The American College Town

Chapter 7: Stadium Culture

7 stadium฀฀ culture One of the most conspicuous differences between higher education in the United States and that in other countries is the greater importance of intercollegiate athletics at U.S. colleges and universities. Stadiums and arenas dominate campuses. Athletic departments have annual budgets that dwarf those of academic units. Games draw spectators from great distances and are televised coast to coast. Coaches are paid higher salaries than university presidents, student athletes are national celebrities , and the marketing of college sports paraphernalia is a billion dollar business. Sporting events are also a central component of student life at American colleges and universities and sometimes overshadow the educational purposes of an institution. When is the last time undergraduates camped overnight in the cold to get the best seats for a professor’s lecture? College sports as they are played and celebrated in the United States have no equivalent elsewhere in the world, where college athletics tend to be participatory activities intended for all students, emphasize fitness and recreation more than competition, and are largely intramural in character or comparatively small-time. Nowhere is the significance of intercollegiate athletics more apparent than in college towns because of the sheer magnitude of major college sports relative to the small size of such cities. If the number of stadium seats is compared to population, college towns possess more seats per capita by far than any other type of place. In some college towns, the football stadium holds more people than live in the entire city. Stadiums are often the most prominent features on the landscape and the first structures you see when you approach a college town. Tens of thousands of fans descend upon towns for games. Such regular pilgrimages are economic boons and can leave a permanent imprint on the built environment and way of life. College sports impact college towns in ways that often go unrecognized. They affect government budgets and influence transportation planning. Big games are important events on local social calendars, preferred seats are status symbols, and the outcome of games shapes the moods of residents . Because major sporting events carry the names of the towns where they are played far and wide, the identities of a college town and a university ’s athletic teams are often intertwined. College towns are many things—bohemian islands, elite enclaves, and liberal outposts—but they are also among our most sports-obsessed places. One-quarter of the cities in a major sports magazine’s recent ranking of the one hundred best sports cities in the United States were college towns.1 The personalities of many college towns have been shaped in part by big-time college sports. Auburn, Alabama, is one such town. Typical of the region in which it is located, Auburn (fig. 7.1) is a football town. If you have ever been in a football town on an autumn weekend when a game is to be played, you cannot ignore it and will never forget it. When I used to have to wend my way through the semi-drunken hordes on game days to get to my office at the University of Oklahoma, the whole experience seemed the antithesis of what higher education is supposed to be about, part of what Murray Sperber calls “beer and circus,” the strategies universities employ to keep students (and the public) entertained while allowing the quality of education to decline.2 But I could not help but also be intrigued. The electricity that permeated my college towns on a football Saturday was tangible. I have experienced game days in State College, Pennsylvania, and Athens, Georgia. I used to be a sportswriter: I’ve sat on press row at the NCAA basketball tournament, interviewed major leaguers around the batting cage at Yankee Stadium, and covered the Rose Bowl. But nothing could prepare me for a football weekend in Auburn or the degree to which life in Auburn revolves around sports. As such, Auburn presents an extreme example, but nonetheless provides a useful lens for examining the ways in which college sports can impact college towns. This chapter seeks to show the important role intercollegiate athletics have played in shaping college towns. To achieve this, I will describe a typical football weekend in Auburn, analyze the historical development of Auburn football and its evolving impact on the local way of life, and assess the contemporary significance of sports in the town. Compared to other college towns with major state universities, Auburn is relatively small, with a...