The American college town

If a friend should ever ask for a book that epitomizes the best that geography can offer, I recommend Blake Gumprechts new volume as a near-perfect candidate. In The American College Town he takes a landscape familiar to every reader of this journal and makes us see it afresh. He dissects its complexity with astonishing thoroughness, using a rich mix of archival material, personal observation, and field interviews. He offers deep case studies, but remembers the need for broader context. Finally, he assembles the total package with spirited, clean prose, some of the best academic writing I have ever seen.

The American College Town is a beautifully designed and well-conceived book. Sandwiched between an introduction that defines the subject and a conclusion about its future are eight thematic chapters. These range in length between 29 and 44 pages, and each illustrates a characteristic of such towns with focus on a particular community. In order these are: the campus as public space (Norman, Oklahoma), fraternity rows and other distinctive residential areas (Ithaca, New York), campus business districts (Manhattan, Kansas), progressive political attitudes (Davis, California), alternative life styles (Athens, Georgia), sports culture (Auburn, Alabama), high-tech centers (Ann Arbor, Michigan), and town-gown tensions (Newark, Delaware). Each chapter is organized historically and illustrated by 10 or so well-chosen photographs and reference maps. The author, one soon learns, is as skilled with camera and mapping software as he is with words.

College towns are a classic example of voluntary culture areas, those created by people who migrate to wherever they think they will find likeminded souls. As such, we might have expected scholarly work on this subject before 2008. Gumprecht blames the neglect on academic farsightedness and the natural human tendency to overlook what is all around us (p. xvii), but I hope this books success will inspire parallel probes into the many other self-sorted places, from retirement centers to the Pacific Northwests ecotopia.

Extensive work underlies this book. One gets an initial feel for this by paging through 64 pages of endnotes and reading that personal interviews numbered over 200. It is clearer still when reading astonishingly detailed accounts of, say, the evolution of Manhattans Aggieville business district or Daviss political culture and realizing that these were assembled from primary materials such as city hall minutes, old Sanborn maps, nineteenth-century diaries, and on-the-spot interviews. Most telling of all, perhaps, is the authors sad confession that this book ultimately sapped so much time and energy that it hastened the collapse of his marriage.

Even readers who have spent decades in college towns can glean much from Gumprechts work. The first chapter, for example, is an interesting exercise in definition. If one selects American cities where university students constitute 20% or more of the total population and, of these, eliminates big cities and suburbs, the result is about 300 college towns. He notes how these entities are rare in other countries (where urban universities are the rule), explains why they are so numerous here (state as opposed to federal control, a scattered population, religious sponsorship, and local boosterism), and identifies six subtypes. He also relates how many of the phenomenons characteristic traits emerged only after an enrollment surge in the late 1940s.

The thematic chapters are uniformly rich. The University of Oklahoma, with its wooded groves, formal gardens, and public auditoria is a perfect demonstration of the open, verdant nature of most American campuses. Their contrast with cloistered, inward-looking universities in Europe is stark. One learns that fraternities at Ithaca were outgrowths of literary societies and at Manhattan that Aggieville bars were scarce until the 1960s when women were first allowed to enter them freely. Documentation of progressive political initiatives at Davis and the music and art scenes at Athens is interesting, too, including a contradictory reluctance in these increasingly middle-class towns to promote social justice and provide affordable housing. Such conflict between alternative and corporate culture reaches a peak in the Ann Arbor discussion on that towns love-hate relationship with pharmaceutical companies and military contractors.

Unlike any other professors I know, Gumprecht has worked previously as a newspaper reporter, sportswriter, librarian, and music executive. This experience flows into the book. His arguments for five of the chapters also have been honed through previous publication in scholarly journals. All this has helped him to achieve balance between detail and overview, history and the present scene, scholarship and storytelling. In fact, I see self-indulgence in only two places: the preface where he nostalgically recalls his drifter days in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Athens chapter where he obviously identifies with the six artisans he profiles. If I were his editor, I would have shortened these discussions.

A related problem comes from a compulsion to be thorough. Even though this book is a pleasure to read at 348 pages, I think it would have been even better cut by a third. With a little less detail on Shug Jordans coaching career at Auburn, Ann Arbors industries, and Newarks landlords, we would still have a clear picture of the uniqueness of college towns. The bonus might have been Gumprechts dream to interest a trade publisher in the project and to create one of the few geographers books ever to capture the attention of the elusive general public.