CHAPTER ONE

THE DIVISION OF URBAN AFFAIRS

THE BIDEN SCHOOL evolved from the Division of Urban Affairs, established in 1961 to address the challenges facing urban America, specifically those in Wilmington, Delaware, and the surrounding metropolitan region. The forces that gave rise to the University of Delaware program and other university-based urban affairs programs are complex and unusual compared to those behind the creation of traditional university programs. Most of the pressure to establish urban affairs programs came from outside the academic community rather than from scholars working on urban issues.

By the 1960s, many older cities were experiencing an unprecedented outmigration of population and businesses to new and growing suburbs. Poverty became increasingly concentrated in central cities, which were suffering declining economic investment and job opportunities, and faced with diminishing resources to tackle their challenges. The U.S. War on Poverty, driven by President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative, reaffirmed the urgency of meeting domestic challenges, many of which were in America’s cities. During the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government invested massive funds for “solution-oriented” training, research, and services related to creating, operating, and evaluating a vast number of federally spawned urban projects. Governments, private institutions, and community organizations called upon universities to play a more active role in their communities and mobilize their resources to help alleviate the poverty, racism, institutional disorder, and environmental blight that threatened the nation’s cities and menaced its residents.

THE FORD FOUNDATION CHALLENGE GRANT

The first investments in urban affairs programs came from the Ford Foundation rather than from state or federal government. Between 1959 and 1974, the Ford Foundation distributed $36 million in start-up grants that challenged U.S. universities to establish new programs designed to address the problems of urban America.¹ The foundation’s challenge embodied a double-edged critique of the prevailing approaches to these problems at U.S. universities. First, urban challenges did not come neatly bundled along the disciplinary lines that defined the academic organization of traditional university faculties. The issues of housing, transportation, inequality, and segregation did not fit within the boundaries of separate disciplines like political science, economics, sociology, law, planning, or psychology. The Ford Foundation focused its competitive grants on creating new interdisciplinary programs. The federal government later affirmed in its grant programs that the traditional disciplinary organization of universities was ill-suited to address the practical challenges facing the nation’s communities.

Second, the foundation insisted that often-insular universities reach out to those living and working in urban communities to understand the nature of the problems those populations were experiencing. To do this, universities needed to place people and expertise in the communities they were serving. The approach underpinning the original urban affairs programs was to bring together scholars from diverse fields, organize them outside the traditional university structure, and give them a mandate and funding to carry out applied scholarship on community problems. These programs were to become a bridge between the university and the community. The responsibility of their faculty and students was to move across that bridge in both directions. The measure of their success would not be scholarly citations but community impacts and improvements.

On September 20, 1960, UD President John Perkins submitted a proposal to the Ford Foundation to “establish a permanent program of urban services within the University of Delaware.” The proposal stated that the “compactness and rapid urbanization of the State of Delaware, the current absence of organized concern about problems of urbanization and the central role of the university in the life of the state, combine to create an unusual opportunity for a program of urban services.” The proposed university program of extension, research, and education would “translate and expand the land-grant college approach so successful in the rural setting to the urban setting which predominated in our State and times.” The program would develop over five years, involve many parts of the university, seek to involve citizens and organizations, and “provide assistance to public officials and governments.” The communities of the state would be utilized “as laboratories and classrooms in which to learn about and to help meet problems of urbanization.”²

The proposal described a three-part program that would be university-wide and interdisciplinary, creating a modernly conceived urban extension service, establishing a related research program on urban problems in Delaware, and introducing new educational activities relevant to the urban field. The program director would appoint “field agents” from various disciplines who would work in a manner parallel to agricultural extension agents and carry out research and extension services in the community. The proposal pledged that the program developed under the grant would become a permanent feature of the university.³

On April 20, 1961, Perkins received a letter confirming that the Ford Foundation awarded the University of Delaware a $500,000 grant for the proposed program.⁴ As confirmed in the award letter, the program would “include an urban extension service to the community, a complementary research program, a modest educational and training program consisting of noncredit institutes and seminars for public officials and interested citizens, and an expansion of pertinent credit course offerings in appropriate colleges of the university.”⁵

In some respects, the University of Delaware was an unusual choice for one of the first Ford Foundation grants. In 1961, the university was still a modest-sized institution located in a small city with a population of fewer than thirty thousand people. A regionally focused university, its undergraduate enrollment of 3,600 was made up mainly of Delawareans. It had few graduate programs and only 340 full-time graduate students, most of whom were in the sciences and engineering.⁶ The university also had limited research capacity in the social sciences, with most of that research conducted by individual scholars for publication in journals and books, not for community application. The faculty had minimal experience carrying out grants or contracts with restrictions and targeted requirements.

