I think college towns are o.k., not that I live in one currently. Mostly, I
think it depends on which town you're talking about.
When I was in New Haven, it was upsetting how Yale looked like a bunch of
gothic or Georgian fortresses (called "colleges") complete with moats,
(ornamental) drawbridges, and battlements, designed to keep the Unwashed
out. I understand that it's gotten much worse since the early 1970s (as the
internal Preppie Quotient rose and the external social situation fell).
In Berkeley, I liked the town more than UC. Maybe it was the town that made
the university rather than vice-versa? But there were a lot of people who
had become excessively adapted to Berkeley and had a very hard time dealing
with the rest of the world. The politics there tends to be very insular. It
does seem to be a major source of the current manias about "designer
coffees" (Starbucks, born of Pete's), yuppie chow (Chez Panisse), and men
wearing earrings, since those were common in Berkeley back in the 1970s,
before they took hold in the rest of the US. Kinko's, which is taking over
the US (and maybe the Canadian) copying business, also started there.
In L.A., there's no real "college town" around Occidental College (where I
worked first). It's more a collection of lower middle-class bungalows.
There's also not a college town around LMU, where I currently hang my hat.
It's more upper middle-class houses, a neighborhood that had deliberately
excluded non-whites until very recently. UCLA also doesn't have a college
town. There are very rich houses in Bel Air and other UCLA-adjacent
neighborhoods, plus a consumer-oriented neighborhood with lots of movie
theatres (Westwood Village). Few if any bookstores exist there, so I can't
call it a college town. (It's no longer the teen scene that it used to be,
due to some gang slayings.) BTW, these days the UCLA profs seem to be
living way off near Simi Valley, the white enclave famous for getting the
LAPD goons off the hook in the first Rodney King trial.
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
"A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and
human beings dear." -- R.H. Tawney.
