Dead College Road Trip, Donna Tartt’s Campus Inspiration, and More - Around the College Town
Links related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Oct. 26 - 31.
Note: each week Around the College Town will feature a list of links from stories I am reading that are related to urbanism and higher ed, often combining both. This will include a brief commentary on each link. These may grow into future articles by me. Submit a link if you think it fits.
A Road Trip to Dead and Dying Colleges - Inside Higher Ed
This article was written by me! It covers my 3,000-mile summer research trip to 12 different college campuses that were dying or already dead. “It was like exploring a lost civilization—forgotten iconography and busted artifacts in crumbling buildings,” I wrote about the experience.
With funerals, gravesites, and liminal spaces, it certainly fits the theme of Halloween today, which happens to be my favorite holiday, too. But the article is more than that—it’s a jumping-off point for my current book project on dead and dying colleges. I’ll continue posting on the topic here at College Towns, too.
The Lore of Bennington College - Arcane Sensibility Substack
I hadn’t heard of Bennington College, and I’m afraid I haven’t read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but the Vermont liberal arts college is rumored to have inspired the author and novel. It sounds like a unique college, which reportedly doesn’t have “required classes or a limit to credits”, that attracts a quirky and unusual group of students. The vibe reminds me of the now-deceased Wells College that I visited in the article covered above.
And we have been losing some of the more unique institutions in higher ed these days. We need more weird places for weird people. There is too much standardization in education now (a future post from me).
China Official's Daughter Speaks Out Over Tim Walz Romance - Newsweek
I also previously wrote about Tim Walz’s experience teaching abroad in China when he was first named VP candidate to Kamala Harris. Since then, more info has come out about his time there, including reports that he had a budding relationship with a CCP official’s daughter. It sounds like a fairly typical case: A young bright-eyed American guy moves to Asia, falls in love quickly, has romantic-comedy-level cultural misunderstandings, and then the relationship fades just as fast. Hey, they all can’t work out.
Chinese Student to Face Criminal Charges for Voting in Michigan - The Detriot News
In more election-related international education news, a Chinese international student from the University of Michigan apparently voted illegally in the election. Whenever I teach about voter ID issues in the US, my international students are always shocked to find that many states do not require an ID to vote. It is quite a rare thing around the world.
I’m sometimes even a bit nervous to teach international students about this issue for fear that one of them would do exactly what the UMich student did. I always follow up the lesson with a discussion on how voter fraud can get you thrown in jail or deported, as is likely the case with the student in Michigan.
Foreign Students Can Bring Parents, But Is It Exploitation? - University World News
We’ve all heard of bring-your-kid to work day, but how about bring-your-parent-to-study-abroad? This might sound like helicopter parenting gone to the extreme, but it’s not. It’s actually a workforce improvement campaign in South Korea. With plunging birthrates, Korea is allowing international students’ parents to come to the country to work. Some are calling this exploitation since many of the parents are from less affluent countries and work in low-paying menial jobs.
The Obvious-Once-You-Think-About-It Reason Why Education Cuts Fertility - Bet On It Substack
Speaking of low birthrates, Bryan Caplan at the Bet On It Substack illustrates the simple way more education decreases birth. “As education goes up, fertility goes down,” he writes. He argues that people want to finish their education before having kids. So if the standard is having a high school degree, the age of parenthood would be around 19 or 20. If the standard is a BA, the age of parenthood would be around 23 or 24. And so on… Then, older parents are more likely to have fewer kids. I have certainly seen this in my highly educated professor/ PhD circles. The conundrum of plunging birthrates is worthy of a future post by me (I’m certainly not going to tell everyone to stop getting an education; well, maybe just the PhD).