In other ways, the University of Delaware was a perfect choice for a new interdisciplinary program intended to bring expertise to bear on the challenges facing America’s urban communities. UD was a land-grant university, and the Ford grant supported programs that would operate in urban areas in ways that paralleled land-grant programs that had served rural America throughout the previous century. At the time, UD was also in a formative period of developing new programs, some of which cut across traditional academic units. Further, the city of Wilmington manifested all the interconnected and growing problems of urban America: poverty, racism, crime, inadequate housing, environmental blight, inefficient planning, and overburdened and under-professionalized government programs.

The Division of Urban Affairs was created to carry out the Ford Foundation grant requirements, and Edward Overman was appointed as director. Overman had worked in government research at the University of Virginia and the University of Tennessee before joining UD, where he held a faculty appointment in the Department of Political Science.⁷ The division was “situated in the structure of the University in a manner calculated to emphasize its role in activities external to the University.”⁸ It reported to Vice President for University Relations George Worrilow.⁹ At its inception, Worrilow defined the path for the future when he recognized that the grant made it possible for the university to form a special kind of unit. The initial professional staff hired in the division had diverse social science and planning backgrounds. They would work in teams to address the multifaceted problems of Delaware’s communities. Quite intentionally, the division represented a mid-twentieth-century reinvention of the nineteenth-century land-grant concept, now focused on addressing the emerging demands of an increasingly urbanized society.¹⁰

Yet, the new program represented more than the translation of a century-old idea to emerging conditions. It also expressed the university’s commitment to improving conditions in the state’s most distressed communities—those experiencing the most significant challenges. In Delaware, that meant a focus on the city of Wilmington.

WILMINGTON’S WOES

In the 1960s and 1970s, Wilmington faced challenges that mirrored those of much of the rest of urban America but with some features unique to the city’s and the state’s political and economic environment. In 1960, Wilmington, with a population of ninety-six thousand, was Delaware’s largest city and had been the hub of its economic growth through the first half of the twentieth century. Dubbed the corporate capital by UD historian Carol Hoffecker, Wilmington was the headquarters of the DuPont company.¹¹ The mark of the company and the historical influence of the du Pont family were present in and around the city in everything from its architecture, housing, and cultural amenities to the spawning of a diverse array of legal and other service institutions that supported the global center of the chemical industry. Because of its corporate identity and investments in commercial buildings and support services, Wilmington had a core infrastructure suitable for a much larger population.

Without question, the DuPont company brought prosperity and notoriety to the tiny state of Delaware.¹² There was a significant relationship between the economic success of DuPont and the economic vitality of the state, particularly Wilmington. Many in Wilmington prospered from DuPont’s growth. However, the distribution of benefits did not reach all of the city’s population, specifically low-income Black families. After World War II, conditions in the city began to change dramatically. Parallel to the pattern familiar in so many other U.S. cities, Wilmington’s population began to drop while surrounding New Castle County grew. From 1940 to 1970, the city’s population declined by nearly 30 percent, while the county’s population increased by over 100 percent.¹³ The exodus from Wilmington was no accident. Much of it was driven by public policy. As summarized by William Boyer, “government policies were killing the city. Wilmington’s drop in population was exacerbated in the early 1960s by I-95’s emasculation of the city. The city was eviscerated, too, in the early 1960s when twenty-two square blocks of east side residences—including both good and dilapidated housing—were lost to urban renewal, scattering the working-class families with negative results.”¹⁴ As a result of these changes, many middle- and upper-income residents left the city. Many businesses followed, “leaving a depleted downtown, with no movie theaters and only two supermarkets in the city. In the meantime, the city became increasingly populated by blacks and the poor.”¹⁵

