I began life in a Michigan college town, and I may spend the rest of it in another one. It surprises me to put the matter this way, because the two places do not seem similar: Alma, a small town far too vulnerable to globalization and deindustrialization, and Ann Arbor, a rich city that seems, at first glance, far too insulated from everything. One of Michigan’s lovable qualities, of course, is its tendency to transform across relatively small distances: the beach towns to the west seem to belong to another order of things than the picturesque or dingy farm towns only so many miles to the interior, the Upper Peninsula constitutes its own multiple worlds, and so on. Still, the two towns feel particularly dissimilar. You could reduce them to battling stock personages in any number of morality plays: red vs. blue America, insular past vs. centerless future, one awful phase of capitalism vs. some later awful phase of it. At least, you could do that until very recently—less than a year ago, as I write this. Now, as we’ll see, they face the same axe.
“College town” is one of those terms that is useful because it’s somewhat empty. Or, more generously, it’s a handle for many sorts of cargo. Historian Blake Gumprecht, setting out to survey The American College Town in his 2008 study by that name, suggests that the name properly applies to any school where “the number of four-year college students equals at least 20 percent of a town’s population.”11xBlake Gumprecht, The American College Town (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 2. Gumprecht admits that this cutoff is “arbitrary.” The next scholarly book that I was able to find on the subject uses a somewhat more expansive definition:
Traditionally, Americans have viewed college towns as one of three principal kinds or a combination of the three. The first is a campus closely connected to a city or town and within its boundaries. In the second, the campus “is located next to a city or town but remains somewhat separate from it.” In the view of architect William Rawn, Yale would be an example of the first type, and the University of Virginia, on the edge of Charlottesville, of the second. Finally, perhaps the most common type of college town is one in which the college or university may be near a locality yet essentially unconnected to it. Duke and Rice Universities are offered by Rawn as examples of this model.22xJames Martin, James E. Samels and Associates, The New American College Town (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 3.
To which I say: Rice? Rice in Houston? That Rice? If the biggest city in Texas is a “college town,” then everywhere is. Better to be a little arbitrary.