The Greater Lafayette area consists of two towns: Lafayette is a mixed community with some manufacturing and service as its economic base and West Lafayette, a smaller community, but a central location of Purdue University. Lafayette’s population as of 2020 was about 70, 000 and West Lafayette’s 44, 000. The metropolitan area, including several neighboring towns has a population of about 237,000, a growth of 16 percent since 2010. By far the major “industry” in the area, Purdue University, employs 17,000 workers of all kinds and the Purdue Research Park employs some 3,000 who work for 155 companies.
Although Purdue University always had strong programs
and a research agenda involving engineering and agriculture, over the last
thirty years the liberal arts, social sciences and humanities grew as well.
Purdue employed poets and novelists of national reputation, as well as
historians, political scientists and philosophers. Interdisciplinary studies
programs were established in African American Studies, Women’s and Gender
Studies, American Studies, and smaller programs for example concerning Human
Rights, Peace Studies, Latin American Studies, Jewish Studies and others. The
intellectual vitality of the university and the surrounding communities
parallels such growth in many places around the country.
However, pressures from conservatives, advocates for
“free enterprise,” and opponents of the flowering of higher education in all
its diversity as a result of “the 60s,” grew as well. The politics of Indiana
moved to the right with the electoral victories of Mitch Daniels and Mike
Pence, due to the weakening of the Democratic Party and the sustained assault on
organized labor. Indiana moved from a “purple” to a deep “red” state.
And thus, the pressures on higher education in keeping
with the new rightwing agenda, which began before the prominence of Donald
Trump, expanded. Nancy MacLean, in “Democracy in Chains,” documents the steady
penetration of education, K through university, by the Koch Foundation and
other conservative forces. Their
programs have been recently illustrated in the document Project 2025 which recommends
policies that will reverse the vitality and diversity of higher education. This
historic project of dismantlement of education was accelerated by the long-term
defunding of higher education by states and the national government and the
covid epidemic.
These changes involved universities, like Purdue, increasingly
currying financial connections with huge corporations and the military, downsizing
and marginalizing the university work force, privatizing heretofore public
services including food, residences, software services, transforming a public
university into a series of private corporations. And these changes in the
political economy of higher education have been paralleled by pressures to transform
the curricula from rigorous discussion to celebration of American
exceptionalism. And the transformation of higher education in the Greater
Lafayette area has paralleled the transformations of the political economy of
the twin cities, increasing privatization of public services, enticing outside
corporate investors, increasing ties to the military and transforming
communities and residences.as well.
Now, West Lafayette, in conjunction with the Purdue Research
Foundation (which has been deemed “private”) is embarking on the construction
of a huge South Korean chip manufacturing and packaging plant in West
Lafayette. The West Lafayette City Council is scheduled on May 5 to debate changing
ordinances to allow this massive factory to be housed in a residential
community in the north end of West Lafayette. (The City Council has the last
word even though the Area Planning Commission voted against the rezoning
request.)
Indiana politicians and spokespersons have been fantasizing
for many years about Central Indiana becoming “the Silicon Valley of the
Midwest.” Now the pending agreement with the firm, SK hynix, it is claimed, will
make Indiana a huge player in the new US/global political economy. However,
those familiar with such dreams recall that SK hynix closed a large plant in
another college town in Eugene, Oregon because product demand had declined. And
those familiar with Wisconsin, are reminded of huge tax incentives given by the
US government and the state to another high-tech company, Foxconn. In both
cases, large numbers of new jobs were promised and, in both cases, smaller
communities suffered critical residential dislocations. The jobs did not
materialize. In the Oregon case the plant shut down. In Wisconsin the facility
built turned out to be a fraction of the size of what was promised.
Critics of the rezoning request that the West
Lafayette City Council is being asked to grant make the following points.
The zoning request is for Sy Hynix to use 121 acres of
land which is surrounded by residential communities. The plant to be
constructed would be for packaging superchips, including manufacturing
processes, and to develop a research and development center. The manufacturing of
semiconductors is known to risk fire, explosions, and health risks to adjacent
communities and workers. And the state of Indiana has already issued orders to
reduce “regulatory safeguards.” Since semiconductor manufacturing causes health
and safety hazards, experts urge that factories be placed far from residential
areas. In this case, SK hynix will be adjacent to and surrounded by existing residential
communities and near a school, a wellness center, and a park, as well as large areas
of greenery to the north.
Along with the dangers of air pollution, the projected
plant will increase traffic in a heretofore residential area, put demands on
the county’s water supply, and in the main radically transform a residential,
and rural environment to an industrial zone that may destroy the sense of
community which residents have enjoyed.
In sum, for the last decade the Greater Lafayette
community and its primary “industry,” Purdue University, have embraced a
single-minded economic development model that pays little attention to the
quality of life of the community, health and safety inside and outside facilities,
while transforming the tradition of open and vibrant education at Purdue
University to the celebration of a model of unbridled growth at all costs.
If the West Lafayette City Council approves the business/university
push for moving closer to a midwest “Silicon Valley,” it will substantially
reduce the quality of life as well as the educational vitality of this
community.
