If only Blake Gumprecht had published The American College Town a year earlier, when Karen and I, returning from many years abroad, were searching for the perfect American place to call home. Instead, I’ve had the double pleasure of reading it here in downtown Athens - having made that lucky choice - with the hindsight knowledge of many a college town gleaned along the way. My exclamations and page tapping marked a fellow pilgrim’s progress through the pages.

Not that this is a guidebook. Though well disguised, it is foremost a scholarly work by the chair of the department of geography at the University of New Hampshire, replete with 60 pages of endnotes documenting wonderfully diverse sources and a 20-page index. Even so, the book’s serious nature is well camouflaged: the sparse statistics are hidden in thickets of narrative, and photos dominate a quarter of the pages.

The hallmarks of geography are almost invisible - no tables of demographic data or layered GIS maps or multivariate analyses leveraging grand conclusions out of the murky richness of life. The pattern Gumprecht has chosen to report his years of research - case studies of eight “college towns,” including Athens - is more like a collection of intersecting short stories: warm narratives full of colorful anecdotes and supporting actors, out of which the character of the American college town emerges. And, while the introductory survey chapter and some of the earliest history in these eight thematic chapters may feel just a bit stiff with the starch of stuffier times, when the stories reach the ’60s they begin to sing.

Before all that, though, Gumprecht has placed a personal preface, something like a testimonial, with refrains occurring later in the text. He reveals how at one point his life had entered a “downward spiral” through “a series of stupid moves.” Thus troubled, a chance return to his own college awakened his intellectual curiosity.

Though 10 years would pass as he worked across the country in independent music and journalism, eventually, in 1995, 18 years after starting college, Gumprecht began a Ph.D in geography, applied his new discipline to the study of American college towns, and produced what he and his publishers believe is the first book on the subject. Writing it, the author says, changed his life. And the text does have a bit of the texture of a revival.

Place and Devotion

So, what qualifies as a college town? Well, they are peculiarly American; whereas most universities elsewhere (Oxford excepted) are lost in large cities, there are hundreds of towns with colleges here. To winnow 60 to study, Gumprecht used “simple” criteria: small, distinct, urban areas populated by many students - at least 20 percent, so the magic is strong. But he also insists college towns must be “perceived as college towns,” a touch of the circularity of the true believer, perhaps.

Gumprecht notes that once you’ve identified 60 college towns you could write an interesting book about their differences. In an introductory chapter he even notes the effects of different types of colleges. But differences are not what Gumprecht is interested in.

The eight colleges in the case studies are presented as the facets of a single diamond. Four, like a matrix, celebrate “place.” “The Campus as a Public Space” is a loving biography of the greening and development of the University of Oklahoma’s plains campus in Norman. “Fraternity Row, the Student Ghetto, and the Faculty Enclave” describes why distinctive residential areas grew around the plateau campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. “Stadium Culture” uses Auburn to illustrate a way of life focused on a field, rich with stadium construction schedules, game scores, coach firings and RV parking, and how it all affected the growth of the university. And “Campus Corners and Aggievilles” chronicles the growth of Kansas State and Manhattan’s commercial areas, particularly the number of bars.

Continuing the same historical narrative, in “All Things Right and Relevant” Gumprecht tackles quality of life. As the University of California grew, its progressives captured the town of Davis, remade it as an archetypical “Peoples’ Republic,” and pioneered extensive bike lanes, curbside recycling and growth limits for the common good: thus, good changes. But, toward the end of the tale, Gumprecht breaks faith with his celebration.

A leitmotif appears: Gumprecht fears that ever-changing college towns, even ones as solid as Davis, will be ruined, not by non-believers but by their most zealous adherents. Reporting a struggle over what he presents as a model planned-housing development, one that would have allowed working-class people to continue to live near their university jobs and provided numerous environmental benefits to society, he sees self-serving, anti-growth progressives acting rigidly and intolerantly, sounding just like the conservatives they say they abhor. They appear, Gumprecht says, no longer interested in civil rights or economic justice, in the truly progressive values of making life better for all. They are, he laments, only interested in protecting themselves.

