Blake Gumprecht
In my continuing accidental quest to avoid traditional novels, I stumbled across this nonfiction book that studies its eponymous phenomenon. Having lived in what I believe to be the consummate college town for several years, I thought the book looked incredibly interesting and decided to read it; as a bonus, I discovered that Ann Arbor is indeed the focus on one of the book's chapters. If there's one authorial quirk that defines this book, it is definitely Gumprecht's self-awareness as a writer. For a book that attempts so hard to be a field-defining academic tome, The American College Town defends its existence rather much and uses quite a few familiar I's that are ill-advised at best. The book immediately launches into a quite-autobiographical preface that does a good job of outlining the book's goals, setting it up for brilliant failure, but seems a little self-indulgent. Each chapter begins with a formulaic college-paper type opening and none fail to present a self-conscious thesis statement that, again, only establishes goals Gumprecht doesn't even begin to reach.
The book reads like a poorly thought out research paper, complete with maddening typos (like ridiculous plurals), but its lack of diversified sentence and chapter structures eventually became delightful as I attempted to locate the thesis at the beginning of each chapter, and to note specifically how Gumprecht failed in its inevitable second part (relating a case study to the college town phenomenon as a whole). The best part about Gumprecht's consistent inability to properly support his assertions was the inevitable final few paragraphs of each chapter, which rather frantically attempted to translate hyper-specific situations into sweeping pronouncements about college town culture. The entire structure of the book is inherently flawed, and these chapter-ending grandiose parades of utterly unsupported assertions simply highlight the extravagant failure of Gumprecht's attempt to launch the study of college towns as such. The preface and first chapter of The American College Town do, in fact, a wonderful job of exploring the topic at large. Gumprecht knows he is attempting a miracle in uniting all college towns into a unified theory of everything, but manages to intelligently extract define several qualities (note the absence of "unique" here) that create a college town-y atmosphere. He attempts to zero in on several archetypal college towns to illuminate these qualities, but instead of using case-studies to illuminate general trends, The American College Towns is simply an interesting amalgamation of short, thematic city histories that all attempt to become relevant and sweeping in their final page but which remain entirely too specific to be useful.
The main problem of this book may not be its scope, which is immense given the diversity of city habits and atmospheres and multiplied given the enhanced weirdness and eccentricity of most college towns, but its lack of editing. This seems incredibly odd given Gumprecht's constant near-self-deprecation, but this book's structure isn't utilized at all towards his purposes and his nagging repetition of phrases is absolutely maddening, particularly when they are flat out lies and contradictions (Ann Arbor is a college town. College towns have cheap rent. One has to be a lie.). And though Gumprecht self-consciously attempts to avoid cronyism by omitting his beloved Lawrence, Kansas as a focal point, his bias is apparent throughout the book and is flagrantly flaunted in his chapter about Ann Arbor. Perhaps I am exercising some cronyism myself, but holding Ann Arbor as the gold standard of how college towns are deteriorating in their college town-iness seems misguided, particularly when the chapter focuses on research facilities that invented minor things like, say, the Internet (a claim made by the book). The appearance of my twice-professor Jonathan Marwil doesn't salvage this chapter, which unprofessionally opens as a blatant attack on my beloved city. This seems even more egregious when the (seemingly) completely moronic Newark, Delaware gets a free pass and escapes without flagrant bias and without obvious comments that would, in fact, support Gumprecht's views about college towns and their development.
Despite all of its flaws, however, I was quite amused and educated by this book. Despite its complete failure to explore the universal facets of college towns, The American College Town does include several interesting portraits of places I never would have even considered. The University of Delaware wouldn't have ever been on my radar before we scheduled them in football for 2009, and I would have automatically dismissed Norman, Oklahoma or Manhattan, Kansas as conservative college town poseurs. Auburn and the aforementioned Newark look incredibly narrow minded and stupid, but whether this is because of the book's one-sided approach to them I cannot say. Ann Arbor is derided for not feeling like a college town once one gets out of...er...town, but I think we actually come out looking better because of Gumprecht's insistence on defining the college town as a single entity and his idiotic refusal to look at the parts of Ann Arbor that make it a better exemplar of other chapters than the one for which is was profiled.
