College Townies: How Do You Honour A Place As You Breeze By?

http://www.thetowner.com/college-townies/

by bootload • 9 years ago

25 18 9 years ago

ianai2• 9 years ago

Always treat people as people. If you're treating someone as a "means to an end" then you're not treating them humanely. That's exactly the way to win enemies and violent tendencies. It goes the same with towns and cities in aggregate.

Know that I say this as someone who doesn't feel very welcome where I live currently. The many aggressive behaviors I experience daily have made me resent this place. So I look for ways and places to appreciate it here. I'm still looking to leave. But I'm also embracing my existence here.

rm_dash_rf• 9 years ago

This hits home. I am also a faculty kid. You grow up thinking the university is awesome. And it is. You get involved in the university when you are older and find that the students for the most part treat the city and its residents like crap. The word townie is thrown around in a derogatory manner towards the locals. You are left thinking why the heck should I support this university when the alumni base has such a bad view of the people that actually live in the city. I realize that not everyone at the university is like that but its enough that it seems like a real cultural problem.

pkd2• 9 years ago

Is this more common in the US? Because in my country it seems to be the absolute opposite. The permanent residents (or the locals as we call them) are extremely apathetic towards the students. Whereas the students (me included) absolutely fell in love with the place and find it hard to leave.

The locals also take advantage of the relative wealthiness of the students (higher education is not cheap) and you will find them skirting rules everywhere: autos don't run by meter, you are charged extra for cold bottles of soft drinks, restaurants and pubs are extra pricey and so are the rents - all this compared to a bigger non-university town just 5 kms away.

panglott3• 9 years ago

There are different kinds of "college towns" in the US.

Boston is a big college town because it has several of the nation's most important/prestigious institutions of higher education—but it's also a distinctive and vibrant city in its own right, with a unique history, culture, built environment. New York is similar.

But many of the state universities and land grant universities, especially in the West, put the state's largest and most important school in a small and otherwise unremarkable town. Norman, Oklahoma, has a population of 110k and the University of Oklahoma, which has enrollment of 30k. Lawrence, Kansas, has a population of 87k and the University of Kansas, which has enrollment of 28k. West Lafayette, Indiana, has a population of 29k and Purdue University, which has enrollment of 40k. Bloomington, Indiana, has a population of 84k and the main campus of Indiana University, which has enrollment of 49k.

These are all nice little towns, but they are all relatively small towns with small enconomies, and there's just a limited number of college graduates they can absorb. They usually have local political cultures strongly influenced by the college and very different than the small and rural communities that surround them.

Plus, lots of American communities can seem very generic. Many Americans towns are less than a century old, with only a few generations of traditions and history, and surrounded by similar communities with a similar size, culture, environment, and history.

iamacynic• 9 years ago

one thing the University of California system got right is that they put their campuses in large metropolitan areas, oftentimes in some of the most expensive real estate around. there really is no concept of 'townie' vs 'student' from what i saw.

kratak• 9 years ago

I wouldn't consider Boston a "college town", and I doubt it qualifies according to this article.* A "college town" usually means a town where the college dominates the local economy, and the students make up a large portion (or even a majority) of the total population during the school year.

I used to go to Virginia Tech; at the time, there were roughly 34k people in the town during the year, 26k of those students. The "townies" were only about 8k (and of course, this included the staff and faculty that lived within town limits, which was a significant portion of the townies). So when it was summertime, the town was seemingly deserted (and it was a wonderful time too!).

* As an example, Tempe, Arizona is home to ASU, one of the top 10 universities in the US by enrollment. Look at the map in the article: there's no dot for the Phoenix metro area. Hence, Tempe (and the rest of Phoenix) is not a "college town", because even with over 50k students, the school doesn't dominate the local economy.

lotsofpulp• 9 years ago

Unless vendors are discriminating against customers, I don't understand which rules are being skirted in your examples. Higher demand should cause higher prices (or more vendors, but that requires prices to reach a certain amount first).

pkd2• 9 years ago

Skirting rules means exactly that - skirting rules. You are not supposed to sell things at a price higher than what is marked as the MRP - yet that is the norm with soft drinks of any kind. Taxis have a meter attached to them and they have to use it to calculate fares but the drivers here don't even bother to switch the meters on. The police is also apathetic.

