I was not born the bohemian that I am today. I became one. In fact, I became a bohemian sometime in the late 1960s in the Dallas, Texas of most of my early teenage youth. I blame it on music (mostly rock), books, the counterculture and associated countercultural politics, and, particularly on my long lost but still dearly remembered friend John Cerillo (sic). It was John who introduced me to a lot of these things, things that remain, along with the reflexive life in general (the only life truly worth living, in my opinion), a large part of my life today.
I grew up in a different world than the world today. I did not, for example, initially consider going to an American college or university. It was not the rite of passage, the delaying of adulthood, that it is today. I planned, like many others of my generation, to get a well paying factory job (the almost $4.00 dollars an hour at the time not to mention good benefits at union plants), buy a car, listen to a lot of rock music, and read a lot of books when I wasn’t working. I guess I thought life could and should be a bit like high school at the time. Little did I know how right I was about the high school part since any job one is likely to get has a culture that is a lot like the culture of high school. And little did I know then what I know now that thanks to de-industrialism and globalisation those well paying jobs with good benefits would soon be largely a thing of the past in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and in the core nation world beyond.
It was an accident that changed my mind about attending university. While recovering from the accident—which only added to my health issues since I had and have sometimes severe and incapacitating asthma and some stomach issues—I started taking classes at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, near which my grandparents lived. I was living with my grandparents at the time since my gran was in many ways my “real” mum. Eventually I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, which my father had connections to, and which I heard was really nice and home to a lot of nice used bookstores. Like Erasmus, you see, I bought books and spent any monies left over on food and rent.
When I transferred to IU from Ball State I moved from a town that was not a college town to a town that was a college town. The Bloomington of my college years was a book buyers paradise. It was a pub goers paradise. It was, with its many and varied restaurants, an eater’s paradise. It was a walkers paradise with its gorgeous scenery. It was a lover of monumental buildings, some of them gothic, paradise. It was an art lover’s paradise. It was a music lover’s paradise given the almost 800 concerts the famous IU School of Music put on and Duroc Records. It was a learner’s paradise. It was, in sum, a great place to live. What it wasn’t was a worker’s paradise. Jobs for those who wanted to stay in B-town after graduation were generally low paying service industry jobs. And while I wanted to stay forever in Bloomington eventually I had to move on since I had dreams of getting a Ph.D. and IU’s social sciences and humanities programmes, like many if not most elite research universities, generally did not admit its undergraduates to its postgraduate degree programmes.
Over the course of my 71 years I have lived in a lot of places, some of them college towns, some of them not. I have, for instance, lived in Dallas, Texas; Muncie, Indiana; Bloomington, Indiana; Austin, Texas; South Bend, Indiana; Toronto, Ontario; Athens, Ohio; Cambridge, England, Moscow, Russia; and Oneonta, New York. Only three of these are college towns and only one of them was a non-college town that has become a college town thanks to de-industrialisation.
As someone who became interested in the history, sociology, and culture of higher education before and after I was a university student I also developed an interest in what is and what is not a college town. In order to tell you why I think some places are college towns and some are not I need to fill in a little bit of the analytical and systematic back story to this issue. I take a five-factor approach to the stuff of human life, a five factor approach, I would argue, which allows us to dispassionately if not objectively approach the stuff of human life. These five factors, I would argue, provide scholars with a glimpse into a reality that is not purely subjective even if much of this “reality” is socially and culturally constructed.
So, with this in mind let’s go back and ask the question of what is and what is not, at least to me, a college town. For some college towns are any town that has a college in it. The problem with this argument, however, and this should be obvious, is that this definition of a college town is, in the final analysis, meaningless and meaningless definitions are not what the humanities and social sciences (let alone the hard sciences) are about. This definition of college towns is meaningless because it assumes that all towns with a college in them are college towns and that they are all, as a consequence, alike. The problem with this assumption is that it doesn’t allow us to distinguish between towns with colleges and universities in them, like New York City, New York, home to Columbia University, NYU, CUNY, and other colleges, Albany, New York, another town with several colleges in or near it, and towns dominated by their colleges and towns like Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, and Athens, Ohio, home of the oldest university in the state of Ohio, Ohio University (sometimes mistaken for the Ohio State University in Columbus (how about that branding!)). I would argue, in other words, that there are differences, important differences, between cities like Albany, New York and cities like Ithaca, New York.
