The American College Town

Chapter 6: Paradise for Misfits

College towns, like the schools located in them, are transient places. Young people come to them to pursue an education and leave once they earn their degrees. For most of the history of American higher education, this model held true for nearly all young people who attended college at residential universities. They went away to college naïve and irresponsible , and graduated four years later more mature and self-confident. They moved to cities and suburbs, began careers, got married, and started families. If they ever returned to the college town of their youth, it was to attend football games or alumni gatherings, and remember their college years. You were not supposed to stay in a college town after you graduated. The dynamics of college town life began to change in the 1960s. College enrollments grew rapidly as the children of the baby boom reached college age. Colleges and universities were forced to expand their faculties, and many of the new professors were more liberal than their predecessors , having earned their degrees in an era of war protests and civil rights marches. They influenced their students. College students, meanwhile, looked around them and saw a world in the throes of convulsive change. Heroes were gunned down. Politicians were proven corrupt. Large corporations began to shape life in profound ways. To some young people, the American dream began to look like a nightmare. They started to question the conventional path of career, marriage, and family. Some quit school. Others saw in college towns an opportunity to create alternative ways of life outside the American mainstream. They opened coffee houses and formed rock ’n’ roll bands. They got low-pressure jobs in places like the university library, and worked only when necessary in order to survive. College towns came to offer a permanent escape for a wide variety of eccentrics—artists, musicians, writers, hippies, punks, slackers, tattooed Gen-Xers. Many went away to college with traditional aspirations of becoming teachers, lawyers, businessmen, and the like, but were changed in some fundamental way by what they encountered in a college town, abandoned paradise฀฀ for฀฀ misfits 6 those goals, and remained in the cities where they went to school, or later returned when they discovered they missed the college town life. The college years are widely acknowledged as a rite of passage and a time of individual awakening, but too often what happens in the classroom is given exclusive credit for this. Away from home for the first time, thrust into communities where young people are dominant, exposed to an eclectic mix of lifestyles and cultures at a time in their lives when they are impressionable , some students are changed forever. Often the experiences that trigger such life changes occur not on campus, but in the nightclubs, coffee houses, and roach-infested student apartments so characteristic of small cities with major universities. Life in college towns has the ability to transform young people in ways that have little to do with formal higher education. This is most common in college towns that are home to flagship state universities like Lawrence, Kansas, and Athens, Georgia. Such universities typically have strong programs in the arts and humanities that attract young people who see college as more than just a path to a nine-to-five job. They come into contact with like-minded individuals and, soon, something larger begins to coalesce. They form bands, organize poetry readings, sponsor film series, hang out, discuss ideas. Eventually creative communities emerge. College towns provide conducive settings for people who wish to follow non-traditional life courses because they offer relatively cheap rents, lots of flexible, low-wage jobs, and a constant influx of new people with new ideas. Some also attract individuals with no formal connection to a university who are drawn to their unusual ways of life. Those who remain in college towns and live unconventional lifestyles are never numerically dominant, but, because many are creative, they shape life in college towns to a degree disproportionate to their numbers. I first recognized the ability of college towns to permanently capture young people who came to them to go to school as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas. There were the “old hippies” who hung out at the Crossing, sixties burnouts who, to our punk rock eyes, had changed little since the student union was torched in 1970. There was Bill Rich, who published a local music fanzine and started a record label. There was James Grauerholz, who...