School Days

A recent essay from the always-interesting New Geography contrasts sharply with conventional wisdom about American college towns, calling them "stifling, boring and obsolescent." To read it is to meditate on whether Thomas Friedman is correct or not in claiming that the world is flat:

And every down-on-its luck town wants to become a college town to attract population, businesses and jobs; they dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley, or at least Alley, by providing just the right mix of public policy and social/cultural atmosphere....

Colleges and college towns have become bastions of intolerance and enforced conformity. Political correctness? That’s not the tenth of it. I’m talking about the stifling of speech, dissent, or any deviation from orthodoxy. Colleges have gone from citadels of intellectual openness to dungeons of intellectual coercion. And in support of what? High ideals such as the canons of Western thought (freedom, liberty, justice, sovereignty of the individual, the inviolability of property rights)? More often, it’s the undermining of the same.

Author Roger Selbert, who goes on to claim that "for most people, college is a waste of time and money," sees a future in which the placelessness of the Internet make the physical campus and the trappings of towns like Berkeley, Boulder, and Ithaca (not to mention places like Oxford or Leiden) irrelevant, even wasteful.

Advances in technology are also making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Distance learning, remote learning – call it what you will – will doom the college town. The Internet renders the college library unnecessary; CDs and DVDs obsolete the 8 AM lecture; email and other advanced communication capabilities make office hours unneeded. Giving up the trappings of a campus will reduce costs dramatically, particularly in an era of high energy prices. Once higher education is exposed to market forces, the rationalization of education will be rapid and profound.

Really? If only College Town Life were still online.

Isn't it that the luxuries a college town provides its residents--chief among them an enlightened atmosphere that is accommodating to new ideas, one that exudes youthful energy--are instead its greatest strengths? Isn't it that uniqueness that sets them apart from other places, and aren't natural advantages like these what helps in a global competition for growth and development? Yes, a college town may indulge a greater-than-average amount of civic and personal navel-gazing (something I know firsthand; I grew up in a college town); but isn't this part of the story that sets them apart from other cities? What about the experience of education--regardless of what you think of it--as a branding asset? Is it an accident that college towns and neighborhoods usually fare better in bad economic times than their non-academic brethren?

(Above, the Princeton campus.)

Blake Gumprecht, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, discusses his book The American College Town in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed:

If they were like every place else, why would we care about them? But they’re not. They are cultural islands. They are exceptional places. They behave differently. They function differently. They are youthful. They are highly educated. They are cosmopolitan. They are free-spirited and progressive. They are cauldrons of creativity. They attract people who are drawn by their sense of difference. College towns lend color to the cultural mosaic that is the United States.

Earlier. (See Gumprecht's photo collections of some quintessential American college towns, here.)

Comments

[Gary]

Colleges and college towns have become bastions of intolerance and enforced conformity.

Translation: As a Young Republican, people don't tolerate my bigotry and dickishness, so I'm going to proclaim college towns as obsolete. Just another movement conservative attack on liberal academia. Homeschooling isn't going to replace Harvard or Wharton, sorry.

[Chris]

No apologies needed here, Gary!