Interesting article, though I'm not sure I agree with everything in it.
From the Ithaca Times (online)
The Commons offers plenty of shopping options, as well as sitting space for summer days and a plethora of public art, helping make Ithaca a unique place. (Photo by Rob Montana)
Higher Education
By John Gann Jr.
According to a recent study, in addition to Ithaca, there are 304 other genuine college towns - places where a college or university is a major part of the local economy - in the United States.
And given the boom in higher education enrollment that started with returning WWII GIs and extended through the Baby Boom and beyond, there are probably more Americans alive today who have spent part of their lives in such communities than ever before in history.
But, despite being such important places in many of our lives, as a group college towns had seldom been seriously studied or written about...until last year. The American College Town is the 438-page, award-winning result of ten years' work and research visits to eight of the 305 communities it designates as college towns.
The man who wrote the book, so to speak, on college towns, is unsurprisingly a professor. Blake Gumprecht is Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He has also been a resident of two other college towns and an informal visitor to others. And though he may know them, warts and all, better than anyone else, he still very much likes them.
Born in the USA
Both college campuses - building spread over large landscaped spaces - and college towns themselves, Gumprecht found in his research, are made in America.
Neither characterized older European universities. Even today college-dominated smaller cities are hard to find outside the 50 states, even in neighboring Canada. Academic buildings crowded together in large cities, Gumprecht points out, have elsewhere been the norm.
Each of the eight college towns profiled in the book was used to probe different characteristics that all college towns share to a degree. Norman, Oklahoma, models the campus as a park and social and cultural center. Manhattan, Kansas, depicts the college area commercial center and bar scene. Davis, California, shines in the area of environmental consciousness, while Athens, Georgia, typifies the college town as a tolerant home for bohemian work and lifestyles.
Ann Arbor, Mich., is depicted as the ambivalent home of high tech business development, while gridiron culture reigns in Auburn, Alabama. Town-gown tensions rooted in student misbehavior and financial concerns characterize the discussion of Newark, Delaware.
While the chapter on Ithaca focuses on housing patterns - for Greeks, other students, and faculty - Ithaca residents will also recognize the issues shared by the other cities.
Development Ambivalence
In a phone interview, I asked Gumprecht whether traditionally economically secure college towns needed economic development these days.
"That depends on your perspective," he suggests. Because of colleges' tax exemption, city governments have good reason, he said, to seek other growth. But he points out that universities benefit as well.
"Certain disciplines such as applied sciences benefit from greater connections with business," he explains, "that firms nearby make possible."
But Gumprecht finds that economic diversification has its downside as well. "Their relative insulation from the rest of the economy gives college towns a charm more money-focused places lack." And with growth, real estate prices and other components of the cost of living go up, eroding college towns' appeal as congenial places to live.
Gumprecht shows a pronounced if characteristically professorial ambivalence toward college town economic development. It seems to derive from his assessment that these communities already enjoy both an economic success that newer developments like distance learning are unlikely to seriously erode and a high quality of life that business growth may well endanger.
What he finds to be the very checkered performance records of towns like Ann Arbor that have shown the most economic development promise may also contribute. But in his mixed feelings, Gumprecht is very much in tune with prevailing sentiment in many college communities.
Disdain for pecuniary pursuits has, of course, always been more fashionable - and more tenable financially - in college towns. And left-of-center college town politics can be unsympathetic to capitalist enterprise, or at least to the non-local corporate kind typified by the much-reviled Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and Starbucks.
"College towns often have unwelcoming regulatory environments for business," Gumprecht observes in his book, "and do little to encourage development."
Tech and Other Options
The professor sees high tech as the best industrial development bet for university communities. Academic researchers, he points out, are more interested in applications now than they used to be.
"Universities today have technology transfer offices. Changes in our economy more than ever favor what goes on in campus laboratories."
But though Ithaca and numerous other university towns (and plenty of other places as well) envision a future as high tech heavens, Gumprecht has his doubts.
"Nationally, dozens of research parks have been built, but," his book contends, "few have stimulated significant economic development."
Venture capital is highly concentrated geographically, he warns, and investors want to be close enough to where they're putting their money to be able to easily look over entrepreneurial shoulders.
And it's not an easy sell, he adds, to bring in people with specialized technical skills from Boston or Silicon Valley. "Jobs with start-ups are risky," he reminds, "and small college towns may not offer other employment in the same field."
Having a tech or other job in a large metro area and commuting from a college town can work better, Dr. Gumprecht concludes. "It happens within an hour of the largest cities, since they have a more sizeable pool of people who enjoy the college town milieu," he finds. But whether people who work in smaller metros like Binghamton or Syracuse could be sold on living in Ithaca he judges uncertain.
As mentioned in his book, the marketing appeal of living in a college town is being borrowed by cities not normally considered to fall into that category. Large multi-university cities like New York and Philadelphia have marketed themselves as "bigger and better" versions of the college town to retain and attract more young professionals. Can "real" college towns compete with such campaigns?
"They're not on the same playing field," Gumprecht demurs. "Someone who wants New York or Boston isn't going to be satisfied with Ithaca."
But there's another market niche that offers some degree of big-city living combined with lesser intensity and lower costs for seekers of something in-between. Gumprecht believes college towns can be extremely competitive in this market. As in everything else today, market segmentation can be the key to sales success.
But are college towns like Ithaca so focused on academics that they're not good places for those who are neither students nor professors? Are they like private clubs or gated communities where others are so out of place that the towns can't credibly be marketed as comfortable places to live for non-academic families?
"The thousands of lifestyle migrants to towns like Boulder, Ann Arbor, and Lawrence don't support that assumption," the professor argues. "And the more in-migration you have, the more diversity and the broader the appeal of the community."
Overlooked by Researchers
Gumprecht found college towns a paradoxically overlooked field in both scholarly and other serious inquiry when he began his research a decade ago. He said that neither his extensive investigation nor the publication last year of the book has yet changed that much.
Though he has no plans for further research on the subject, he hopes others will pick up the ball. He concedes that the rules of advancement in academia don't encourage tenure-seekers to look into topics deemed too close to home. But, he does "hope my book will help city officials in college towns better understand the special nature of these places."
The professor sees considerable marketing power for college towns in the large number of college graduates in the population now as a result of the boom that started with the G.I. Bill and has never let up in almost 65 years.
"Alums still show great attachment to the place where they spent their college years," he explains. "That's a big plus in marketing college towns to retirees, to prospective residents, and to people who want to start businesses."
Ithaca Dualism
I asked what most impressed him about Ithaca.
His responses suggest he sees a dualism in Ithaca not typical of even larger college towns. The city has two major institutions of higher learning, he noted, not including Tompkins Cortland Community College. And one itself has two faces, being both a private university and a land grant institution.
Ithaca is also unusual, he observes, in having more than one neighborhood where faculty families cluster. And it supports two older in-town business districts five blocks and 400 vertical feet apart - the Commons and Collegetown - that serve the market owned by a single in-town commercial center in most other places.
"Ithaca is very Ivy League," he said.
"And, given the topography," he quipped, "compared with most college town residents, Ithaca people are probably in much better shape." n
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John L. Gann, Jr., President of Gann Associates, is a midwest-based consultant, speaker, and writer nationally on marketing places for economic development. He lived in Ithaca while working in Cooperative Extension community development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. He is the author of How to Evaluate (and Improve) Your Community's Marketing, published last year by the International City Management Association. He may be reached at (800) 762-GANN or
citykid@uwalumni.com.
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