the campus “bubble,” in which the idyllic and tidy world of university students never touched the complex life of diverse and low-income areas just a mile or two down the road. Whenever possible, the city backs such efforts, as with an engineering-oriented collaboration called the Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem that links students from multiple colleges with neighborhood groups, high schoolers, and an African-American church to pursue projects that will improve the area around an environmentally impaired underground tributary in a low-income neighborhood.
Other efforts have been generated entirely by students, who have begun to realize that they can respond to the economic inequality around them by working not just to serve but to empower others. In 2011, a sophomore named Peter Woo returned from a summer of service-learning in India and realized that what he’d observed with cash-lending practices there applied in South Bend, too. After estimating that predatory lending in our area costs low-income South Bend residents $3.5 million a year, he gathered some interested friends to launch a micro-lending nonprofit called JIFFI. Working to create alternatives to check-cashing lenders, the organization continues to serve residents on our West Side.
SOME UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENTS have fairly obvious inroads to collaborate with their surrounding communities, working in fields like urban planning, civil engineering, or law. But some of the most compelling partnerships grew out of departments that I had never expected would be so well equipped to engage in the life of the city—such as the neuroscience students I met one night while visiting a support group for mostly ex-offenders at a community center on the West Side.
The taco meat was mostly gone by the time I arrived, so I went to take a seat among the twenty or so chairs in a circle. It was a diverse group. One man looked about sixty-five years old, African-American, with jeans and a dark shirt and glasses; another did not look like he could be eighteen yet, a slim Latino kid in a gray sweatshirt with jeans and white shoes, with tattoos from the side of his neck to the tops of his hands. One woman stared straight ahead of her, talking to no one, while others made small talk with the people next to them. The only people who looked altogether out of place, besides me, perhaps, were four sunny Notre Dame undergraduates, huddling over laptops and trying to make a projector work. In addition to the usual support conversation, the evening would feature a presentation about their field, which turned out to be neuroscience. In particular, they explained, they wanted to talk to the group about neuroplasticity.
I’m about as generous-minded toward undergraduates as it gets, but I suspect my face revealed my inner thoughts at that moment, something like: Please tell me you know what you’re doing here. Were these mostly white kids really going to inflict a PowerPoint about the finer points of neurological research on a room full of reintegrating ex-offenders who were just trying to get their lives back together?
The projector wasn’t working, so three of them held laptops up while another took turns talking. The slideshow explained the development of neurons in adolescence, the electrical and chemical basis of neurotransmission, the relationship of the amygdala to other parts of the brain. They had made it fairly accessible, but it was hard at first to tell if the silent faces of their audience were showing any interest. The students talked about self-control, describing the famous study in which children capable of resisting eating a marshmallow in front of them would earn two later on—and those kids would, it turns out, go on to earn higher incomes and have generally more successful lives. They talked about Buddhist monks’ ability through meditation to activate different parts of their existing neural networks, and the relationship between what you eat and how your brain works. Then the questions began.
“So, you’re saying the neurons I have today are the same as the ones I had when I was a kid?”
“Yes, but they branch off and form new connections, too, and this can keep developing even in adulthood.”
Another asked: “You said that a traumatic event changes your brain.”
“Yes, it can cause connections between your neurons to develop differently.”
“So, how do you change it back?”
A conversation transpired on how PTSD had been treated partly by having subjects train their minds to reframe the events that had harmed them from an outside perspective.
A man who said he was first incarcerated at the age of fifteen got interested. “I’ve seen people raped, stabbed, and set on fire. How am I supposed to think about that from an outside perspective?”
The student looked a little helpless, but another participant, a man in his twenties with a perfectly flat-billed baseball cap on, jumped in. “That’s how it was for me. I got shot five times and lived, and was ready to tear up everything, but when I saw it happen from the outside I could start to let it go.”