I began life in a Michigan college town, and I may spend the rest of it in another one. It surprises me to put the matter this way, because the two places do not seem similar: Alma, a small town far too vulnerable to globalization and deindustrialization, and Ann Arbor, a rich city that seems, at first glance, far too insulated from everything. One of Michigan’s lovable qualities, of course, is its tendency to transform across relatively small distances: the beach towns to the west seem to belong to another order of things than the picturesque or dingy farm towns only so many miles to the interior, the Upper Peninsula constitutes its own multiple worlds, and so on. Still, the two towns feel particularly dissimilar. You could reduce them to battling stock personages in any number of morality plays: red vs. blue America, insular past vs. centerless future, one awful phase of capitalism vs. some later awful phase of it. At least, you could do that until very recently—less than a year ago, as I write this. Now, as we’ll see, they face the same axe.
“College town” is one of those terms that is useful because it’s somewhat empty. Or, more generously, it’s a handle for many sorts of cargo. Historian Blake Gumprecht, setting out to survey
The American College Town in his 2008 study by that name, suggests that the name properly applies to any school where “the number of four-year college students equals at least 20 percent of a town’s population.” Gumprecht admits that this cutoff is “arbitrary.” The next scholarly book that I was able to find on the subject uses a somewhat more expansive definition:
Traditionally, Americans have viewed college towns as one of three principal kinds or a combination of the three. The first is a campus closely connected to a city or town and within its boundaries. In the second, the campus “is located next to a city or town but remains somewhat separate from it.” In the view of architect William Rawn, Yale would be an example of the first type, and the University of Virginia, on the edge of Charlottesville, of the second. Finally, perhaps the most common type of college town is one in which the college or university may be near a locality yet essentially unconnected to it. Duke and Rice Universities are offered by Rawn as examples of this model.
To which I say:
Rice? Rice in
Houston?
That Rice? If the biggest city in Texas is a “college town,” then everywhere is. Better to be a little arbitrary.
The Pervading Life
Between the too-arbitrary and the too-expansive, there is the conveniently vague. For Wikipedia, the college town is one where an institution of higher learning “pervades” the life of the place. Good enough. I like this verb, “pervade.” In cities or towns that have enough other things going on—places we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, call “college towns”—it’s rather the place that pervades the school. (...)
What is it like to be pervaded by a college? Alma College is a prototypical small liberal-arts college, or SLAC: founded in the late nineteenth century, a vestigially Protestant institution still somewhat attached to a mainline denomination (the Presbyterian Church, USA). It has a pretty campus with a decent amount of green space, human-scale class sizes, and a handful of reasonably famous alums. The only SLAC-standard quality it misses is a rumored former Underground Railroad stop, such as you would find at Knox College or Oberlin—both the town and the college came along too late for that.
My impression is that it’s an excellent school, slightly overpriced for the location. The only parts of Alma College that I can really vouch for are the library, where I first read about the films of Akira Kurosawa, and the bookstore, where I bought a tape of the self-titled third Velvet Underground album, far too young in both cases, and therefore at the perfect time. In the summers, its weight room was so easy for us local high schoolers to sneak into that I suspect the ease was intentional on someone’s part—another small act of gown-to-town benevolence. I never paid tuition to the place, but for these reasons, I will die in a minor and unpayable sort of debt to it. At its best, the small college in a small college town functions this way for the nonstudent residents, as a slightly mysterious world within the world that, while pursuing its own ends, expands everyone’s sense of what is possible. The college calendar makes a pleasant polyrhythm against the calendar of the seasons, the schedule of the high-school football team, and the motorik pulse of daily nine-to-five town life.
Someone Else’s Utopia
For this to happen at all, the college has to be its own distinct place, present and familiar but in some ways opaque. The small liberal-arts college, whatever else it is, is always the hopelessly scrambled remains of someone else’s Utopia. It’s a carved-out community where a group of students and teachers try to figure out what it would mean to give some transcendent idea—Plato’s forms, Calvin’s God, Newton’s law-abiding universe, the revivalist blessed community of the early-nineteenth-century abolitionists—its proper place in daily life. (...)