The concentration of African Americans and other minorities was also a product of housing discrimination that excluded them from living in much of the surrounding area of the county.¹⁶ As the more affluent left the city, they took their tax dollars, leaving fewer resources available for city services.¹⁷ Wilmington was left with a high concentration of Black and low-income families and declining employment opportunities for unskilled labor, while the suburbs continued to grow and prosper.¹⁸ Given the dominant role of DuPont in Wilmington, it is not surprising that the leadership to address these challenges came from Henry B. du Pont, who guided the establishment of the Greater Wilmington Development Council (GWDC) to support the revitalization of Wilmington and the surrounding areas. Understanding the GWDC is essential for understanding the environment within which the Division of Urban Affairs worked. In its first years, the division entered into several contracts for research with the GWDC.

The GWDC wielded a great deal of political influence at the state and local levels, and it used that influence both formally and informally to promote its agenda. In 1967, it sought legislation to eliminate discriminatory housing practices because industries in the Greater Wilmington area were having trouble recruiting Black professionals to move to the city. The GWDC was not entirely business-focused, however. In the late 1960s, the organization provided funding for neighborhood service centers, sponsored an analysis of education resources in Wilmington, and advocated for a community college to be opened in the center city. Working with the Division of Urban Affairs, the GWDC promoted the professionalization of public service employees and was influential in establishing the first staff of professional planners in Wilmington.¹⁹ In these respects, the council acted as a form of private government for Wilmington, often eclipsing formal government institutions in delivering expanded programs and services to support a new path for development.²⁰

The GWDC partnered with the Division of Urban Affairs to study the state and regional economies, how they were changing because of urbanization, the shifting locations of businesses and employment within the region, and the implications of these changes for Wilmington’s central business district.²¹ With financial support from the GWDC, the division launched “a program of research into the dynamics of the economies of the region.”²² The alliance of the division staff with private sector leaders focused on the emerging factors influencing economic development in the city and across the state. The division’s research also looked at consumer attitudes about shopping and living in Wilmington and the broader policy environment affecting the economy, including tax policies. “It is believed,” Overman proposed, “that the Division of Urban Affairs has made one of the most complete and valid analysis of personal income ever made for a whole state.”²³

The critical event that impacted Wilmington’s development in this period occurred in 1968. The unrest within the Black community in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., led then-Delaware Governor Charles Terry to declare a state of emergency and order the National Guard to occupy the city. The details of the events that precipitated that occupation are subject to debate, but what is not debatable is that after the unrest was over, the governor refused to withdraw the National Guard. He continued to refuse despite the pleas of local business leaders, political leaders, and city residents.

Joe Biden, who returned to Delaware in the summer of 1968 after graduating from law school, found Downtown Wilmington a “strange place.” He walked to work past soldiers carrying rifles every day: “Apparently they were there to protect me.” Biden elaborated on the different community responses to the National Guard’s presence:

The white citizens the TV reporters interviewed were almost all happy to have the Guard there. They were afraid riots might ignite in the ghetto and then spread from there. They were afraid Wilmington’s police force wasn’t big enough to keep it contained. Generally, they were afraid.

But in the black neighborhoods of East Wilmington, residents were afraid, too. Every evening National Guardsmen were prowling their streets with loaded weapons. Curfews were in effect from dusk to dawn. Mothers were terrified that their children would make one bad mistake and end up dead. The locals called the nightly National Guard reconnaissance rounds “rat patrols.” “They patrol our streets like we’re animals,” black citizens would say. “They take away our pride.”²⁴

The experience had a profound influence on Biden. He knew that “blacks and whites weren’t talking to one another.” He also knew that “white residents of Wilmington had no idea why black residents of the city complained about the way” Governor Terry and the National Guard were treating them. Did they have the same constitutional protections and freedom of movement as those living in white neighborhoods? Biden continued, “I thought the folks in those neighborhoods deserved at least that much. I didn’t think I could change the world in 1968 or even what was happening, but I thought I could make a difference. So I walked across Rodney Square and into the basement of a three-story building and applied for work in the public defender’s office.”²⁵

