The American College Town

Chapter 9: Town vs. Gown

9 town฀฀ vs.฀฀ gown When David Athey bought his Colonial Revival house in the Kells Avenue neighborhood of Newark, Delaware, the seller told him that the best attribute about the house was the same as the worst—its proximity to the University of Delaware.1 The house is one block from campus, so when Athey decided to pursue a graduate degree at night, he was able to walk to class. A major research library is five minutes from his door. He can attend plays and concerts in two campus performing arts venues. Foreign films shown nowhere else in the state are screened in the Trabant University Center. Residents can walk five minutes to watch UD football and basketball games. As in other college towns, the green spaces of campus act as parks for the nearby residents. But the closeness of Athey’s house to the campus also means the neighborhood is home to an ever-changing population of student renters, whose lifestyles sometimes bring them into conflict with other residents. Loud parties rattle windows, and residents are awoken when students return home noisily from bars and parties. There is the constant worry that homeowners will sell to landlords, who will turn houses into student rentals. Traffic is heavy during the school year, and parking is in short supply. The university itself is viewed as an adversary because it does not house most of its students, fails in the eyes of some to control their behavior off campus , and builds new facilities that are seen to undermine the local quality of life. All around Athey’s home are the battle sites in an undeclared but unresolved civil war. Next door is a house until recently occupied by undergraduates , one group of which so angered Athey, allowing their dog to defecate on his lawn and keeping his family up late playing loud music, that he considered moving. Around the corner is a former fraternity that was closed by the university after police were called to the house eleven times in one year. Nearby are the Ivy Hall Apartments, one of four Newark apartment complexes the city identified as “problem” properties because they are the source of a disproportionate share of alcohol and disorderly conduct complaints.2 A few blocks away, the university has built an arts center and parking garage, the latest in a long list of development projects opposed by residents because of the fear they will increase traffic. Such are the issues that create tension in college towns all over and are fundamental features of college town life. Much of the conflict is the simple result of what happens when so many young people, free from parental supervision for the first time, descend upon relatively small cities. The other critical characteristic that divides town and gown is the fact that higher education institutions located outside big cities often dominate a town physically , economically, and politically. Colleges are viewed with conflicting emotions—welcome because of the benefits they bring, but resented when they act with little regard to the interests of permanent residents and because students can make bad neighbors. While many of the characteristics that make college towns distinctive are unique to the United States, animosity between town and gown has an ancient lineage that can be traced to the beginning of the university in Europe. The degree of privilege enjoyed by medieval universities and the intensity of town-gown conflict have no parallels in America. Hastings Rashdall has observed that the town of Oxford in England, site of Oxford University, “was practically governed by the university.” The history of the university in Europe is full of stories of town-gown riots in which countless students and townspeople were killed. The St. Scholastica’s Day massacre in Oxford in 1335, for example, left nearly one hundred dead. Fighting was “perpetually going on in the streets of Oxford,” Rashdall said. “There is probably not a single yard of ground . . . which has not at one time or other, been stained with blood.”3 Town-gown conflict, furthermore, is not limited to college towns, but the nature of problems is different in bigger cities, as Gordon Lafer demonstrates in his study of New Haven, Connecticut. The economic contrasts between colleges and the areas that surround them are often greater in big cities than in college towns, which heightens resentment of an institution . Urban universities have been accused of exploiting unskilled workers whose job opportunities diminished as manufacturing declined. Most colleges are exempt from...