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The 'Vicious Competition for Credit' Over Launching Madonna's Career
Wannabe Geek Heroes, Bad Apologies: The Week's Best Pop-Culture Writing
1book140's August Reads: Vote for 2 Unmissable Graphic Novels
This Week in Beer News
Could a Private University Have Made a Difference in Detroit?

The 'Vicious Competition for Credit' Over Launching Madonna's Career

Posted: 27 Jul 2013 10:03 AM PDT

Sire Records

On July 27, 1983, the world would be introduced to a budding superstar from the streets of New York City (by way of Bay City, Michigan) named Madonna. On that date 30 years ago, Sire Records released her debut, Madonna. The record would go on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide and spawn five singles, including the hits "Holiday," "Lucky Star," and "Borderline."

Behind the boards during recording was producer Reggie Lucas, who had seen success working with Lou Rawls, Stephanie Mills, Phyllis Hyman, and Roberta Flack, among other artists. Later in the process, Madonna brought in DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez to assist.

In the years since the album's release, Madonna's become a household name, one of music's most influential artists ever, and a source of controversy--including among her collaborators. I spoke with Lucas about recording Madonna, about what made its singer so novel, and about who he think really deserves credit for the album that served as a launchpad for one of the greatest pop acts in history.

Your background was primarily as an R&B and jazz artist. How did that influence you creating the songs for Madonna? Because she was a different kind of artist.

Well, she was a white artist wasn't she? [laughs] It was the main thing that made her different. When I came to the Madonna record, I came with two things. The first thing was I brought a lot of success and a solid background as a hit producer and songwriter within the R&B world, but it was also with the skill as a composer and rock and roll guitarist. Madonna was simply the first opportunity that I had to play around with other musical interests that I had. You couldn't make the first Madonna record for Phyllis Hyman. I couldn't make Miles Davis music for Roberta Flack. Miles was the one place where I got it all out of my system, and that was the beauty of Miles.

As a producer, you understood that your first job was to support people to achieve that end. You challenged the artist just enough to bring out the best in them and introduce them to audiences that they normally wouldn't be introduced to. When I did "Physical Attraction," that was just it. She was a little different. Madonna was wilder in terms of her look and image; I don't know if her music was that much wilder than anyone else back then. I think her music was sexually freer and it predicted what was going to happen in the future. She was definitely an innovator when it became to being more suggestive, which was pretty cool. I thought it was great.

So--mixing that with my musical background, Madonna's first album was really a hybrid of her interests and mine. "Physical Attraction" was our starting point with that style. It did pretty well and she began to move forward with her career and sound.

How did that dynamic work in the studio?

She had a lot of material that she had written and collaborated with other people on in the course of being signed to a record label. When she met me, "Everybody" was about to come out and she had written "Lucky Star." My role had been as a creative songwriting record producer. [Musician James] Mtume and I typically wrote a good percentage of the material we produced for Stephanie Mills, Phyllis Hyman, and those artists. So that's what I ended up doing for Madonna. I would write songs and ask her, "What do you think of this?" "Physical Attraction" and "Borderline" were done specifically during the production process and for her. They weren't demo songs that I was shopping around.

Madonna and I had an enormous amount of freedom. They would tell us to make the record and we went and made the record. I think, in retrospect, we were happy to come up in an era where the record company played a very small role in creative supervision. Our creative process was very independent.

Did you guys have a set routine that you followed every day coming into the studio?

She was diligent, it was a pretty good experience. She wasn't the type of artist that you had to go and look for. She wanted to be successful. She was always there when she needed to be. I was used to being in charge of things so I was always there at the studio ready. I made sure everything moved smoothly for her so that the process surrounding being in the studio was fairly transparent to her. She had to come in focused on her music and performing as an artist and it helped my focus as well. The musicians I worked with were guys I had worked with for years. We worked out of Sigma Sound Studios, a studio I worked out of for years as well. She brought some very good people into the situation. It was very comfortable making the record.

We made usage of synthesizers and drum machines. That was the first record that I ever recorded where I used a drum machine. It was one of the big transitions for me. We used Moog and Arp synthesizers, and that was relatively new technology back then. It gave the music a new sound. Madonna was an artist that knew what she wanted, but she wasn't a record producer. So it was my responsibility to create a sound for her. She would be there interactively. If she didn't like something she heard, she would say so and I would change it. The funny thing that happened on this record is when we got into the studio together we established this mini-Moog bass sound for her as her key sound. And she stuck with it for a long time.

