Over the years, I have reflected a lot on the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical similarities and differences between the various universities I attended. Ball State University, for example, was relatively integrated into a northwest side neighbourhood in Muncie, Indiana, though it was not a college town since the school did not dominate the city of Muncie economically, politically, culturally, demographically, or geographically when I went there in the mid-1970s. There were shopping areas replete with pubs and even, eventually, a new and used bookstore near campus. Students, at least after, if memory serves, the first two years on campus or if old enough, could live off campus and there were a smattering of rooms and apartments for rent to students near campus. Some of the events at the Emmons Auditorium did draw some with the requisite cultural capital from Muncie and East Central Indiana but, for the most part, most of the events at the university were oriented toward and attended by a smattering of students. My sense is that Ball State has become more central to Muncie, just as Hartwick and SUNY Oneonta have become more central to Oneonta, in the wake of deindustrialisation and globalisation, but that Muncie is still not a college town. In fact, you wouldn't even know there was a sizable university in Muncie if you didn't know it already or live nearby. Rusting Muncie, by the way, remains a city in decline that keeps trying the same things over and over again to staunch the decay.
In 1978 I transferred to Indiana University. Indiana University dominated Bloomington then and dominated Bloomington even more after RCA packed up and left. It still dominates Bloomington economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically today. There were shops, restaurants, pubs (most notably Nick's Old English Pub), bookstores, and coffee houses aimed at students and the bohemians who came to Bloomington for school or culture and who never left between the western part of the east side of campus and the square some seven blocks west on Fourth and Sixth Streets and Kirkwood in between.
Bloomington was a progressive Democrat town in a sea of conservative Democrats, right wing Democrats, and elitist Republicans in right wing and conservative Indiana. The Indiana School of Music, as it was then called, put on over 800 concerts a year when I was there, and one could see foreign films at least once a week if not more not to mention classic and more challenging Hollywood films at the film clubs and cinemas throughout the city. Indiana's 30,000 students came to a city of around 50,000 people and, when they were resident, consumed product at Bloomington's many businesses. The nearby mall, not surprisingly, was named the College Mall. The university consisted of almost 2,000 acres and constituted about one-third of Bloomington, Indiana.
Compared to Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame was a secular monastic community. Like the Muncie of Ball State, the South Bend, where Notre Dame is located and where I lived in 1984 when I attended UND, was a town that had seen better days thanks to the failure of the car maker Studebaker and White flight suburbanisation, and was about to see even less better days thanks to the deindustrialisation and the globalisation that were becoming noticaeble in the America of corporate friendly Ronald Reagan and corporate friendly Democrats. Like Muncie, South Bend was trying all types of urban renewal schemes to revitalise the central business district all to little avail.
Notre Dame itself was isolated, save on football Saturday's, from South Bend and located in the northeast part of the city where it was officially known as Notre Dame, Indiana. It even had its own post office and zip code. And while students added to the economy of South Bend and nearby Mishawaka, most of what they added to was isolated on campus--Notre Dame had a student run pub near the football stadium-- it had an excellent bookstore that was probably more noted for its Notre Dame apparel and which it sold to students, alumni, and non-alumni fans (I made the mistake of going up, which itself was difficult given limited mass transit to campus, to browse the books one football Saturday and had to wait for 40 minutes to get in), and at the nearby University Park Mall in Mishawaka, which, if memory serves, was built by a corporation owned by a Notre Dame grad who has given extensively to his alma mater.
Most of what went on on campus was aimed at students and mostly student attended though the art museum did run classic films and hold art exhibits when I was there which I assume some from the community attended. Notre Dame had an entirely different feel from Indiana University, a much more segregated and isolated from the city that surrounded it feel. As such, South Bend, which was not a college town like the Bloomington I came to love, was not really my cuppa tea in any way, shape or form Nor was the university's student demographics, which were almost 90% Roman Catholic, my cuppa tea. Notre Dame seemed to me parochial, something that was particularly noticeable when New York governor Mario Cuomo sashayed into town to talk about why he, as a politician, a Catholic politician, had to follow secular law rather than canon law when it came to abortion. Needless to say, Cuomo's visit and speech was the talk of the campus town as nothing else had been before or after during my brief sojourn on campus.