Biden’s walk across Rodney Square started a public service career that began with his election to the New Castle County Council in 1970. That experience further heightened his recognition of the mounting challenges in Wilmington, particularly for its Black and increasingly low-income population. As Carol Hoffecker has pointed out, the riots of April 1968 represented the “nadir of Wilmington’s postwar decline.”²⁶ The National Guard remained in Wilmington for nine months, the longest military occupation of an American city since the Civil War, until Terry was defeated at the polls by Russell Peterson, a DuPont chemist. Peterson’s first act as governor was to remove the National Guard. The occupation was stigmatizing for Wilmington and further accelerated the city’s downturn. Property values dropped, and the pace at which population, businesses, and jobs left the city increased. Wilmington became smaller and poorer, with shrinking public resources to support city services.

In the 1970s, competition between Wilmington and the surrounding areas of New Castle County increased and pitted suburban residents against those living in Wilmington. As Hoffecker explains, “The most important public issues in Greater Wilmington during the 1970s, inter-district busing, metropolitan government, and the future location of the area’s major hospital, all pitted the interests of the city against those of county residents.”²⁷ Increasingly over the next two decades, policy decisions on these and other issues often further disadvantaged the city. Given the lack of progress for twenty years in implementing the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision (which included two Delaware cases), the federal courts mandated metropolitan school desegregation in 1974. This court decision resulted in the elimination of the Wilmington School District and ten other New Castle County districts and introduced countywide busing of students.²⁸ Faculty and staff from the Division of Urban Affairs researched shifting demographic patterns and policies affecting school desegregation and the public attitudes about these changes. They also chronicled the politics of the metropolitan school desegregation process and its impacts.²⁹ For the next half-century, faculty, staff, and students from the programs that eventually became the Biden School remained engaged in analyzing public education policy impacting Wilmington and educational equity across Delaware.

The conditions in Wilmington in the decades after World War II paralleled those of cities across America. The corporate center of the city continued to prosper. However, those who worked in the corporate center increasingly lived in the suburbs, and those who remained in the city were unable to leave. At its scale, Wilmington’s challenges were as acute as in any city in the nation. It also seemed to observers, including some at the Ford Foundation, that if those challenges could not be solved in the small city of Wilmington, then there was little hope to tackle them in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

DEVELOPING THE DIVISION

The Division of Urban Affairs’s mandate was to develop research-based knowledge that policymakers could use to address the problems in Wilmington and other Delaware communities. In carrying out this mandate, the division faced challenges of its own. The most immediate was its lack of the data needed to conduct research and analysis. The university had no established social science or policy centers generating data. Overman identified capacity issues as a top priority, pointing to the need to “build a state-wide system of data acquisition, processing, and dissemination geared to the long-range planning and operating needs” of communities and state agencies.³⁰ Without such capacity, the division and its partners, such as the GWDC and government agencies, would be unable to effectively pursue objectives such as strengthening the planning capacity of Wilmington and other Delaware communities, evaluating the ongoing changes in the regional economy and their impacts, or documenting the social problems generated from urbanization in and around Delaware.

For the first decade and a half of its existence, the division was building this capacity. At the same time, it was completing studies for government and community institutions, often under contract. The interdisciplinary staff included political scientists, public administration specialists, economists, demographers, and sociologists; most did not have faculty appointments. The staff was more racially diverse than the university staff and student body. It included community development specialists and other practitioners and advocates not in typical academic departments. Notably, the initial senior staff had little background and experience in urban issues. Most had focused on rural issues and now sought to translate their knowledge to an urban setting. The staff also had no experience building community-focused research capacity, yet they were determined to do so.

A critical step in building such capacity was developing a census and data system headquartered at the division but involving many state and local agencies. It was an ambitious effort to draw public planning, transportation, and school agencies “into a state-wide system of data acquisition, processing, and dissemination geared to the long-range planning and operating needs of these agencies.”³¹ The system also would be used as a research resource for the division and other parts of the university. In 1963, the Census and Data System, which later became the Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research, was formally established to provide current, accurate demographic information and analysis to decision-makers in communities throughout the state.