Were there any challenges in working with a low budget and trying to break a new artist on a new label, Sire Records?

It wasn't really difficult at all. Sire wasn't a new label. It was an independent record label that was acquired by Warner Brothers. It had an enormous amount of success with the English punk sound and dance music. Sometimes things just have a flow to them. Madonna's record had a flow to it. Michael Rosenblatt was always there and I worked with him from the label. He was great, he was a real pro. He knew how to be an A&R person for a record. He didn't interfere, but he wasn't so distanced from it that he didn't have an idea of what was going on.

Michael is probably an unsung hero of launching Madonna's career. If you can believe it, Warner Brothers had very limited interest in Madonna when she was first signed. You know what they thought? They said that Madonna is this new white artist that wants to sing black--so what they did was send her to the black radio stations when her first record came out, and that's how they promoted her at first. They just treated her as a black artist. I guess they kind of envisioned her as Teena Marie. Madonna had an intense interest in black music, but she wasn't Teena Marie. She was something different. But she did it and she went to the black radio stations and held her own. Frankie Crocker was playing her records in New York.

When you bring up the fact that Madonna was pushed toward a black audience, it would explain why "Physical Attraction" and songs like that were at top of the Billboard Black Singles Charts.

You can't make this stuff up. Warner Brothers really didn't know what to do with her. See, there was a subtext to Madonna that had to do with her personality. She looked like a punk rocker to a lot of people. When people at record companies, law offices, and managerial places first saw Madonna before she became an established artist, a lot of people were put off by her. They thought she was too crazy and too weird. Being a music person and a human being, I don't operate that way. I thought she was cool and different. I didn't really know if she was going to become a big star, but I thought she had something valid to say and I could help her with it. Warner Brothers didn't get it right away, but Michael Rosenblatt did.

When she took off, there was an immediate, massive shift to move in and establish business relationships with her. In the beginning, she was just this little dance artist that Frankie Crocker gave a few spins to, and some DJs out in San Francisco, and she starts creating this buzz. Then, people at the record label started putting two and two together and got five. They immediately did a 360 and welcomed her with open arms.

Many people think other famous producers launched Madonna's career. What are your feelings about that?

I've refrained over the years in addressing aspects of Madonna's career because I'm not a person who likes negative discussions. But what I will say is that in Madonna ascent to fame and fortune, there's been a pretty vicious competition for credit in being involved. In other words, someone will say, "I launched Madonna." If I talk to a lot of people today, I will say I was Madonna's first producer. I produced six of the eight tracks on her first record. I would say nine times out of 10, their response will be, "Oh yeah, I thought Jellybean did that." But Jellybean didn't do that. Jellybean was a remixer, and we didn't have time to remix records. It wasn't something that I was interested in doing. Somewhere in this process of publicists and personal relationships, somehow he came out as the guy.

I was a traditionalist and probably a little naive at the time, but I started out working for Billy Paul. Billy and his wife Blanche were like parents to me. They took me under their wing. I was a little kid. They took me on the road. They looked after me. They supported me. I joined Miles Davis's band. Miles introduced me to the world of big-time jazz success. I played at the greatest halls in the world and stayed at the finest hotels. Miles was like a surrogate father to the guys in the band. You got credit for the work you did. You were a member of Miles's band. When I worked for Roberta Flack, Stephanie Mills, and Phyllis Hyman, we made the records and people would say, "Oh, you produced that record." You produced one good record for Stephanie Mills and take her from selling no records to selling gold records; they would call you back and treat you better.

Sothis Madonna record was my first and worst introduction to the notion that you wouldn't have a linear continuation with someone who you've had success with. It totally blindsided me. I understand it a little bit better now, but not really. Just for the record, one tires in a lifetime of hearing someone taking credit for something that you've done. Jellybean produced "Holiday" and he remixed a couple of tracks, but remixing tracks for radio isn't the same thing as producing one of the major breakout pop stars of the 1980s. Now there's Wikipedia and you'll always find these distortions in Wikipedia. My kids find this stuff and they fix it for me. [laughs] I don't think there's really ever been someone to clear this up. Madonna certainly hasn't helped at all. I think if it were left up to Madonna, she wouldn't talk about anybody.

