“A Tale of Two College Towns”:
For Wikipedia, the college town is one where an institution of higher learning “pervades” the life of the place. Good enough. I like this verb, “pervade.” In cities or towns that have enough other things going on—places we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, call “college towns”—it’s rather the place that pervades the school.
At its best, the small college in a small college town functions this way for the nonstudent residents, as a slightly mysterious world within the world that, while pursuing its own ends, expands everyone’s sense of what is possible.
For this to happen at all, the college has to be its own distinct place, present and familiar but in some ways opaque.
The otherworldly character of the liberal-arts college’s mission is obvious enough here: young Puritan theocrats studying, among others, older Puritan theocrats so that they can responsibly govern a Puritan theocracy. We are talking about shining cities on hills here. The SLAC makes up one component in a uniquely American fusion of utopianism as a tool of social reform, education as a tool of social mobility, and free real estate.
Horowitz rather diplomatically describes the reaction of the “college men” to this incursion:
They have perceived the especially diligent student as the “grind” and the student seeking faculty friendship as the “fisherman” or “brownnose.” Such terms of derogation have been necessary because college life has always had to contend with a significant number of students who have wanted no part of it—the outsiders. To the early colleges came some men for whom higher education was intended, those studying for the ministry.
Liberal education was for a very long time reserved to an elite—whence the word “liberal,” befitting free men—who were a small minority in Western societies. Gradually, except by the standards of the world at large, Americans began democratizing privilege.
Another way to put it is that America tried, for a brief moment, to build a welfare state—which is to say, a democratic civilization—and we did a lot of it through our schools. When the tide of opinion turned against welfare states, the school-based parts of our system were the only parts that were widely enough used to survive.
People expect a relatively small, selective, and liberal-arts-focused school to be a little weird. But the land-grant college or public university offers itself up as a public service, and is judged, probably unfairly, by different rules; meanwhile, it also crosses into more people’s daily lives more often and more dramatically, and thus offers itself up to be judged. Anthropologists have a useful term, “schismogenesis,” for that tendency of human beings to define ourselves by exaggerating and accentuating our differences from a nearby “other,” often two-thirds imaginary.
It baffles and enrages me that so much talent and earnestness comes together to create a student culture full of harried young people who let ChatGPT do all their homework for them because they don’t think they have time to get the education they pay for, but who also cut themselves or spiral into depression because they fail a test. It takes more than human ingenuity to make so little of so much. One is tempted to resort to demonology to explain it.
“Earnest dilettantism.” “Patience for everything.” “Gargantuan” and “quixotic” projects done “with total seriousness and dedication.” When a college town lives up to its potential, these are its hallmarks.
In any case, the biggest source of tension between the University of Michigan and its surrounding town is housing, [which] in fact [] pits out-of-town corporate landlords against local landlords. It amuses me that this conflict involves the very trait in which this particular town and this particular gown most resemble each other: the shared desire to appear liberal and public-spirited without bearing the costs and inconveniences of liberality and public-spiritedness.
[T]he liberal-arts college, small or huge, is an essentially humanist enterprise, and that too many of the people who run them have been cowards about admitting it.
Briefly, anyone who offers an account of human knowing and being in which we are not comparable in some ways to but actually reducible to machines is not a humanist. Nor is anyone who denies our potential for good, whether by adopting a Schopenhauerian disgust with people as such or by denying the meaningfulness of the distinction between good and evil themselves. Liberal education doesn’t absolutely require political liberalism, but it requires that you think there is such a thing as “freedom,” that it is a thing people rightly aspire to, and that you acknowledge the existence of “people.”
To hate the mind, to assign curiosity or disinterested love of a subject no place in one’s account of human motivation, to see every sign of particularity or individuality as “pretentiousness” or “elitism”: All of this is finally anti-human.