The Town-Gown Divide, Simply Illustrated (in Forty-Four Seconds)

Whitewater is a small town, of about fifteen thousand people. From east to west, the main road in town is about three miles long. Our town is lovely, but not a big place.

For years, this small town has struggled with town-university conflicts, despite myriad committees, projects, task forces, and commissions.

There’s no quicker illustration of the town-gown gap than the introduction from the university’s chancellor to our small city’s Common Council and Planning Commission members this spring.

Here’s that introduction:

A Greeting as Though from Afar from John Adams on Vimeo.

For goodness’ sake, the chancellor addresses residents in the very same, small town as though they were travelers from another land, as though they’d only just arrived from faraway Patagonia.

They haven’t. They live in the same modest town in which the chancellor lives. It’s both funny and false, stiff and awkward, to speak as though the city and campus were separate realms. A visit to campus is not a visit to Olympus; a visit in town is not a trip to another continent.

It’s all one place, merely a few miles across.

Thinking and speaking otherwise is why we’ve not closed the town-gown gap.