Stephen Volan • Department of Geography, Indiana University Bloomington • June 2014
The growth rate of American citizens attending college has generally exceeded that of the overall population in the twentieth century. The GI Bill and the Baby Boom created an unprecedented increase in educational access: while the population doubled between the war and the end of the century, holders of bachelor’s degrees quintupled (Ryan and Siebens 2012).
By the second half of the century, the notion of the “campus” had expanded to take on roles beyond mere classrooms and laboratories. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1989) classifies three types of urban places: where people live, where they work, and where they gather socially and recreate, or First, Second and Third Places, respectively. American campuses began solely as Second Places — where students “worked” at learning — but have come to offer First Places — housing for a significant portion of the student body — as well as Third Places such as cafés, theatres, fitness and recreation centers — functions usually provided by or found in conventional cities.
The typical four-year university today offers more than classroom instruction: it offers a self-contained urban experience, complete with services like police, public works, public transit and utilities, that allows students to live several years of their lives almost entirely on campus. This research proposes reconsidering the college campus as a municipal phenomenon: how campuses have become like cities unto themselves, and how they relate to the conventional cities that often host them.
Two basic research questions will structure the study: 1a) How and to what extent have campuses expanded municipally, as “First Places” where people reside? If a campus were not uniquely regarded in America, citizens would consider the warm bodies there residents of some conventional municipal jurisdiction: a county, and perhaps a city, town or village. Thus, these forms of standard government are an appropriate template to examine the campus’ assimilation of certain municipal function, from public safety to public works.
1b) How and to what extent have campuses expanded commercially, as “Third Places” where people shop, play and recreate? Campuses offer many retail services which now play a significant role in campus budgets: food provision, basic goods, recreational and health services. They do so, however, in artificial land-use patterns that resemble theme parks more than naturally-occurring urban places. Both of these expansions deserve scrutiny.
2) How have campuses co-evolved with traditional cities and towns? How do they interact, or not? How is a campus like, and unlike, a city?
The intellectual merit of this study begins with its attempt to study college campuses from both a municipal-commercial perspective and an urban-economic one. Despite conforming to standard national definitions of populated places, campuses are overlooked as special exceptions in the consideration of towns and cities as markets. The act of analyzing a campus as an urban place unto itself — as though it were a city — is uncommon, if not unprecedented. Further, few attempts to directly measure the economic impact of a campus has been undertaken.
The broader impacts of the study include demonstrating the economic significance of academic-driven decision making about the building of campuses. In the national retreat from land-use policies collectively called “sprawl,” this study will provide valuable feedback toward developing specialized planning policy for de-suburbanizing college campuses and more urbanely integrating them with their surroundings. Lessons from the study will apply to any kind of “campus” — military base, gated community, housing project, theme park, or capital city (such as Tallahassee, Florida, or Washington, DC). Inherent in the study of American college campuses are also certain societal attitudes toward the youngest of adults. The national tendency for applying the principle of in loco parentis to ever-older people attending college over the course of the twentieth century conflicted with the fight to lower the age of suffrage which resulted in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. This study will trace the embodiment of that conflict in the physical plant of campuses.
(Full proposal at <http://pages.iu.edu/~svolan/geog/thesis/proposal.pdf>)