Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 19

had chaired trustee meetings and gala receptions on campus.
Attendees had scuttled under umbrellas to avoid getting
drenched.
One of the soggiest parts of campus was the sweeping
grass sward of the elegant outdoor quadrangle, now a flooded
turf with several thousand folding chairs, carefully laid
out for Ball State's first commencement ceremony on the
traditional quadrangle since the pandemic began. The choice
Geoffrey Mearns said he would make by sunrise was whether
to move the ceremony inside, to the basketball arena.
Mearns ran around the quadrangle and looked at the
sky, checking and rechecking the weather radar on his
phone. Around 6 a.m., he called his staff associates and his
wife, Jennifer, to say, as I heard him put it later that morning,
" Let's do it. " The commencement would be outside. It
was still drizzling as he made the call.
At 10 a.m., in a bright red academic robe, Mearns welcomed
the graduates, who were seated on 10,000 chairs that
had just been wiped and blown dry, to a providential beginning
of the next stage of their lives.
Of course, it wouldn't really have mattered if the call
had been wrong-if the rain hadn't cleared, if the sun
hadn't broken through until midday. I've sat through wet
commencements before. They can make for rueful but
proud reminiscences years afterward. ( " Well, things started
out tough ... " ) In this case, my wife, Deb, and I would
have been among the rained-on at Ball State, with stories
to tell; we had come to give commencement addresses and
accept honorary degrees. But the rain had stopped, and we
were in the procession, walking carefully over the slippery
grass behind Mearns.
The reason we were there, and had come to know the
Ball State community over the previous three years, was our
belief that the " Let's do it " spirit of Mearns's bet about the
weather, while of minor consequence on its own, was connected
to larger gambles and commitments Ball State has
made. (The university's motto, " We Fly, " is just a more elegant
version of " Let's do it. " )
Over the past five years, the most dramatic step Ball
State has taken might also be the most consequential for
Muncie. In 2018, the city turned the management of its entire
K-12 public school system over to the public university,
something with no clear precedent in American higher
education history.
This takeover, unlike the weather forecast, is genuinely
important, and Deb and I think what we have seen in central
Indiana matters. It and developments like it have attracted
little or no attention from the national press. But we think
they are an introduction to an important new era of colleges,
college leaders, and " college towns. "
2) The story of college towns ...
Let's start at the end, with " college towns. " The term is a
reminder that having a nearby college has different implications
for a community than having a factory or an office
park. Small liberal arts colleges, big research universities,
ambitious community colleges, HBCUs, tech schools, specialized
academies, religious institutions-these and other
kinds of schools have always given college towns special
advantages.
There are small towns closely identified with small
liberal arts colleges. In Massachusetts, Amherst the
college-and the town. In Ohio, Oberlin. In Kentucky,
Berea. In Tennessee, the University of the South, at Sewanee.
In eastern Washington, Whitman.
There are elite universities that have transformed
the economies and possibilities of their regions. The
Harvard/MIT cluster in Cambridge and greater Boston.
Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF in the Bay Area of California.
Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh,
in Pittsburgh. UCSD in San Diego. Caltech as a center of
the aerospace industry in Southern California. The University
of Utah and Brigham Young, in the Salt Lake City/
Provo area. The North Carolina universities that give the
" research triangle " its name. Any study of the growth of
these areas has chapters on these colleges' roles.
There are big land grant and state institutions that
have become the technology-and-culture centers of entire
regions. Ohio State University in Columbus. Wichita
State in central Kansas. Penn State in central Pennsylvania.
The University of Texas in Austin. A full list could
take the rest of this article.
And there are particular institutions that have become
thin reeds, barely propping up the economies of
their surrounding areas. To enumerate them would be
cruel. I'll just say that some rural communities have tied
their economic fate to jobs in the prison-industrial complex.
Those tied instead to the small-college economy
have struck a better bargain. A draw of professional talent
into the community. A better chance that young people
who come for " institutional " reasons will want to stay
and build.
... and of college leaders
The ramifications of being a college town are familiar-as
are the gaps between colleges and the communities in which
they are located, which is why we say " town and gown. " What
is new is how an under-noticed generation of college leaders
is deciding to use their institutions as deliberate instruments
of community, civic, and regional advancement.
What a seaport was to growing communities in the
1600s, what waterfalls for producing power were in the
1700s, what railroad connections were in the 1800s, and on
through the years, ambitious colleges can be to communities
of our era. The Washington Monthly has rightly focused
on colleges as engines of individual mobility, social responsibility,
and national cohesion. In this and upcoming stories
we will be publishing in the Monthly, Deb and I will report
Washington Monthly 19
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