Let me tell you a story that happened many years ago. In the years leading up to the Berkeley free speech movement and the subsequent anti-Vietnam War movement, San Jose State College was a major California party school.
Students came there from all over CA to go away to school while paying in-state tuition. Most lived in thousands of apartment units clustered around the campus, I was one of them. We got a decent undergrad degree and had a blast doing it. I stuck around for an MBA.
When “the troubles” came to Berkeley, they happened at SJSC as well, though less publicized. The result, students looking for a fun place to get a degree stopped coming to troubled San Jose from distant parts of California.
By the time it became a university in 1972, SJSU had become largely a commuter school whose students lived in the various Bay Area communities in which they grew up, or where their current jobs were located. They drove to the campus and back home, and the apartments weren’t needed.
Apartment owners expect a return on their investments; being a landlord isn’t philanthropy. When the students stopped renting their apartments, they found other renters who were, on the whole, on various forms of government assistance. The neighborhood around the campus became effectively a slum - something it was not in the 1960s.
Fast forward 50 years to the present. I just learned the campus I spent most of my career teaching at, another CA state university party school with many campus area apartments, will host almost no in-person classes and be largely online next year as a result of Covid-19.
I’m wondering if the same thing will happen to it that happened to San Jose State, the deterioration of the neighborhood ruining the campus ambiance and sending the go-away-to-school kids elsewhere. In this case, however, the rural setting will mean an enrollment crash if the campus has to rely on commuter students who live within an hour’s drive of campus.
I’m reminded of a snarky thing Karl Marx wrote, namely, “that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” This outcome would be some combination of the two.
