The American College Town (review)

The college town is hardly an American invention, with Oxford and Cambridge, Heidelberg and Padua, and Coimbra and Salamanca all coming well before the founding of Cambridge on the north bank of the Charles River near Boston. But as geographer Blake Gumprecht argues in The American College Town, Americans have made the ideal of an educational and cultural oasis their own, even perfecting the image in many respects.

The college towns that Gumprecht explores are distinctive and desirable places to live and work—comfortable yet cosmopolitan, as he puts it. They are lively, progressive, unconventional, and prosperous, while being both serious and irreverent. They are the kinds of places where professionals with many other options choose to settle, incorporating many of the advantages of living in a major city such as San Francisco, Chicago, or Boston, but with fewer concerns about matters such as housing, traffic, or schools.

Defining it as a place having its character dominated by a college or university and the cultures that the institution creates, Gumprecht explains how the college town emerged and has evolved. He suggests that it has eight primary features, discussing each in a case study of a representative place.

Norman, Oklahoma, represents the campus as a public space, with the collegiate gothic architecture and attention to landscape design ideally distinguishing the University of Oklahoma from other institutions, as well as imbuing it with symbolic value as both significant and “a place apart” (p. 63). The attractive campus offers Oklahoma, as elsewhere, strategic advantages, as its non-academic components—residences, fitness facilities, dining commons, grounds—are alluring to prospective students and others. Indeed, institutions employ the appeal of living and working in a college town in selling themselves.

Gumprecht employs Ithaca, New York, to illustrate the three types of neighborhoods indicative of the American college town: the student ghetto, fraternity row, and the faculty enclave. He is a geographer, so his discussion of these neighborhoods around Cornell University focuses on people within space, especially as it has changed over time. With Ithaca, as in most chapters, Gumprecht devotes considerable attention to local historical context, patiently and richly telling the story of the place from its beginnings.

In discussing new housing in Ithaca developed expressly for students interested more in luxury than the traditional student apartment, he introduces a theme to which he returns throughout the book: the college town is changing, becoming less scruffy and more refined—and even elitist. Places like Ithaca are not necessarily becoming less bohemian but are increasingly home to those who possess both such sensibilities and access to significant resources.

Gumprecht concludes his book by returning to the suggestion that college towns risk becoming—or perhaps have already become—enclaves for the affluent, just funkier ones than an upper-middleclass suburb. The book focuses more on describing the concept of the college town, doing so in an impressive and pleasing manner. There is also a story, however, that perhaps others could explore in how college towns, like the universities within them, are becoming ever more elite.

In Manhattan, Kansas, home to Kansas State University, “Aggieville” signifies another feature of the college town—the area adjacent to campus with bars and shops that cater to students. As a geographer, Gumprecht is interested in the transition of the district adjacent to the Kansas State campus from traditional retail to its current purposes, particularly following the construction of a shopping mall outside of town. His account here is representative of a significant strength of the book, as Gumprecht exhibits the patience and attention to detail characteristic of an expert storyteller. He also is creative in discovering secondary sources, which he draws on engagingly.

The challenge with using Manhattan to illustrate the particular downtown typical of a college town is that it misses the changes ongoing in places like Princeton, Boulder, or Ann Arbor, which are within commuting distance of a major city and where high-end boutiques—and not only student-oriented bars—have replaced hardware stores and...