But, as we all know, devotion is a complex phenomenon, and Gumprecht quickly relents, coming to the rescue of his ideal. His restored faith rests on a refrain we will hear several times: even the most unsettling days in a college town remind us that articulate intellectual debate is alive there at a level rarely found in more, well, common communities. It is a defining moment in the revival - quite like the Athens Banner-Herald naming three of those for and against the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility as business newsmakers of 2008, citing their sparking of “an ongoing conversation about growth, jobs, community values and the future of Athens.”

The Future Is Here

Which brings us to Athens itself. Gumprecht calls its story “Paradise for Misfits,” and in it relates the unconventional lives of seven creative men and women - six who came to UGA as students, one drawn by the music scene - who each found a home in Athens. Quoting Vic Chesnutt, Gumprecht muses, “Athens has been a nurturing environment, a sort of 'womb, a place where I grew from my fetal rock ‘n’ roll state into a full-blown human.’”

The chronicles of these seven lives reflect many of the attributes that make college towns so attractive: youth culture, low cost of living [until recently], a laid-back atmosphere with little pressure to "succeed," a cosmopolitan air and tolerance, nay, appreciation of the unconventional.

But can these attributes survive? It’s the question that clearly haunts Gumprecht. Perhaps devotion always entails fear of loss. In any case, it comes to dominate the book.

“High-Tech Valhalla” tells the tale of Ann Arbor, MI, questioning the relationship between the University of Michigan and economic development. Introducing the case, Gumprecht confesses, “Researching and writing this chapter has been a struggle… I recognize the importance of economics to understanding places, but I hate money and what it does to us. ...I suppose one reason I am attracted to college towns is because they are generous places where money seems less important than elsewhere. …I considered eliminating this chapter…” But in the end he decides he must report both what he likes and “other distinguishing features.”

And he proceeds to do so with great attention to detail: plans and figures and dates, costs and square footage and numbers of hoped-for employees of business parks, and extensive documentation of the rates of success and failure. What he finds is a long, volatile, unsettling relationship, full of exciting advances - in health sciences, automobile sensing technology and computer software - and shockingly rapid crashes, with Pfizer suddenly pulling 2,100 jobs in 2007 that killed another 3,723 spin-off jobs as well. Ultimately, it is mostly an uncertain relationship, one without a clear direction, though with obvious benefits and costs. Towards the end of the chapter we find this assessment: “‘The heart and soul of Ann Arbor has disappeared,’ says one resident.”

Gumprecht goes on to cite experts, both pro and con. It seems college towns, of the type admired by Gumprecht, are good places for creating ideas and perhaps even start-ups, but they don’t have the population size, diversity or quality of life of the larger urban areas to which many of Ann Arbor’s successful start-ups eventually decamp. At which point there follows the refrain about college town conversations rarely heard in other places.

The final thematic chapter, “Town vs. Gown,” is the story of Newark, DE, home of the University of Delaware, where Gumprecht’s mother went to graduate school and he ran wild as a kid. It, too, is a story of ups and downs, of good relations and bad; of rowdy drunken students and programs to diminish the effects of their antisocial behavior on other citizens; of campus expansion and efforts to improve relations between college and town; and of implacable student life overwhelming old single-family neighborhoods and the struggles to preserve both.

But here, in addition to the conversation refrain, Gumprecht is able to report a bit of concrete good news. At a particular juncture in this particular town, when regulations modestly deflecting student migration happened to work together with programs encouraging construction of large modern apartment complexes catering to, and at that particular time desired by, students, the two seemed to actually reduce the stress on older neighborhoods.

In the end, Gumprecht looks briefly to the future. Athens has already seen much of what he describes: higher prices due to ever-increasing market demand for an ever more rare commodity; an aging hipster population with fewer young replacements; the static tidal flux of economic development, with its detritus of parking lots; and an influx of retirees adding a new variable to the old stresses.

But the professional Gumprecht eventually argues that college towns have stabilized and, in most cases, “the characteristics that make them unusual and compelling are likely to persist.” It’s an endearing, if not completely convincing position for those of us who have spent many years studying, living and teaching in college towns - watching them change, searching for the perfect one. Karen is already getting tired of hearing me cite the many fascinations of the book.

M. Wray Witten