[California] Stanford, UC tackling global poverty issues

from The SF Gate

Stanford University and UC Berkeley have joined a trend among the nation's elite universities and are developing centers dedicated to fighting poverty worldwide as economic inequalities grow ever starker.

Both are fledgling efforts aimed at marshalling their respective academic forces to work across disciplines -- from engineering to sociology to the biological sciences -- to tackle some of the most vexing and enduring problems facing humanity. A few universities, such as Harvard, have established track records in this arena, but a number of academics believe the trend is accelerating among major universities.

Stanford sociology Professor David Grusky said a center was overdue at Stanford.

"There's an understanding at the highest levels that poverty and inequality can't be seen anymore as just ethical problems but rather as problems that have wide-reaching ramifications for society," he said. "If we care about terrorism and ethnic unrest or health problems poor people face -- there are real social costs that poverty and inequality imply -- you ignore poverty and inequality at your peril."

Although both centers are focused on world poverty, they have different missions.

The Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford will concentrate on producing research and influencing national and international policy debates on poverty. The Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley will primarily focus on sending students and faculty into poorer nations to solve problems on the ground.

There are other differences, too. While Stanford's center has an initial annual budget of $125,000 for five years and envisions a fundraising drive, Cal's effort is being started with a $15 million gift from UC Regent Richard Blum, a wealthy investor and husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California.

"One of the biggest benefits is that if we are putting 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 students abroad with an experience like this ... then lives will be transformed," said Richard Lyons, executive associate dean at the Haas School of Business, who is helping to develop Berkeley's center. "We've set these students on a different course -- their perspective on poverty, and their potential role in the poverty challenge will be forever changed."

It's part of a growing national trend.

Northwestern University and the University of Chicago have been running the Joint Center for Poverty Research since late 1996. Harvard established the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy a couple of years later.

In 2002, the University of Michigan created the National Poverty Center, which is largely funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Last year, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill started the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, with John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator as director, and Princeton University started the Global Network on Inequality.

There is no single reason behind the centers. Some, like Lyons, point to the growing disparity between countries undergoing economic booms such as China and "places in the world that have been left behind" such as Africa. Laura Hogshead, assistant director of the poverty center at North Carolina, said universities are often a reflection of what's happening in the world and speculated that people are increasingly aware of inequalities, in part because they see them more clearly in their own lives.

"The research has shown that the middle class is more insecure than ever," she said. "It's an issue touching a lot of Americans and a lot of the world. ... You can have an education and work hard, and you still might not get ahead."

But what kind of impact can universities, which are often so removed from poverty, have on the debate?

Universities can analyze the statistics that nonprofits collect in the field and help shape how those on the ground respond to a complex issue, said Thomas Reynolds, a regional director for CARE, which has the goal of eradicating poverty and creating social justice for poor people around the world. Others note that much of the world doesn't have the luxury of studying the complex causes behind poverty.

"We always talk about how the world's toughest problems require the most creative solutions," said Jeremy Barnicle, communications director for Mercy Corps in Portland, Ore. "We as a humanitarian-aid group are really trying to make closer connections with academic institutions precisely because they can bring so much value."

Stanford, one of the richest universities in the world with consolidated net assets of $16.9 billion, has a history of helping countries maximize their gross national products with its powerful economics department, Grusky said. He says he envisions modeling the university's new poverty center after the influential National Bureau of Economic Research.

"Stanford University seeks to develop an authoritative institution on matters of distribution, just as NBER serves that function on matters of total economic output and how to maximize it," Grusky wrote in the center's white paper.

Capitalism, he said, has been immensely successful in generating high-GNP societies, but one side effect has been "massive inequality (that) can be debilitating unto itself." Even if someone doesn't have moral concerns about poverty, the well-being of the poor affects society's well-being, he said. Workers with inadequate health care, for example, aren't as productive and don't contribute to the GNP.

The Stanford center wants to produce a book series titled "Controversies in Inequality," as well as a Web and print magazine directed at policymakers. Like many major universities, Stanford wants to foster more collaboration among disciplines to address some of the world's most pressing problems.

Many faculty members already are working on poverty issues, such as one professor examining the extreme income inequality in China and whether that nation's new rich also hold high-level political positions. Grusky just finished research that he said debunked the notion that had society known about the extent of New Orleans' poverty before Hurricane Katrina, it would have been addressed.

UC Berkeley's center earlier this month sent a request for proposals to all professors seeking project ideas. The university will choose several projects to execute over the next three to four years, Lyons said.

Although the center's primary push will be putting students in the field, the center also plans to offer courses in the fall, and eventually either a certificate, minor or major in developing economies.

Poverty and inequality have always plagued the world, but that doesn't mean universities can't develop new ways of solving the problems, said Stanford's Grusky.

"It's time again to think in ways that are utopian ... and imagine systems that are different from the ones we have, the ones we see."