Athens, Ohio, where I arrived in 1985, was a lot like Bloomington, Indiana. The central business district of the city and its Court Street, with its more than twenty pubs, began just across the street from the campus gates of the university. Ohio University was located in the southeast part of the town between the central business district and the (Hock) Hocking River. Athens, thanks to Ohio University, had a very vital cultural and intellectual life that centred around the pubs, though there was a vital film culture in Athens as well. It's key and central rituals were pubbing on every evening of the week--there weren't even Friday classes at OU at the time--and Halloween, when some of Ohio's 17,000 students, some of Athens's 19,000 residents, and those thirty thousand others who came to Athens for the rite of passage took over Court Street in the central business district. I enjoyed living in Athens, though I have always been more enamoured of Gothic college and university architecture like that of some of the colleges of the University of Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and much of the architecture of Indiana University in Bloomington, than the colonial architecture of much of Ohio University and parts of Athens.
After leaving Athens I ended up at SUNY Albany in Albany, New York in the late 1980s. I would return in the 2000s to take a doctorate. Albany was a lot like Muncie and South Bend. It had been hit hard by suburbanisation, it had been hit hard by deindustrialisation, and it had been hit hard by corporate globalisation. The University itself was impacted by two historical facts. First, it had been a normal college before it became a university, like Ball State, and second, the state of New York didn't create a university and college system until the 1960s. Unlike the University of California system, which had been around since the mid-nineteenth century, SUNY, which is larger than the California system, is a relatively new university system which was constructed late and which, because of the impact of deindustrialisation on the state of New York, has never been fully financially stable and rises and falls economically with the economy. By the way, the SUNY system may be larger than the California higher education system but it isn't close to being a rival academically and intellectually to the University of California system.
The old normal school campus of SUNY Albany was and is in midtown Albany between Washington and Western Avenues. It is home to political science and social service programmes. The new campus was built on an old golf course some three miles west between Madison Avenue and Washington Avenue and consisted of a dismal panopticonal modernist monolithic platform designed by Edward Durell Stone. It has not aged well and it is isolated from the life of the city. There wasn't, when I arrived at SUNY Albany much nearby campus, save the burbs and the Crossgates Mall. Many students, and particularly many graduate students, lived in the old and rundown parts of the city proper in cheap apartments cut out of some of the brownstones and row houses particularly in Center Square and Pine Hills. By the 2000s neoliberal SUNY Albany was building apartments on campus under the sleazy smelling leadership of Karen Hitchcock. Interestingly, around the same time the College of Saint Rose in the Pine Hills neighbourhood of Albany was buying and restoring old Victorian and Edwardian homes for campus and student occupancy. There was a bookstore in the nearby Stuyvesant Plaza, a plaza built for the burbs, and one several blocks from the old campus near the place where Central Avenue and Washington Avenue met at the Armoury. The last, Boulevard Bookstore, was gone by the time I returned in the 2000s thanks to the rise of corporate bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble in the suburbs, bookstores where books are akin to any other commodity including the non-book objects they peddle.
In both the 1980s and 1990s, but particularly in the 1990s, I found cultural and intellectual life at the monumental suburban campus of SUNY Albany as isolated and as isolating as the campus itself. There was a limited film culture. The bookstore was the first university bookstore I encountered that was corporate owned. The campus bookstore was and is run by Barnes and Noble and had only a smattering of supplementary reading material, an excellent measure of the quality of the college and university; generally speaking, the less the number of supplementary books in the bookstore the less the quality of the college or university. Like the suburbs, I found the physical campus alienating and chalked up its limited cultural and intellectual life, at least in part, to its alienating material culture. The isolation of campus was exacerbated by the fact that it wasn't easily to walk to from Albany and the fact that it was difficult as a non-student to park on campus particularly during the day. In that regard, SUNY Albany, which seems to me the educational equivalent of the suburban shopping mall, was a little bit different from that temple of consumerism.
Some, by the way, argue that the isolation of SUNY Albany out in the burbs was intentional after the activism of the sixties, a period when Albany experienced student "riots". Whether this hypothesis is true or not, it does kind of help give one a sense of the culture, material and intellectual, of SUNY Albany.
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