What other college towns can teach us about College Park’s challenges

Our contributors recently discussed why College Park, Maryland doesn’t have the same “college town” feel as the places around similar flagship universities in states like Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, or California. But College Park isn’t the only place struggling with these issues. What can we learn from other college towns around the nation?

Geoff Hatchard posed the question:

[What] college towns aren’t the commonly-cited ones that may be “somewhat great” and are improving that College Park can look to as inspiration? I’m thinking of places that have or are overcoming obstacles. The first that comes to mind is New Haven, CT. Are there other examples anyone can think of?

Ben Ross said, “Boston University might be an example. When I lived in Boston, that stretch of Commonwealth Avenue was dominated by auto dealerships. It’s much more urban now.”

Tracey Johnstone has an example from not too far away:

Old Dominion U. in Norfolk had/has the same problems: It’s a metropolitan area with better [or worse] places to go and Hampton Blvd. divides it 1/3-2/3rds. And, to be honest, men vastly outnumber women in the Norfolk area (whereas it’s the opposite in the immediate DC area) so, the demographic skews younger and more male than most college towns. In other words, college girls aren’t limited to dating college boys. As a lot of first-generation college students attend Old Dominion, the income/class jump from dating college students to sailors isn’t that big. And the situation is muddied by all the folks attending Old Dominion while still serving and on the GI Bill after getting out.

All that contributed to no “college” ambiance.

Toronto has a few student-oriented places near the university like the Brunswick House, but on one side is the Ontario Parliament Building and on another Toronto’s “Rodeo Drive” with Cartier, Louis Vuitton, etc. Not exactly college fare.

Joe Fox fleshed out the list:

Comparisons that come to mind (for me) to UMD — being near an urban area, but not having an urban campus like GWU or ODU, in a large market— are:

• University of Miami
• SMU in Dallas
• University of Richmond
• Manhattan College
• Rutgers
• Seton Hall
• UC Berkeley
• UCLA
• UC-Irvine
• Arizona State
• George Mason U

Of the above, only Tempe and Westwood, to me, have that feel. The rest are similar, or less college-like, than College Park.

Geoffrey Hatchard said, “Add SJSU in San José to that list.”

SJSU is compact, dense, has 30,000 students, but turns its back on all four sides to the city around it. Parking garages are located on a couple of the corners, and the only place where there has been an active move to make the school and the outside city mix is at the northwest corner where the MLK Library, shared by the school and the city’s library system (serving as its HQ), sits.

Gray Kimbrough tried to break down the “college town” challenge into some specific factors, which we quoted in the first part as well. He went on to tie them into general trends nationwide:

UMD has a pretty perfect storm of:

1. A nearby community that is relatively hostile to the university and its students, as others have already mentioned.
2. A location near, but not really in, a fairly major city.
3. A campus that is relatively suburban and spread out, in addition to having little interface with the surrounding community.
4. Its large size, especially relative to its town.
5. Its lack of a medical center, which can often provide a built-in need for communication between the university and the community (and all the positive results that flow from that).

Universities with prototypical college towns generally lack #2. The closest thing I can think of to an exception would be Princeton, which is NYC-accessible because of NJT, but not really that close. Also Ann Arbor isn’t all that far from Detroit, but it’s somehow in a different world.

Universities that have condition #2 but nonetheless have good relations with the community tend to lack or have resolved at least one of the other conditions. Northwestern has the advantage that Evanston is quite a bit larger than College Park, but it also has a much denser campus that isn’t completely inward facing. Minnesota isn’t exactly in downtown Minneapolis, but it has a dense campus that interfaces with a commercial strip on at least one side. And despite original reluctance, UMN’s leaders have come around to the idea that transit has a huge role to play in tying the campus to the broader community. Berkeley might be the closest example here, but I haven’t spent enough time there to comment on what they’re doing right.

Basically think of any large university that has a decent amount of activity near campus. All of these have at least one side of campus that blends relatively seamlessly with a prime commercial strip. UMD has a pretty effective buffer on its side of campus facing US 1, and basically no part of campus faces outward. NCSU is beyond what could be considered a relatively dense core in Raleigh, yet somehow its main campus is denser than UMD’s.

Also, where a university lacks a great relationship with the surrounding community, a medical center can serve as an entry point to a discussion to improve that. I see some schools that have turned their backs on their towns, like Yale and Duke, starting to take advantage of this. UMD has a vet school, but I don’t think this has the same effect as a really good hospital. Even GW and Georgetown have built-in positive interactions with DC because of their med schools and hospitals.

College Park can’t do much about #2, #4, or #5, but they can work to change #3 in particular, and hopefully work on #1 in the process. There needs to be an acknowledgment that the layout of UMD’s campus absolutely plays a factor here. As they build out the campus, perhaps they can work to both build more densely and build connections to the surrounding area.

Jonathan Krall brought it back to walkability and the urban form:

In my experience, most universities have adjacent commercial areas, so long as zoning allows it. The ones with college towns have human-scale street grids in or adjacent to the commercial zone. This is true of UC Boulder, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSB, all of which have large cities nearby. It is not true of UM College Park or UC San Diego. I do not know how those street grids came to be, but they make all the difference. What the college-town part of Boulder (just west of the school) has over College Park isn’t better shops and restaurants. It’s that people like to walk and bicycle in the college-town part of Boulder (and the rest of Boulder as well, but that’s another story).

However, these college towns could be considered anemic (Boulder, UCSB) or over-commercialized (Berkeley, UCLA) compared to a small college town such as Ithaca, NY, home to Ithaca College and Cornell University. The big-city effect is real, but it is the walkable street grid that is essential.

Owen Chaput pointed out that what makes a good “college town” varies depending on whose eyes you are looking through:

When we ask what makes a good college town, whose perspective are we looking at it from? Undergraduates, graduate students, staff, unaffiliated residents, and random visitors all have very different needs and interests, and what suits one group very well might be uninteresting (or a nuisance) for another group. I suspect that a great college town comes in part from having all groups present on or nearby campus, and relatively dependent on the campus business district(s) to meet their needs.

For towns looking to improve, here are a few possible factors: for undergrads, the challenge is getting them off campus and spending money or living in the surrounding community. With grad students, the challenge is enough cheap housing, beer, and culture nearby the university so the grad students don’t go live somewhere more interesting and affordable. Staff (professors, admin, support) and unaffiliated community residents need to be able to live close enough to the college business districts to patronize them year-round, but require diversified housing stock and separation from the weekend rowdiness.

Ithaca, NY is the best I’ve ever spent time in. Hard to find fault with it, except it is far from a major city and frigid for six months of the year. But it’s an easier example since it doesn’t fit the UM-College Park suburban-urban rubric, and I think it benefited from natural geography keeping things crowded in two directions. Emory is bad. Surrounded by very expensive, low-density suburban housing, but only three miles from Atlanta! Very little commercial zoning. Awful, awful traffic. It has a huge medical facility and the CDC right next door, but lacks any college town feel. The walkable street grid explanation fits for Emory.

What universities around the nation do you think have lessons for UMD and College Park?