This isn't capitalism I am talking about.

neaden• 9 years ago

I grew up in a college town (a large state land grand university) and this isn't really how I perceived things. The complaints were more about college students littering, drinking too much, or playing loud music.

futun2• 9 years ago

What 90% of college graduates fail to consider is that many of those townies will one day be far richer than they are.

The idea of students 'looking down' at (for example) the local plumber is often ridiculous, considering a plumbers' hourly rate often exceeds that of many lawyers.

As we all know, there is a frightening, decreasing correlation between college education and financial success. At the same time there are plenty of locals who work hard and pour money into real estate.

It's a disturbing truth for most college graduates who drink the kool-aid of "education equals financial superiority". And colleges are only too happy to serve up that kool aid.

eg: I know a guy my age who owns a dozen hardware stores. He made his first million before he was 30, and he dropped out of high school. He's also one of the sharpest business people I know.

Be nice to everyone. You might learn something.

ianai2• 9 years ago

Money doesn't buy moral righteousness nor equal brilliance. Our economy has proven that time and time again.

I absolutely agree with you that people should treat people like people, though. The plumber shouldn't look down on the college student and the college student shouldn't look down on the plumber. If anything they ought to talk and learn from one another. I've learned my hardest to understand and learn on my own lessons from people that were drastically different from myself.

etrautmann• 9 years ago

That's not really the point he was making in this article, which was more about people that make their homes in multiple places. It was using the term townie differently from the standard definition.

futun2• 9 years ago

Just in case this isn't 100% clear to anyone: "Townie" is derogatory.

tcfunk• 9 years ago

I feel I have this problem(?) still, years after graduating college. I have lived a few places now, and held several jobs, and each time I have treated both the location and occupation with an air of impermanence. I neglect to make friends or make any long-term commitments because I know I will one day leave them behind.

epberry• 9 years ago

Well hey, I live here too! Actually I've lived here my whole life, growing up in West Lafayette and attending Purdue, and then working here as a software engineer after graduation. The author is spot on about many of the drawbacks but there are quite a few nice things that are hard to appreciate unless you've actually experienced them.

One I think is quality of living for the price. I'm pretty sure that by several metrics my quality of life is much better than that of many friends living in NYC or SF. I make about 1/3 of their salary on average but I have a relatively large apartment, walk 8 minutes to work every day, see my parents about once a week (starting to appreciate this more and more as I get older), have a steady supply of graduate student friends and my own colleagues who I went to school with to converse and hang out with, and a Purdue community to engage with and learn from.

Drawbacks for me are a intense feelings of FOMO as I read about the innovation happening in real tech hubs, a lack of a larger network of startups and strong engineering companies, no big city to experience, and seeing my parents once a week ;).

I don't want to stay in West Lafayette forever (although I would strongly consider moving back here to raise a family) and maybe I'm just rationalizing my situation, but the SF-or-bust feelings I used to have in college have subsided quite a bit.

closeparen• 9 years ago

This attitude manifested itself most corporally in the behavior of the local college students in traffic; they would wander in and out of the street without looking, exuding a kind of studied indifference, sending a clear message to the local people that the streets were for them, risks of blunt force trauma notwithstanding

It's one of my favorite things about college campuses that pedestrians own the streets and cars wait their turn.

You could always tell when it was parents weekend by the huge size of cars on the streets and their unusual aggressiveness at crosswalks. Suburban/exurban parents out of their element. It was always satisfying to see them ticketed. This is an urban college campus. That shit doesn't fly here.

It's not really about student vs. townie, it's just that these few blocks, unlike almost anywhere else in the country, are for walking.

College Townies: How Do You Honour A Place As You Breeze By?

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