A Visit to a Special Place

Harry Robinson takes us on tour of  Bawston

Boston was on Professor Peter Doherty's mind when he answered questions at the University of Queensland following his alumni lecture last week. As we know, Doherty has spent many years in the US and is past all goggling at the colossalality (to coin a word) of its intellectual property. Yet he could not help a gasp at his recollection that Boston and environs nurtures 500,000 students. (One in five or six of the area's total population.) He went on to add that Harvard and its associated hospitals and laboratories were home to 8,000 academic teachers and researchers.

But Harvard is only a sliver of the knowledge industry of Boston. It's fashionable to think of Silicon Valley, Stanford, and maybe a chip or two from Berkeley and UCLA as America's crowning educational glories. Marvellous as they are, they are still parvenus compared with the learning communities back east.

Such as Boston. That city and its near neighbours hold around 30 tertiary educational and research institutions. The most famous names are Harvard which has enfolded Radcliffe, the mighty MIT, Boston University, Tufts, and Wellesley and Brandeis not far away. Dig a little and you'll find plenty more with major interests running from architecture and arts to pharmacology and political science. It's not all science of course. The loopy linguist Noam Chomsky, the passionate defender of the western canon Harold Bloom and the proud and sad Kennedys have all strolled along the banks of the Charles River.

Yes, there is a point to all this Boston adulation. Please, a little patience for a lightning historical sketch.

1620 - Pilgrim Fathers land on Massachusetts Bay.
1635 - the Puritans set up the first secondary school of the colonies, the Boston Latin School.
1636 - Harvard founded.
1647 - the Puritan dominated Massachusetts Bay Colony set up elementary schools in every town and village, and attendance was compulsory.

With all that brain work going on, it was no accident that Massachusetts took a leading role in rebellious affairs which culminated in a Tea Party. Fast forward to the 19th century.

1821 - Boston Public High School, the first PHS in the US.
1852 - Tufts Uni and Med School founded.
1861 - MIT.
1869 - Boston University.
1871 - Wellesley.
1879 - Radcliffe, described as a private liberal arts college for women.
1948 - Brandeis founded

It's a consistent story of homage to spreading education thickly on the ground. It's also a tribute from the more material sources of wealth, fishing, silviculture, farming, port activity. As the 19th century grew old, Massachusetts was known as the first "truly industrialised state." Powered by water mills on the streams flowing from the Berkshires down to the Atlantic, manufactures included textiles, leather goods, cutlery, watches and such. And then came decline. For the first half of the 20th Century, steam and electric power and cheaper labour in other states drew manufacturers away and Massachusetts looked like fading into a pretty backwater.

The educational industry went on, though. But the state had to struggle to try to keep up with the likes of California, Texas, Illinois and Michigan. There was a flight to the suburbs. Boston began to look thin, apart from Harvard, MIT and such. The 50s brought urban re-design and the 60s brought some urban renewal. (See Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities.)

But ideas were stirring all over and by the time the 80s arrived with demands and opportunities for expertise in high-tech and electronics, trained, active, adventurous minds were all the go. Boston was ready to fill the need. That knowledge from those knowledge institutions lifted the whole life of Boston once more. It's now as useful, busy, innovative and profitable as the best of the rest. It would still be a backwater but for the huge accumulation of expertise in founding and running universities, colleges, libraries, and laboratories - the accumulation which made Professor Doherty gasp.

What can Australia learn from the life of Boston? Not that we should try to create a look-alike. The real Boston can't be replicated. What we can take in is the central thread in the life of Boston - that good education is good for human development, good for economic development, good for business. Decently conducted, it's a profit, not a loss item.

PS: The whole area jumps. Yale is just down the freeway from Harvard and Manhattan is only a few steps more down Interstate 95.