It was my first and worst introduction to the notion that you wouldn't continue with someone you've had success with. I understand it a little bit better now, but not really. Just for the record, one tires in a lifetime of hearing someone taking credit for something that you've done.

The bottom line is that, I think, the kind way that Madonna has always tried to refer to me is that I was just an R&B producer. There are two things that I dislike about that. First thing is, that it treats being an R&B producer as pejorative, as if it were something less than being a pop or rock producer. Second thing is, that I didn't make an R&B record for her. I made a crossover pop record of the highest order. So the notion that she similarly dismissed me because I was just an R&B producer is offensive on multiple levels to me.

It's hurtful because I didn't understand it. I did the same thing I always did. I came in and worked my ass off to support the artist and cast them in a good light. Everybody but her reciprocated by saying they liked the record, and let's make another one. Between her and Jellybean, they try to pretend the records I did weren't any good. It's almost like I was fired or something. I wasn't fired. I finished the record I put it out and they took it and put it out and sold a bunch of records. And everybody else ran around trying to take credit for it because it was so big that they couldn't help themselves.

Talk me through the process of making some of the songs you were involved with on the album.

I'd write songs and put them on a little cassette player with me singing, and I can't sing. I'd ask Madonna if she liked them, and she said, "Yeah, it sounds cool. Let's do it." I did the demos for "Physical Attraction" and "Borderline" and she brought in her demos for her songs to the studio. And we did what we did to them. Probably the most interesting one was "Lucky Star." If you heard the original demo for "Lucky Star" and you heard what it came out like, they're the same song, but barely. We really put a lot of creative energy into that one and it came out beautifully.

I must say, Madonna was great to work with in the studio. She really put in the work. She was a creative person. And it was one of the many reasons why it was disappointing not to be involved in subsequent projects. It's just one of those things. Look, she picked one of my good buddies, Nile Rodgers, to do the next record. She couldn't have picked a better person.

I always had a pretty casual process of making songs, but with some formality. I kind of inherited how Miles Davis used to operate. So we would come in and the songs were simple they didn't require a lot in the way of charts. I would write out a little chord sheet, but the musicians were so good they would learn these things. They were really used as templates to try to find in the studio what we wanted to do with the songs. I'd make a lot of creative decisions and creative additions and subtractions to whatever was going on in the studio. We didn't spend a lot of time messing around either. I think that's the trick.

When you make a pop record, you don't want it to sound sterile. You want to bring some of the improvisational excitement of jazz, but without the actual 15-minute saxophone solo. You can't have a 15-minute saxophone solo on a Madonna record. You have to find a way to build in this excitement in a way that just works. Being a member of rhythm sections as a guitarist was always helpful to me in terms of understanding how music works from a production-quality standpoint. When you're a member of a rhythm section, you know when the music is a dud because you're right there as it happens. I always felt that I was always in tune to the level of energy, precision, and crispness of rhythm section performances. And I think that's the key to so many records.

As you look back 30 years later, how do you feel about the impact the album made on popular culture after it was released? It's regarded as one of the most important pop albums from the 1980s.

Well, I don't know. I think everybody involved in the arts has a tendency to take themselves a little bit too seriously. I made a great record, and I a lot of people liked it. It sold a lot of copies and launched careers and created opportunities for people. And that's what you want to do. That is supposed to be the outcome of your good work. I don't think it changed the nature of life in America or anything like that. [laughs] It was just a good record.

Wannabe Geek Heroes, Bad Apologies: The Week's Best Pop-Culture Writing

Posted: 27 Jul 2013 09:15 AM PDT

Click the links in the article titles to read the full pieces, and let us know what we've missed:

Last week's best pop-culture writing

1book140's August Reads: Vote for 2 Unmissable Graphic Novels

Posted: 27 Jul 2013 08:01 AM PDT

Various

A box labeled "stories," an apple by any other visual style, a black reporter passing with an assumed identity, and an illustrated guide to (almost) all literature are among the beautiful and evocative graphic novels up for vote at #1book140, our Twitter book club.

Readers have suggested several dozen amazing graphic novels to read in August. I should have expected it, since you tried to read four graphic novels in one month last time.

