Illustration: Fanny Blanc for Bloomberg
Trump Is Targeting an Economic Revival Story
Pittsburgh shows how universities and hospitals can fuel renewal — and why Trump’s manufacturing push and cuts to higher education could undermine it.
Tyler Bickford is a burly and bearded man and such a proud member of the United Steelworkers union that he has its emblem tattooed on his forearm. Bickford is a shop steward. He fought for years to get his workplace organized and to successfully negotiate a new contract for his colleagues. In Pittsburgh, a city with a proud industrial history that’s also home to his union’s national headquarters, that should make Bickford a fairly unsurprising Rust Belt character.
Except for one big salient fact: Bickford is a children’s literature professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His academic expertise is in tween pop music and Hannah Montana. A decade ago he declared the Disney sitcom a “seminal text” thanks to its 14-year-old main character’s leading role in “discourses about childhood, publicness and consumerism.”