The Census and Data System conducted interview surveys on prominent policy issues such as school desegregation and the reapportionment of the Delaware General Assembly. It also helped form the Delaware Population Consortium to produce a single set of demographic projections for all governments and informed state decision-makers on policies such as taxation. This work required skills quite different from those of traditional faculty. Edward Ratledge, who joined the division in 1973 and became director of the Census and Data System in 1974,³² explains that the staff needed “a wide and flexible interdisciplinary research outlook. They also needed to be visible to the policy community and communicate with a broad spectrum of decision-makers. Hence, the need for professional staff and self-selected faculty who would create a different model of engaged scholarship that incorporated public service as a priority.”³³ Their projects built on one another, such that the staff learned new skills and acquired additional data systematically. This work also generated valuable off-campus relationships with state leaders that led to “invitations to participate in taskforces, commissions, advisory boards, and other policy advisory positions, most of which were uncompensated public service but opened doors for funded projects.”³⁴

During its early years, the Division of Urban Affairs focused on leveraging university resources to assist community groups, municipalities, nonprofits, and public agencies throughout Delaware. A key objective was to enhance the planning and policy-making capacity of municipalities and regional and state agencies. In the early 1960s, there was little such professional capacity in Wilmington, New Castle County, or any other community in Delaware. Overman proposed that improving planning capacity was essential for communities to address the problems of urbanization.³⁵ When the City of Wilmington and other municipalities hired planning professionals, the division acted as a support institution, engaging them on an Inter-agency Planning Committee to coordinate planning efforts. The committee also included representation from the GWDC and state officials. Municipalities throughout the state called upon the division to assist with developing comprehensive plans. In the first two years, it worked on plans for the cities of Newark, Dover, New Castle, Smyrna, and Laurel. Technical assistance in the development and implementation of municipal and county planning quickly became a staple service.

The division also conducted demographic analysis, including a population and housing analysis of the Wilmington metropolitan region. That analysis drew attention to the changing racial backgrounds and income levels of the population in the city and the surrounding suburban parts of New Castle County. The division staff sought to demonstrate to decision-makers and the public that policy analysis and planning mattered. Research on policy and planning issues and options could identify new possibilities for addressing critical community issues.

During its first five years, the division’s public service and applied research programs broadened dramatically. Much of this work was supported by external federal and state grants and contracts, as well as by direct support from municipalities. The division launched projects in the areas of educational policy and urban services, community organization and neighborhood development, housing and land use, government organization and municipal administration, and poverty and racial equality. Based on its initial work, the division was one of only two programs that received a supplemental grant from the Ford Foundation in 1966.

G. Arno (Skip) Loessner, appointed assistant director of urban services for the division in 1969, recalls that the responsibilities for evidence-based analysis carried special obligations for division faculty and staff not to participate in partisan politics or engage in private consulting with the State of Delaware.³⁶ Loessner explains, “The main thing was to be able to back up our work with evidence and maintain recognition for objective analysis.”³⁷ Jeffrey Raffel, hired in 1971, believes that unbiased analysis was the key to the impact of the division’s work. The division offered more than technical assistance and research capacity; it also provided legitimacy and an appearance of neutrality for consulting policy-makers because “nobody questioned the validity of our results.”³⁸

The Division of Urban Affairs’s capacity-building efforts continued in the early 1970s. In 1972, the Urban Agent Program was created. Later renamed the Center for Community Research and Service, the program was located in Wilmington to provide direct, ongoing research and technical assistance to community institutions, especially in low-income neighborhoods. It formalized the urban agent work underway from the outset of the Ford Foundation grant in which “agents” applied various community organization strategies, including some new models, to cultivate community-based economic development.

With James H. Sills, Jr., as director, the Urban Agent Program was not only in the community, but it also acted on behalf of the community. Sills was a community organizer and a recognized Wilmington leader before joining the University of Delaware. He was the first African American executive director of People’s Settlement, a nonprofit social services agency located in Wilmington’s Eastside that served the city’s immigrant population and subsequently focused on helping the increasing number of poor and Black families. Sills had also served as an at-large member of the Wilmington City Council between 1968 and 1972 and was directly involved with efforts to end the National Guard occupation of the city. When Sills became the head of the Urban Agent Program, he was already widely recognized as a community activist, a political leader of the Black community, and an outspoken advocate for the university to take on a more significant public service role.