This month we're reading two books, so you get two votes. The first vote is on recent, notable graphic novels. The second vote is for more topical comics.

Vote twice, below. Voting closes Tuesday at noon. Once we select the books for August, I'll announce the results post a schedule here at The Atlantic and on our Twitter hashtag, #1book140.

Vote One: Notable Graphic Novels Within The Last Five Years

Building Stories by Chris Ware just won four Eisner awards at Comic-Con last week. The graphic novel comes in a box that includes 14 components that can be read in any order. If you vote for this, our reading schedule will almost certainly have to be an infographic. This story set in New York City is worth the effort.

Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli, is "a satirical comedy of remarriage" and "a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology" according to Douglas Wolk in the New York Times. It's also gorgeous and showy; one page shows a single apple drawn in sixteen different visual styles.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, TIME Magazine's book of the year in 2008, is a memoir set in rural Pennsylvania about the discovery that she was a lesbian and her father was gay. The TIME review calls it "a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."

Vote Two: Topical Comics

Incognegro by Mat Johnson is the story of a black New York reporter who takes on one last story, passing as white to investigate lynchings in 1930's South. Why is it topical? Trayvon Martin.

The Influencing Machine, by Brooke Gladstone, is one of the best, most readable introductions to the role of media in society. Gladstone is host of the weekly WNYC show On The Media, a show that explains and comments on everything from the state of health science reporting to the alleged bias of NPR. Why is it topical? Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 1: From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons edited by Russ Kick, illustrates around 60 famous works of world literature with art by a deeply talented team of artists including Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, and Molly Crabapple. If you vote for this book, we'll read the first volume in August. I'm buying the box set in either case.

This Week in Beer News

Posted: 27 Jul 2013 07:07 AM PDT

Catching up from some time on the road.

1) Beer labels in motion. Thanks to all who sent links to this delightful Tumblr site, which includes animations of a number of favorite beer labels, like the one above for the also-delightful Little Sumpin' from Lagunitas. Inexplicably, I once saw a lone bottle of Little Sumpin' on sale in Beijing. I could not imagine that it had had a wholesome journey there, so I passed it by.

2) India 'Session' Ales. This is a brewing style I hadn't known about, and that sounds promising. Today's hop-conscious craft brewing world is overall a big step forward in realizing the full potential of human excellence. But often extra hops, which up to a point I am looking for, come in combination with extra-high alcohol levels, which I can do without. CraftBeer.com reports on ISAs that supposedly convey the taste of our beloved hop-blessed IPA family without all the extra ABV percentage. I look forward to checking them out.

3) Think before you drink. A sad story from Spain, where a speed-drinking contest among beer enthusiasts crowns a winner only to see him keel over and die. Who could have imagined that drinking the equivalent of 18 bottles of beer within 20 minutes might be risky in any way? Still, condolences.

4) Baltika Brew. Now I know that Baltika is a big European brewing combine, founded in St. Petersburg and since 2008 mainly owned by Carlsberg of Denmark.

But I didn't know that yesterday, when I was trudging along Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg and, just in time, caught a glimpse down a side street of this welcome sign. For the next hour, my wife and I imagined that we had stumbled across the local equivalent of Great Leap brewery in Beijing, or the Boxing Cat brewpub in Shanghai, or Hangar 24 in Redlands: that is, a great new independent craft brewery that burnishes an already appealing town. The dusky ambience, the prominently displayed brewing kegs, and above all the (good) beers tapped straight from the kegs nursed us along in this quaint brew-pub fantasy.

And even now that I know that Baltika is part of a giant operation, I don't care. Check it out when you're in the vicinity.

5) Why we love financiers, chapter 4,275. An interesting though heart-rending report from MSN Money explains why big banks' stockpiling of aluminum supplies, in hopes of creating artificial shortages and ramping up the price, has caused major problems for brewers around the world. Read and weep -- including the detail that packaging accounts for nearly a quarter of the cost of a normal six-pack.

6) Why we love America, chapter four million. Certifying the current era's role as the Golden Age of Beer, a reader shows the beers he tried on a recent visit to Montana. Perhaps with dangers like those in item #3 in mind, he clarifies, "not all at the same time."