Gumprecht begins his book by attempting to codify common elements of the college town feel, but he ends up accidentally celebrating the diversity within such towns. While some elements of each chapter are relevant at least to Ann Arbor (with which I am intimately familiar) and, often, to the snapshots of other featured towns, Gumprecht fails to see these similarities and ironically continues to expound upon their differences in chapter after chapter. The American College Town has some interesting ideas about the college town, but they emerge only after readers ignore the blowhard comments that purport to expose them (with the exception of the book's first chapter). The book fails miserably at giving a unified portrait of the American college town, but it is a decently written and captivating thematic look at several quirky cities that fit his well thought-out definition of college towns. With a little less self-consciousness and a lot more general editing, The American College Town may have been the defining work Gumprecht was attempting to create, but as it is it is no more than a panoramic view of several separate and thematically distinct American college towns.
Grade: C+
The book reads like a poorly thought out research paper, complete with maddening typos (like ridiculous plurals), but its lack of diversified sentence and chapter structures eventually became delightful as I attempted to locate the thesis at the beginning of each chapter, and to note specifically how Gumprecht failed in its inevitable second part (relating a case study to the college town phenomenon as a whole). The best part about Gumprecht's consistent inability to properly support his assertions was the inevitable final few paragraphs of each chapter, which rather frantically attempted to translate hyper-specific situations into sweeping pronouncements about college town culture. The entire structure of the book is inherently flawed, and these chapter-ending grandiose parades of utterly unsupported assertions simply highlight the extravagant failure of Gumprecht's attempt to launch the study of college towns as such. The preface and first chapter of The American College Town do, in fact, a wonderful job of exploring the topic at large. Gumprecht knows he is attempting a miracle in uniting all college towns into a unified theory of everything, but manages to intelligently extract define several qualities (note the absence of "unique" here) that create a college town-y atmosphere. He attempts to zero in on several archetypal college towns to illuminate these qualities, but instead of using case-studies to illuminate general trends, The American College Towns is simply an interesting amalgamation of short, thematic city histories that all attempt to become relevant and sweeping in their final page but which remain entirely too specific to be useful.
The main problem of this book may not be its scope, which is immense given the diversity of city habits and atmospheres and multiplied given the enhanced weirdness and eccentricity of most college towns, but its lack of editing. This seems incredibly odd given Gumprecht's constant near-self-deprecation, but this book's structure isn't utilized at all towards his purposes and his nagging repetition of phrases is absolutely maddening, particularly when they are flat out lies and contradictions (Ann Arbor is a college town. College towns have cheap rent. One has to be a lie.). And though Gumprecht self-consciously attempts to avoid cronyism by omitting his beloved Lawrence, Kansas as a focal point, his bias is apparent throughout the book and is flagrantly flaunted in his chapter about Ann Arbor. Perhaps I am exercising some cronyism myself, but holding Ann Arbor as the gold standard of how college towns are deteriorating in their college town-iness seems misguided, particularly when the chapter focuses on research facilities that invented minor things like, say, the Internet (a claim made by the book). The appearance of my twice-professor Jonathan Marwil doesn't salvage this chapter, which unprofessionally opens as a blatant attack on my beloved city. This seems even more egregious when the (seemingly) completely moronic Newark, Delaware gets a free pass and escapes without flagrant bias and without obvious comments that would, in fact, support Gumprecht's views about college towns and their development.
Despite all of its flaws, however, I was quite amused and educated by this book. Despite its complete failure to explore the universal facets of college towns, The American College Town does include several interesting portraits of places I never would have even considered. The University of Delaware wouldn't have ever been on my radar before we scheduled them in football for 2009, and I would have automatically dismissed Norman, Oklahoma or Manhattan, Kansas as conservative college town poseurs. Auburn and the aforementioned Newark look incredibly narrow minded and stupid, but whether this is because of the book's one-sided approach to them I cannot say. Ann Arbor is derided for not feeling like a college town once one gets out of...er...town, but I think we actually come out looking better because of Gumprecht's insistence on defining the college town as a single entity and his idiotic refusal to look at the parts of Ann Arbor that make it a better exemplar of other chapters than the one for which is was profiled.
Gumprecht begins his book by attempting to codify common elements of the college town feel, but he ends up accidentally celebrating the diversity within such towns. While some elements of each chapter are relevant at least to Ann Arbor (with which I am intimately familiar) and, often, to the snapshots of other featured towns, Gumprecht fails to see these similarities and ironically continues to expound upon their differences in chapter after chapter. The American College Town has some interesting ideas about the college town, but they emerge only after readers ignore the blowhard comments that purport to expose them (with the exception of the book's first chapter). The book fails miserably at giving a unified portrait of the American college town, but it is a decently written and captivating thematic look at several quirky cities that fit his well thought-out definition of college towns. With a little less self-consciousness and a lot more general editing, The American College Town may have been the defining work Gumprecht was attempting to create, but as it is it is no more than a panoramic view of several separate and thematically distinct American college towns.
Grade: C+
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