Under Sills’s direction, the Urban Agent Program became a vehicle for addressing the challenges facing low-income and increasingly Black neighborhoods. This advocacy contrasted with the focus on unbiased assistance that was a cornerstone of the work of other units in the division. The work done by Sills and his colleagues in the program at times entailed challenging major economic institutions, particularly banks whose mortgage and lending practices discriminated against minority and low-income residents.³⁹

By the early 1970s, the scope of the division’s work encompassed the entire state. Notably, the division staff working with Mayor Crawford Carroll of Dover helped establish the Delaware League of Local Governments in 1970, which operated from the division’s offices in Newark. Loessner defined a three-year program to coordinate services among local governments and improve their recognition and representation in Legislative Hall in Dover. The collaboration with the league continued over the next half-century, primarily through the work of the Delaware Public Administration Institute. In 1973, the institute, which later became the Institute for Public Administration, was established to pursue this broader, statewide effort through partnerships with local, state, and regional governments and public agencies. Jerome Lewis was appointed director, with specific responsibility for supporting the professionalization of those in government agencies at all levels.⁴⁰ At the outset, a federal grant program under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1970 focused such services on personnel practices, including assisting with employee selection processes and labor relations. The institute became the home base for the Delaware Association for Public Administration and the Delaware Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration.⁴¹

Within less than a decade, the Division of Urban Affairs had developed a substantial capacity for applied interdisciplinary research on a wide range of public issues. It also maintained growing collaborations with communities across the state and state agencies. It became “one of the most vibrant, in-volved and influential institutions in the State of Delaware.”⁴² At the same time, it remained outside of the established academic structure of the university, reporting to the vice president for university relations rather than to the provost. There were no faculty appointments in the division, although some staff held faculty appointments in the social science departments. It offered no instructional programs and had no students of its own but did establish an Urban Fellows program in 1962. This program enabled students in disciplinary social science master’s programs to serve as research assistants for faculty on projects focused on addressing urban challenges.

Throughout its first decade, the internal operations of the division remained informal. Many decisions were being made in an ad hoc manner by the director. While this ad hoc decision-making was not surprising for a new unit outside of the university’s academic structure and focused on work for external clients, the second director, C. Harold (Hal) Brown, enhanced this informality with his management style. He often prided himself on not conforming to bureaucratic rules, and had a one-on-one approach to management that relied little on formal policies. Raffel recalls that Brown made decisions without formal staff meetings or any agreed-upon rules, and this adhocracy continued even after the first faculty were hired.⁴³ Robert Wilson, hired to lead the division’s demographic and evaluation research programs once Brown was made director, recalls that the size of the division staff, about twenty in total, was small enough “to fit into the recreation room in Hal and Sally Brown’s home.”⁴⁴

A NEW MODEL OF UNIVERSITY PUBLIC SERVICE

By the mid-1970s, the division had carried out more than two hundred studies for government and quasi-governmental agencies at various levels and had built a reputation as Delaware’s primary source for policy analysis and research on public issues. Not all of its work was in policy analysis and planning, however. Much of the work was on the ground in communities across the state, building partnerships that would serve as the foundation for longer-term improvements in services and policies. Raffel notes that trust was a factor of critical importance for division staff in building those partnerships in a small state and “the foundation for our success in the decades ahead.”⁴⁵

The division’s success through the mid-1970s was difficult to judge because many of its achieved outcomes were discernable only after a decade or more. Some of the most dramatic results of the division’s work were indirect: professionalizing city and county workers, strengthening the capacity of community organizations and public/private partnerships, and improving the data available for public decision-making.

One clear result is that the Division of Urban Affairs changed the University of Delaware. It introduced a new model of university public service guided by applied research on emerging community needs and challenges. To implement this model, the university created an organization different from a typical academic unit. In hindsight, the creation of the division was a crucial step in UD’s evolution into an engaged research university. Over the next half-century, the public service and applied research centers developed in the 1960s and early 1970s remained critical components of the future Biden School. The centers were also the foundation for new and distinctive academic programs.

In 1974, a Ford Foundation evaluation of the urban university programs it had supported concluded that most of its funded experiments had been less than effective. It identified the University of Delaware’s Division of Urban Affairs as among the few notable successes.⁴⁶