Anyone who has ever been to Albany and Ithaca and gained an understanding of them knows that there are important difference between these two urban areas. Ithaca is a college town. Cornell University dominates the city economically. Cornell employs one out of every three persons in Tompkins County, the county in which Ithaca is situated. Cornell dominates Ithaca culturally. Cornell’s concerts, talks, and exhibits dominate the small city’s cultural life. Cornell dominates Ithaca demographically. Cornell has almost 24,000 students while Ithaca has a population of around 30,000. Cornell is a significant aspect of Ithaca geographically. Cornell is 4800 acres while Ithaca is 6.04 square miles. Cornell dominates Ithaca politically. Like virtually all college towns in the US it tends to vote Democrats (the higher educated tend to skew left of centre and hence Democrat which is why the Nixon and post-Nixon Republicans such as the Trumpies and their fellow travellers have and are going after universities), particularly in presidential elections.
Albany, New York, on the other hand, is not a college town. Albany is not dominated geographically, demographically, politically, economically, or culturally by the University at Albany, the now defunct College of Saint Rose, the professional schools of Union University near the Albany Medical Center, SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (which is once again part of SUNY Albany after being distinct from it for nine years), or Maria College, even when taken together. Albany is first and foremost a political town. The state of New York is the city’s largest employer. Albany is a regional medical centre. Albany Medical Center is the regional hospital for the capital region of upstate New York and is the second largest employer in the city. Albany is a regional shopping centre. People come from all around to shop at Crossgates Mall and Colonie Center, both of which provide significant employment opportunities (if not necessarily well paying and well benefitted employment opportunities) for Albany County's residents (and some outside of Albany County I suspect). By the way, it is worth reflecting on the fact that all of the dominant employers of Albany, New York, are service sector employers, something that tells us a lot about the economy of postmodernist America.
Given my interest in the question of what is and what is not a college town it was only a matter of time before I read Blake Gumprecht’s book, The American College Town (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). Gumprecht takes a finer toothed comb to the question of what is a college town and what it is not than I do in my freshman level sociology and history courses, which is where I discuss the question of what is a college town. Gumprecht argues that college towns are distinctive and largely American places (there are, as he notes, fewer college towns in Europe, Canada, and Australia for historical reasons). Gumprecht does, like me, define college towns along economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic lines. He goes on, unlike me, however, to delineate five basic types of college towns. There are, he argues, flagship university college towns or research university college towns (e.g. Bloomington, Indiana). There are land grant university college towns (e.g., East Lafayette, Indiana). There are mid-size university college towns (e.g., Athens, Ohio). There are private liberal arts colleges college towns (e.g., Williams, Massachusetts). And there are religious college college towns (e.g. Hillsdale, Michigan). Gumprecht ascribes these differences in college towns to the size of the US (geography), American regionalism (cultural geography), and the newness of the US relative to old Europe, where there are very few college towns given the fact that it was urban before colleges arose and given its cultural differences from the US including its general lack of the ideology of American arcadianism, the belief that students learn better and can better be controlled in more rural like environments.
After an introductory chapter in which he defines college towns Gumprecht uses case studies to explore the various types of college towns in the United States he enumerates. In chapter one Gunprecht uses the University of Oklahoma in Norman (Oklahoma’s land grand institution) to explore the campus as a public place and space and as a place of art thanks to its monumental buildings, its art museums, its other museums, and its manicured green spaces (emulating the British and French garden?). In chapter three Gumprecht uses Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (a university to which federal land grant benefits were added to an already existing university) to explore the fraternity, student ghetto, and faculty enclave spaces in college towns. In chapter four Gumprecht explores the retail and service landscapes in college towns using Kansas State University in Manhattan (Kansas’s land grant institution) as his example. In chapter five Gumprecht uses the University of California, Davis (California’s first agricultural school) to explore liberal politics and its achievements in college towns. In chapter six Gumprecht uses the University of Georgia in Athens (a university to which land grant funds and academic programmes were added) to explore the bohemian aspects—demographic, cultural, built environment—of college towns. In chapter seven Gumprecht uses Auburn University (a land grant institution) in Auburn, Alabama to explore sports culture (one of the, from the vantage point of today, three original sins of American colleges and universities along with its non-academic power structure and its increasing administrative bureaucratisation), particularly football culture, and its impacts in a college town in the South. In chapter eight Gumprect uses the University of Michigan (Michigan’s earliest state university) in Ann Arbor, to explore high tech changes afoot in one college town, changes that may, paradoxically, be the major factor making Ann Arbor less of a college town. Finally, In chapter nine Gumprecht uses the University of Delaware in Newark to explore student drinking culture and its spatial, political, and cultural impact on town versus gown tensions in college towns.
