What Happened to Your College Town: The Changing Relationship of Higher Education and College Towns, 1940–2000

Kate Rousmaniere

doi:10.1017/heq.2021.31

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the history of what is commonly called the town-gown relationship in American college towns in the six decades after the Second World War. A time of considerable expansion of higher education enrollment and function, the period also marks an increasing detachment of higher education institutions from their local communities. Once closely tied by university offices that advised the bulk of their students in off-campus housing, those bonds between town and gown began to come apart in the 1970s, due primarily to legal and economic factors that restricted higher education institutions’ outreach. Given the importance of off-campus life to college students, over half of whom have historically lived off campus, the essay argues for increased research on college towns in the history of higher education.

Highlights

Once closely tied by university offices that advised the bulk of their students in off-campus housing, those bonds between town and gown began to come apart in the 1970s, due primarily to legal and economic factors that restricted higher education institutions’ outreach
Given the importance of off-campus life to college students, over half of whom have historically lived off campus, the essay argues for increased research on college towns in the history of higher education
Between 1955 and 1978 Opp led the University of Florida’s Off-Campus Housing Office of the Division of Housing, which functioned as a listing, inspection, advising, and referral agency for all rental housing requested by university students, faculty, and staff—a number that by 1970 averaged an annual 20,000 clients

Summary

Higher Education Enters the Housing Business

The first systemic economic investment of higher education in the business of housing began in the late 1940s with the rapid enrollment of returning World War II veterans on the GI Bill. 328 Kate Rousmaniere loans depended on repayment from other residence hall operations—a requirement that would prove challenging to universities in later years As their off-campus holdings increased, many institutions formalized the advising responsibilities of the dean of students with the creation of an off-campus housing office, like that which Opp directed at the University of Florida beginning in 1955. Facing legal and political fire, and reluctant to enforce regulations on local landlords who housed most of their students, many universities closed the offcampus offices that had been responsible for enforcing the antidiscrimination codes and replaced them with voluntary committees staffed by faculty, students, and community members The purpose of such committees was educational: to explain the university position on racial discrimination and to hear complaints and initiate efforts to discourage discrimination.. Most student affairs administrators, drawing on their profession’s emerging social psychology emphasis, turned inward to focus on students’ experience of residential life in dormitories, largely overlooking the experiences of the majority of students who lived off campus. For example, in his influential 1974 study, Commuting Versus Resident Students, Arthur Chickering essentially dismissed off-campus students as being less engaged in academic activities and more likely to fail academic courses than those who lived in residence halls.

Trouble in Town

Findings

Conclusion