The bigger picture:
Amid concerns about the environmental impact of the center, the university insists the 100,000 square foot facility will be “eco-friendly” and “non-intrusive.” In a press conference announcing the data center project, Clark said the institution is guided by a “do no harm” mantra as it relates to the plan. “If, along the way, we had identified instances where a project of this nature would do harm, we wouldn’t be here today,” Clark, the university president, said during a press conference regarding the plan, according to the Nashville Banner.
But it is not always clear on the front end when projects of this size and scale might cause harm to their surrounding communities. For instance, Virginia’s Commission for the Study of the History of Uprooting of Black Communities by Public Institutions of Higher Education in the Commonwealth formed after “Uprooted,” a series in which investigative journalist Brandi Kellam spent two years exploring how a Black community was “systematically dismantled to make way for Christopher Newport University (CNU) in Newport News, Virginia,” according to Kellam’s website. The commission is looking into whether affected families and their descendants are entitled to compensation and relief.
And in Fayetteville, Georgia, residents complained for months about low water pressure before officials realized a local data center had drained 30 million gallons of water and, according to POLITICO. Officials in Georgia touted millions in tax revenue and new jobs from data centers, but did not account for the impact of the data centers’ significant drain on water and electricity.
In Nashville, where Fisk is located, residents frequently experience localized water pressure drops, service interruptions, and boil-water advisories due to active water main breaks, according to local outage records. And some of the city’s oldest water lines run through its Black neighborhoods, because of underinvestment in municipal upgrades over several decades. As high-end developments – and now data centers – move into historically Black spaces, the institutions that serve those residents will need to continually work to balance innovation and revenue opportunities with leveraging the expertise of local faculty to understand and mitigate the impact of those initiatives on the local residents.