There are a lot of things I liked in Gumprecht’s book. I liked how he integrated historical and cultural geography, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, culture studies, and autobiography in his approach to college towns. I liked how Gumprecht defined college towns. Like me Guprehcht ties the singularity of college towns to economic, political cultural, demographic, and geographic factors. I liked how Gumprecht explored the dynamics of college towns, well at least college towns that are home to elite research universities, as a consequence of a number of factors yuppiefication and high technification amongst them. I liked that Gumprecht talked about sports in his chapter on a place where football is king, Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. Sports is a big deal, perhaps an even bigger deal these days at the big universities like Michigan and Indiana and even at smaller non-Association of American research universities like Ohio University and Ball State. At the latter students had to pay mandatory fees which included fees for the sports teams and could go to football and basketball games for “free” if they so wished. It was the only way to keep intercollegiate sports alive there. Sports, particularly basketball, remains big at Indiana though football has become perhaps even more and more central to IU identity and boosterism thanks to recent on field successes and even appearances in the new college football playoff system. And I liked that Gumprecht's multi-pronged approach to college towns is repeatable and can be verified or falsified by looking at other college towns, college towns like Bloomington, Indiana.
I spent, as I noted earlier, several years in Bloomington. Bloomington was not, in any way, a sleepy town when I arrived in B-town to attend IU. Students went to pubs particularly Nick’s, which was the most famous pub in town when I arrived and when I left Bloomington. Nick’s, which was a few blocks from the western edge of campus (this was before the now iconic college gates were added where Kirkwood ends and IU begins) was so popular that it added a third storey just before I left. Kirkwood was the site, along, if to a lesser extent, 4th and 5th streets, of the student oriented retail drag that stretched from the university to the square downtown. Kirkwood still had a hippy flavour when I arrived in Bloomington, though that changed during my years there. When I first moved to Bloomington there were two bookstores on the square (a critical measure of the old college town that was changing before my eyes; since that time the number of bookstores has ebbed and flowed, mostly ebbed, and the IU Bookstore became a brach of Barnes and Nobles and later Follet's with a consequent decline in the quantity and quality of non-text books). There was an ice cream shop on Kirkwood. And there were quite a number of restaurants including the Greek flavoured Trojan Horse and, eventually, the Uptown Cafe (we called it the Yuptown even in the 1980s). There was even a hardware store on the square. Bloomington also, of course, had a student ghetto or several student ghettos and a kind of countercultural ghetto on the west side of town where those who came to school at IU but never left lived (I wonder if it is still there?).
Bloomington, of course, had and continues to have things that Gumprecht says are elements of a college town. It has and continues to have its student ghetto and bohemian enclaves. It had and continues to have its faculty enclaves. It has and continues to have a food co-op, Bloomingfoods. In the late 1980s and 1990s, an era before the brave new digital age arose, things began to change just as they did in Ann Arbor, as Gumprecht notes. Several things stimulated this change including quality of life issues (many hip mags rated B-town high on the great quality of life index), a decline in state financial support, the fact that increasingly Bloomington became a bed room community for upscale migrants from Indianapolis (the edges of the south part of Indy were about an hour away from B-town), and the building of an interstate that passed near Bloomington. Perhaps most importantly, however, Indiana University grew almost exponentially.
IU grew and then grew some more. The university expanded from the approximately 34,000 students when I was there to 48,000 students today as decreasing state support led to not only an increase in students but an increase in administrative personnel to handle the increase in the student population, including those from outside of the state and the US who pay higher fees. Of course, the increase in students was not the only reason for the increase in bureaucrats in a bureaucracy which had and has a life of its own as Max Weber noted years ago. The result of Bloomington’s and IU’s growth was that both the university and real estate developers built higher end apartments and condominiums to satisfy the high end “needs” of some students driving rental prices up in the process. Yuppification could be seen in the fact that the city turned the south side of the downtown square into a mall full of higher end stores aimed at an increasingly :upscale” and yupscale crowd. Retail establishments on the square, such as the hardware, store disappeared.
