Inner suburbs should consider merging with adjacent cities

to Pittsburgh. In a very white region, this town is two-thirds black, with high poverty and fiscal distress. It is unable to tap into the tech and medical boom happening next door to helpfinance public services.

Wilkinsburg also illustrates the trade offs involved when considering a merger. There is legitimate value in its identity as a separate town and as a predominantly black one. This would be lost with a merger. But without merging with Pittsburgh, can it financially survive? There’s no easyanswer.

Let’s not kid ourselves: Mergers are extremely challenging politically. East Cleveland provides an example. After starting to explore a merger, the mayor and city council president were recalled in a special election in December, albeit by tiny vote margins. The merger proposal is going nowhere at present.

Nevertheless, local and state leaders should keep mergers in mind and consider them when need and political reality align. Officials also can draw lessons from city battles to annex neighboring municipalities.

Annexations typically require cities to offer a carrot of some sort, such as investments in infrastructure. For more mergers to happen, states likely must step up to fund transition costs, potentially absorb excessive suburban fiscal liabilities and put a capital improvement plan on the table as a sweetener. Ohio’s state auditor had suggested a $10 million state infrastructure investment in East Cleveland contingent on amerger.

The challenges of helping economically declining and fiscally struggling inner-ring suburbs will not be easy ones to solve. There are no magic fixes, and the answers will vary by community. But merging with adjacent central cities is an option that needs to be on the table. witch-hunts at Yale, because there will be no witches.”

The earlier purges of faculty lead to the creation of the Association of American University Professors in 1915, and its “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure”insisted on the right of faculty members to express themselves “to students and to the general public, without fear or favor” as long as they maintained “standards of professional character” when they were doing their jobs. The modern restatement notes that “a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position.”

Of course, campuses must evaluate the quality of a professor’s teaching or scholarship, which inherently involves assessing his or her speech. But universities must not use a professor’s statements in other settings as a basis for “excommunicating” an otherwise qualified professor.

Campus leaders who