7) Sharknado-themed. Because I can't resist:

From afar, and in specific from inside the half-lit beerhall beneath that Baltika sign off Nevsky Prospekt, cheers! Amid our other woes give thanks for a still-improving, increasingly worldwide, golden age of beer.

Could a Private University Have Made a Difference in Detroit?

Posted: 27 Jul 2013 06:09 AM PDT

detroit rebecca cook.jpg — Rebecca Cook/Reuters

Detroit's bankruptcy filing last week and the decades of decline that preceded it have been a predictable political and historical Rorschach test. The right blames the city's demise on moral failures and weak character -- the banana-republic-caliber corruption and fiscal fecklessness of its politicians, the greed of its unions, the spinelessness of automobile executives who gave into them. To the left -- more inclined to see history as the product of "great forces" than "great men" (or terrible ones) -- the Motor City was swamped by powerful tides: racism, sprawl, and unbridled capitalism.

But what was distinctive about Detroit? Other cities struggled mightily to adapt to the decline of manufacturing. But only Detroit struggled mortally - at least in terms of municipal cash flow. Why do Detroit's troubles so vastly exceed not only those of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, but Baltimore, Providence, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Rochester?

Here's a possible part of the answer, in the form of question. What exists in each of those cities, but can't be found in Detroit? One answer: a large, and usually quite wealthy, private research university. Where is Detroit's Johns Hopkins? Or, to limit the comparison to neighboring Rust Belt states, where is its Carnegie-Mellon, or Case Western Reserve? Why is there no, say, Henry Ford University in Detroit? And if there had been one, would it have made a difference?

First, why focus the question on private universities? Of course, public universities matter to cities, and had the University of Michigan not decamped from Detroit to Ann Arbor in 1837, the region's entire history might well be different (better or worse is hard to say). But that move was part of a bigger pattern. As University of Kentucky historian of higher education John Thelin notes, most leading public universities were established in what were, at least at the time, rural areas. Cheaper land, the domination of state legislatures by rural interests, the initial agricultural focus of many such institutions, and anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant nativism all pushed public campuses out into the country. That left private (including Catholic) institutions positioned for a greater impact in urban areas.

In the United States, private universities occupy a disproportionate share of the very top tier in wealth and prestige -- places that operate in education, research and health care on a scale that could substantially affect the economy of a city as large as Detroit. Yes, Detroit has public Wayne State and a smattering of mostly small and often Catholic private colleges. But while Wayne State does important work, and even a fair amount of research, its operating budget is $576 million. In Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon and the quasi-private University of Pittsburgh are about $3 billion combined, in a city less than half Detroit's size.

Wayne State University doesn't do for Detroit what Duke University does for Durham. (Wayne State University)

Private non-profit institutions enroll fewer than 15 percent of U.S. undergraduates, but they account for 27 of the 60 U.S. members of the Association of American Universities, the leading group of elite research institutions, whose members employ on average 11,400 people each. In 1950, about the time Detroit's population began falling, private institutions were 18 of the 32 AAU members.

Today, the top 20 universities in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings are all private institutions, as are 15 of the 20 largest university endowments. That dominance is regretted by many, but it's no coincidence. Top private institutions are more varied in their missions, and more malleable and flexible to respond to new opportunities and change direction. The best of them are more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic. Those and other reasons have simply made them, historically, more appealing places for very rich people to give enormous amounts of money (and unlike any public university I know of, at a certain price they'll even name the place after you).

Of course, Detroit isn't the only major American city without a prominent private research university (Portland, Minneapolis-St. Paul and San Diego are all vibrant -- though the last two have large public research institutions). But it is arguably the most surprising. Detroit was once America's fourth-largest city, and not lacking in rich philanthropists. More to the point, a century ago, it was the Silicon Valley of its day, bustling with engineering talent, entrepreneurs, and venture capital. Imagine visiting Detroit in 1920 then journeying to the farmland of Palo Alto, CA, and finally the tobacco warehouses of Durham, NC. Which place would you have bet on to become a global research and education powerhouse? Yet among those three, only Detroit failed to do so. Frederick Rudolph's still-landmark history of American higher education, The American College & University was published in 1962, when Detroit still had over 1.5 million people. The city's name does not appear in this book, nor in Thelin's 2004 successor volume A History of American Higher Education.

