A nice, boring makeover

Long story short, I attended three universities as an undergraduate (indecisive, anyone?), but the one I attended for the longest, and the one I identify with the most is a private Christian college in the middle of rural Indiana. It was a great school with a great reputation and I have great memories of attending there. It was there that I met my wife, discovered writing, and met great friends for life. But unlike some of my classmates my devotion to it falls well short of “cultlike” or “these were the best years of my life.” It was a nice experience and a good education and that’s about it. Before graduation I transferred out, because I had to go see about a girl (my wife of 27 years and counting).

I keep tabs on this university pretty easily because my parents live in a nearby town. The town the school resides in (population: 3,800) is currently under construction, which is not an exaggeration. Like the whole thing is torn up, because due to some Big Pharmaceutical grant money the university found its way into, it is re-beautifying and reimagining town to make it look less like a small, blue-collar Indiana town and more like the well-heeled suburban-Chicago and West Michigan locales from which many of its students hail. It is buying up houses all over town and ripping up the main road that runs through what used to be downtown.

The houses and storefronts that used to reside in those places are being replaced by brand new builds which are boring and nice and brochure-like. The result will, I’m sure, be very pleasant, but will be fundamentally something other than the town that used to be there. The question is, “Is this a good idea?”

If you’re from town or like the idea of town as, well, town, the answer is probably “no.” But, too bad, because $25 million speaks pretty loudly and unless you have it lying around, your opinion doesn’t really matter and you can drown your sorrows in hipster coffee and shiplap because your town is about to look like Chip and Joanna Gaines’s living room. Complicating things is the fact that the school’s relationship with town has always been strained at best, what with college being the purview of the (broad strokes here) wealthy and educated and (sometimes) arrogant, and town being what many small Indiana towns are. There’s really only an ice-cream shop serving as the de facto line of demarcation between “town” and “school,” and it has kind of been the only thing holding the two entities together for decades.

Rumor has it there will be apartments and condos for parents and alums, so that they can come back and relive the old college magic. I work at a similar small Christian university in the South and because I like being early to things (especially jokes), I’ve been joking for a decade that some Christian university will essentially build dorms on campus for parents, so that they can follow their kids to college and keep tabs on their professors and maybe cut up their food for them in the dining hall.

It looks like it may be happening at my old school, which will, of course, be disastrous for whatever we still mean by “the college experience” (if it were to mean something like “developing independence” and “cutting the apron strings”), but there is an “if the market will bear it then we should do it” mentality that is pervading Christian higher-ed at the moment. And with more parents working remotely, why not follow little Calvin or Athanasius to school and keep tabs on him, while taking advantage of the myriad dining options and pickleball courts yourself? It’s higher-ed meets Country Club. And if Adoniram is feeling a little stressed out from 14 credit hours and a couple of extracurriculars, I’m sure Mom can just pull up to class and take notes for him!

I’m exaggerating but only a little. I’m sure this is much ado about nothing. In a decade, everyone will probably love the new version of town, and college as we know it may not exist at all. But at least we’ll have some nice shopping.