The brave new digital world changed Bloomington even more. It, for example, made it difficult for bookstores to survive at least for a time. Bloomington’s most famous used bookstore, Caveat Emptor, which moved several times, ended up on the square and has almost closed for good a couple of times. The food co-op, which began as a co-op in which you had to work to buy food at, morphed into a food coop in which even non-members could shop and which was guided toward the radiant future of economic glory by a board of "professionals". Today it is a shell of its former self and has suffered through several busts. Subdivisions spread particularly on the east side of the city where IU and the College Mall are. The College Mall area saw increasing business development, a development that made parts of Bloomington look like suburban shopping areas of places such as Colonie, New York or the greater Dallas area which stretched west to Fort Worth and north to the Oklahoma border. Movie theatres declined in numbers and art films became increasingly the province of the Ryder, Bloomington’s longest running alternative newspaper. Recently the Ryder art film series died, like the alternative newspaper it published, with the death of its founder. As the state of Indiana grew more right wing populist IU has been and is being forced into the politically and ideologically correct mould of the states politically and ideologically correct right wing populists.
There were some things I was less that thrilled by in Gumprecht’s book. I wish that Gumprecht’s excellent maps had been more detailed. Additionally, I think that Gumprecht could have taken an even finer tooth comb to college towns that he does. Athens, Ohio, a place that I briefly lived in the mid-1980s, is a college town but it a a college town with a difference. Ohio University, a second or third tier research university, and poor cousin to the Ohio State University, was and is known as a party town. It is probably the main factor that attracts students, particularly students from Ohio who know that OU is a party school, to it. Athens's retail geography reflects the fact that it is a party town. The Court Street and Union Street downtown area was home to some 24 or so pubs and it was home to an insane Halloween celebration when I was there. On Friday one could stagger from one pub to another for staggered happy hours. Athens's pubs had character. One pub, for instance, was upscale, another was really down down-scale. Books were less important to Athens’s population. It was home to only two bookstores who sold books other than textbooks. Because of ebb and flow in incoming students Athens and OU were and are also hit by periodic busts.
Additionally, Gumprecht seems to suggest that at least one other city I have lived in is a college town though it is not. Gumprecht, for instance, argues that Provo, Utah, home of Brigham Young University, BYU, or the Y is a college town, a contention I would strongly disagree with. The Y may, geographically speaking, make up a significant part of Provo. Its 35,000 students plus may make up a significant part of Provo’s population. It may also be an important part of the Provo economy. However, the Y, with its honour code and it consequent impact on things like Provo’s private housing—men and women cannot live together in private housing in Provo unless married—and liquor sales establishments—there were only two pubs and one state liquor sales establishment in Provo when I lived there—made Provo reflect, in miniature, the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Y’s culture and the Y's economic and political culture are, in other words, the culture of the LDS Church. All this, and particularly the Y’s honour code, make BYU less like the University of Notre Dame, where the student body was primarily Catholic when I was there just as BYU’s student body was primarily Mormon when I was there. Both had around 97% Catholic and Mormon in its student body. Most of the Y’s faculty were also LDS and the Y faculty mandated that all undergraduates take religious classes. All this makes the Y, which is a large research university on one level, more like, on another level Bob Jones, with its Baptist fundamentalist ideologies and strong mechanisms for the control of students, than Notre Dame, which I found a lot like an isolated monastery when I was there.
Another problem I had with Gumprecht’s exploration of college towns was that I thought it too focused on large flagship and former land-grant colleges and the college towns they are the central part of. Gumprecht’s chapters focus, in order, as I noted earlier, on the University of Oklahoma in Norman; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Kansas State University in Manhattan; the University of California, Davis; the University of Georgia in Athens; Auburn University; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and the University of Delaware in Newark. Cornell, the University of California, Davis, the University of Michigan, and the University of Kansas are members of the elite AAU. Oklahoma, Kansas State, Georgia, and Delaware are land grant universities that developed into large research universities who aren’t yet in the AAU. Cornell was given land grant income by the state of New York. Gumprecht does talk about Williams College and the college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts but it would have been nice to see, for example, chapters on a small liberal arts college in a college town as defined by Gumprecht, a religious oriented liberal arts college in a college town, and a former normal school cum research university in a college town.
Great book. Recommended. As an aside, I found it interesting to learn that Gumprecht has left academia and returned to journalism since this book was written. That is a sad loss to the academy.
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