I can't articulate a single, overarching theory for why this is so, but I can offer two ideas. The first involves a series of contingencies dating to the early 19^th century, whose effect was to lessen the chance of such an institution being in place to later grow and thrive in Detroit. The second dates to Detroit's golden days in the early 20^th century, and the economic culture from which its wealth emerged.

The first theory addresses why there has been a relatively weak private college and university tradition across Michigan. The contrast with its neighbor to the south is revealing. The early 19^th-century was a golden age of college-founding, and nowhere more so than in Ohio. In Rudolph's description, Ohio at this time was engaged in a kind of Weberian Olympics, with a melting pot of mostly Protestant sects competing to demonstrate their generosity and prosperity and, by extension, state of grace. The busiest included the Episcopalians (Kenyon), Baptists (Denison), Congregationalists (Oberlin and Western Reserve) and Methodists (Ohio Wesleyan, Mount Union and others). But the Catholics, Lutherans, United Bretheren and even Swedenborgians (Urbana) also got in on the action.

While Ohio's private colleges and universities were in algae-like bloom, Michigan was still practically the frontier. The state was home to just a few thousand residents, mostly in Detroit. A comically Gallophobic 1891 book History of Higher Education in Michigan blames the state's halting progress toward education in the years before statehood on troglodyte and annoyingly procreative French farmers. In author Andrew McLaughlin's telling, at least, these left-behind settlers were incapable of appreciating democracy, commerce or basic - let alone higher - learning. Alas, little could be done except wait for a critical mass of industrious New England Puritan descendants to arrive from the east and impose their will.

By then, public higher education in its modern sense was emerging. Two elements of the University of Michigan's move to Ann Arbor and opening in 1837 proved critical for Detroit. The first was not just that the university left Detroit but that it didn't go far -- just 35 miles. Second, the university became one of the best public universities in the world. In a recent ranking it was the only public institution in the top eight, and second in total research spending only to Hopkins.

The combined effect of these two factors was a university in Ann Arbor casting its shadow over Detroit, lessening the chance a rival would flourish there. The current University of Michigan is in some ways the private powerhouse Detroit never had. The university does take its public mission seriously, and helps Detroit in many ways: It maintains a center in the city, has a semester-long program for students there, and helps quietly behind the scenes where it can (for instance, deploying grant writers to help the beleaguered city government of Detroit apply for funds from federal grant programs that might otherwise go uncollected). It also tries hard to recruit students who somehow make it through the city's embattled schools. But in practice, Michigan is a private university in all but name, the state's share of its general fund budget down below 17 percent. In its global ambitions, cost and dearth of low-income students, Michigan has more in common with Harvard or Hopkins than with Wayne State -- and the benefits of its presence are focused in Ann Arbor, not Detroit.

Still, it wasn't inevitable that 200 years later Michigan would today still have relatively few private colleges. Many states, like California, that missed the fertile college-founding period of the early 19^th century eventually saw more private institutions spring up. Michigan saw some, but not many, and few around Detroit. The city's burgeoning automobile economy seemed to offer endless decently paying jobs that didn't require a degree. Those now-departed career tracks help explain why Michigan ranks 21^st nationally in the proportion of adults 25 to 64 with a high school degree but 32^nd in the proportion with a bachelor's.

So between the economy and the good option the public university provided, Michigan -- and especially Detroit -- never developed a strong culture of private colleges and universities. In Ohio, by contrast, private colleges flourished and public higher education emerged relatively late (Ohio State wasn't founded until 1870). Today Michigan, with just under 10 million people, has 33 4-year private colleges (not counting affiliated campuses). Ohio, just slightly larger at 11.5 million people, has 60.

Yet this narrative feels incomplete. First, private research universities can co-exist in proximity to prominent public ones (Duke and the University of North Carolina, Stanford and Berkeley). Yes, Michigan was settled later than other eastern states, and to be a top-tier private school, it helps to be old (if possible, to predate the republic). But a super-wealthy benefactor can rocket a new or unremarkable institution to the top. Think of William Marsh Rice and the family of Leland Stanford Jr., founding their now-top 20 namesake institutions in the late 19^th century. Or take tobacco baron James Duke, who gave $20 million to transform struggling Trinity College in North Carolina into Duke University.*

So the question is, where was Detroit's Leland Stanford or James Duke? This brings us to my second theory. In the "great men" version, perhaps it was just Detroit's bad luck that Ford, its most famous industrialist, hated cities (he once said the only solution to the city "problem" was for people to leave them). He also hated elites. And Jews. Together those traits didn't add up to someone likely to spend his money on a large urban university (though Ford did take over and support Detroit's city hospital).