As a kid, I learned about town-gown tension from the movie
Breaking Away (1979), in which Indiana University frat boys have nothing better to do than start riots with the town boys and everyone is inexplicably devoted to bicycle racing. As a sports movie, a romantic comedy, and a
bildungsroman, and as a testament to the odd, flat beauty of the Midwest,
Breaking Away holds up fabulously and always will. Nobody should mistake it for a sociological treatise. I read the college boys in the movie as almost exact stand-ins for the meanest of my middle-school classmates and never noted the contradiction. The kids who most plagued me were not necessarily college bound—although, at that age, I didn’t think that I was, either.
There must have been town-gown tension between the place where I grew up and the liberal-arts college I didn’t go to, but it was off my radar. The one incident I remember sharply is far more ambiguous in its implications than “the townies were uncivilized” or “the students were snobby.” Like many of the most pleasant memories I have of my adolescence, it involves a gas station more or less right in the middle of town, where, I know not how, one of the smart, underachieving stoners of my acquaintance found a job as a cashier. He promptly secured a job for another smart, underachieving stoner, whereupon the place became, for months, until management cracked down, an intellectual and cultural
salon for my town’s smart, underachieving stoners and also their goody-goody churchgoing friends who did not smoke. You would drink fountain soda at employee-discount rates while listening to David Bowie and Phish on the tape player: What, if you had no girlfriend, could be more urgent than this?
One night, I was having a heart-to-heart with yet another of these fellows, a talented visual artist who looked like
Let It Be–era John Lennon after a good shave, when a group of college-age women we didn’t know—therefore, students—walked past us. They were loud, probably drunk. One of them turned and looked at us, flashed us her rear, then kept on walking, without addressing a word to us.
What did this gesture mean? Contempt was encoded in it, obviously. (Only in male fantasy and pop culture—but I repeat myself—could mooning qualify as flirtation.) Two teenagers with nowhere more interesting to sit on a weekend evening than the stoop outside a gas station:
Let us remind them of what they will never have access to. We looked, to them, like people who at best would study accounting at Davenport University, or “business” at Lansing Community College, or who would answer one of those once-ubiquitous TV ads imploring us to enjoy the freedom of the independent trucker. These young women, hemmed in on all sides by the threat of male sexual violence, wanted a safe way to test the boundaries of that hemming-in and correctly judged the two of us as no threat to the four of them: That is a somewhat more sympathetic, Dworkinite reading of the situation, and probably true. But either way, the gesture was baldly classist, an exercise of power. There is no reading of it that is not an insult; you can make it somewhat better only by thinking of it as misdirected revenge on the many guys who had probably insulted
them.
On this score, I’m not sure our flasher was successful. My friend’s response to her briefly visible, panty-clad buttocks was one of the most emotional displays I have ever seen, so total as to make one question the idea that even the rawest physical desire is necessarily simple or shallow. For a moment, he was wonder-struck and said nothing, merely looked at me as though we had both just seen a UFO and he needed me to confirm it. Then, long after the women had walked away, he began to apostrophize them, in a voice as full of longing as Hank Williams’s: “Please come back. I’ll
pay you. I have a bag of weed in my pocket,” and so on. There are many ways to expand a person’s sense of what’s possible.
In this moment, I knew myself, really for the first time, as a
townie. Within a few years, I had already shaken off that identity. So, I think, did my friend. It takes all the sting out of being a townie when it is an option rather than a fate. We, like untold millions of others, were both able to move back and forth between town and gown because Americans effected a fundamental change in our sense of who college is
for. What is most striking about the threefold typology of American college students offered in Helen Horowitz’s much-cited
Campus Life (1987) is that, today, most college students are—her word—“outsiders”:
The term college life has conventionally been used to denote the undergraduate subculture presumably shared by all students. My study clarifies that college life, in fact, is and has been the world of only a minority of students.
by Phil Christman, Hedgehog Review |
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Image: markk