A farm boy and largely an autodidact, Ford did believe in and support education. But his educational causes were vocational and extended beyond Michigan. (The contemporary Ford Foundation does have programs supporting higher education, but is generally associated with international issues. The $3.2 billion Kresge Foundation, based in the Detroit suburb of Troy, is active in both Detroit and higher education causes, but its higher education support is national in scope. There are handsome Kresge auditoriums and libraries on a number of campuses, including the University of Michigan, but there is no Kresge University.)

But if not Ford, why not others? I asked Robert Fishman, a University of Michigan professor of architecture and urban planning and a historian of the city, for his theory on why no great private university ever emerged in Detroit. He said it was something he'd often wondered. But he didn't think it was just coincidence.

Detroit's business culture, Fishman told me, contained a deep suspicion of academia. He noted each of the Big Three ran their own tech schools and enormous in-house research operations, and all were distrustful of outsiders, preferring to promote from within.

"Even GM, the most intelligent of the Big Three, went very far through their Tech Center to isolate their research from university research open to public examination and scrutiny," Fishman told me in an e-mail. "The Detroit auto people were just not interested in -- [they were] positively threatened by -- the openness and skepticism of academia." The culture could not have been more different from the revolving door between Stanford and Hewlett Packard, then Apple, and then Google. "This separation between the auto companies and the wider urban culture of Detroit was very damaging, and very different from, say, Silicon Valley later on," Fishman said.

If that culture cost Detroit a great private university, the loss is considerable. That's not because Ford was necessarily wrong in his anti-elite approach. Today, close to half of the roughly $417 billion controlled by American universities in their endowments belongs to just the 20 richest institutions. Arguably, that concentration of wealth isn't healthy.

But what if Detroit had enjoyed a piece of it? Just 12 percent of adults living in the city have a bachelor's degree. Such institutions do more for a city than graduate and employ educated workers. They also generate a kind of trade surplus -- tuition checks (from the mostly wealthy students who regrettably predominate at such places), federal research grants, and health care dollars from surrounding regions (and, even more lucratively, wealthy foreigners). The city of Detroit's crushing health care costs might be more bearable if so many of those dollars didn't flow out of the city. Some do stay, through the large Henry Ford Health System's operations there. But many also head out to the suburbs to the systems suburban hospitals, and to the University of Michigan's massive medical system. Relatively few people, on balance, travel into Detroit for health care.

Big private research universities have also become bold, if controversial, urban developers. In roughly the late 1980s, the private University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Columbia all reached the same conclusion: without making their neighborhoods safer and more appealing, they could no longer attract the students and faculty they needed to be among the world's best. Their efforts often provoked opposition. But those neighborhoods did change. I was one of those scared-off prospective students who visited Penn in the early 1990s. Today, Penn's neighborhood is transformed, and the university's reputation has indeed grown.

A big research university probably couldn't have turned the ship of many of Detroit's fundamental problems. It offers no obvious antidote to political corruption, nor to the apparent blessing that proved a cancer to Detroit: jobs that gave not just middle-class whites, but working-class whites and eventually their black counterparts, the means to move to the suburbs, eventually leaving only the black underclass in the city.

But it might have offered some inoculation against economic monoculture, which both left and right can agree was central to Detroit's catastrophe. And it could have anchored neighborhoods, like Cleveland's University Circle, that provide urban islands of relative stability during rough times and then a base to build out from - exactly what Mayor Dave Bing is desperately trying to seed in Detroit. Had someone a century ago donated the equivalent of $1 billion today to start a "Stanford on the Great Lakes" in Detroit, the effect might have been profound.

Perhaps it's not too late. Such an effort today would likely be criticized as far from the best use of $1 billion for Detroit, and it would face considerable obstacles. But it would have one thing going for it. One of the challenges these days for universities like Penn and Columbia is expanding in the newly pricey neighborhoods they've gentrified. Affordable real estate would not be a problem for somebody starting a university in Detroit.

*This section has been corrected to reflect the nature of the relationship between James Duke and Duke University.

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