- The Amherst Fire Department employs numerous UMass Amherst alumni and, during the school year, three dozen student volunteers. In front of the department’s new engine, from left to right: Dave Martell ’96, Matthew Sposito ’09, Interim Chief Lindsay Stromgren ’90, ’97, Chief Keith Hoyle ’87 (retired), Assistant Chief Michael Zlogar ’71, Captain Don McKay ’77, Reed Frailey ’07, and Larry Tebo ’80..
Amherst, Massachusetts, looks like many other towns with its ball fields and beer halls. But the conversations connect here like nowhere else. Novelists compare notes while schoolchildren fling Frisbees. Polymer engineers bump into each other at Cowls Building Supply. Psychologists talk neuroscience at the Moan and Dove. Puffer’s Pond draws award-winning scientists and their families for summertime swims.
No matter what your pursuit, in Amherst you will literally run into kindred spirits (and contrary ones, too), who will keep your mind nimble and your interests piqued. For those of us who claim to love Amherst, it seems to have the perfect mix of nature and nurture for body, mind, and soul. Each of us has a moment, or a collection of moments that come to mind when we think of our Amherst: Charlie’s Pub, the libraries, Emily Dickinson’s house, Wildwood Cemetery, the Newman Center, Antonio’s….each one a touchstone piled in cairns upon the topography of Amherst.
The town’s blend of hip-ness and haute-ness made headlines in late spring when Katherine L. Cohen, media-anointed authority on the subject of college admissions, posted online a declaration that Amherst, Massachusetts, was the number-one college town in North America…toppling Austin, Montreal, and even Boston.
Cohen’s pronouncement raises the question about the value of such third-party endorsements. What’s really in an accolade?
There are no governing bodies for college town best-ness, no Oscar-bestowing Academy, no peer-review. It’s the Wild West of aggrandizement played out daily on numerous blogs devoted to the subject. Earlier this year, University of Georgia up and declared its hometown of Athens “America’s Best College Town!” for no apparent reason other than they felt it to be true.
Are they allowed to do that? What are the rules of personality contests? Why should we care?
Being named “number one” doesn’t factor much into the campus’s recruiting strategies, says Kevin Kelly, director of undergraduate admissions at UMass. “First, you have to offer kids a great education, and we do,” he explains. “Where you work, live, learn, and play is very important, and Amherst’s status as a beautiful, safe New England town is part of the package. The ranking gives us a convenient way to talk about that.”
Beyond bragging rights, then, being named “best college town” says less about the charms of Amherst and more about people’s passionate attachment to a sense of place—the role of familiar and nurturing landscapes in shaping our lives. That attachment is both personal and collective, like a sports rivalry.
Thankfully, finally, there’s some serious thinking on the subject to help us understand the vigor with which people debate and decry college towns: University of Massachusetts Press recently published the first full-length study of the subject. The American College Town by Blake Gumprecht, geography professor at University of New Hampshire in Durham. The book represents research conducted over a decade in 60 study towns.
Even he, an expert on the subject, experienced the fervor by which rabid fans hold their college towns dear. In the book’s introduction he confides: “people have questioned my choices, wondering why their favorite college town was not on the list.”
Gumprecht’s book seeks to define what is a college town. For Gumprecht they are places “where a college or university and the cultures it creates exert dominant influence over the character of the town.” He studied what distinguishes college towns from other places: campuses as public spaces, progressiveness, places where stadium culture meets high-tech breeding grounds.
“If they were like every place else, why would we care about them?” writes Gumprecht. “They are cultural islands. They are exceptional places…They attract people who are drawn by their sense of difference. College towns lend color to the cultural mosaic that is the United Sates.”
Living and working in a technicolor piece of the country’s cultural mosaic prompts a complex set of feelings and circumstances for Reverend Douglas McGonagle ’87, ’95 PhD. “When the bishop asked me to return,” he says, “I had been away from campus for a decade, living in the comfortable rhythm of parish life,” says McGonagle, who took over the The Newman Catholic Center following a post in the prosperous suburb of Wilbraham. The Newman Center, “is a parish on steroids, it’s 24/7, much more intense,” says McGonagle. “We’re the campus’s kitchen and living room. It never stops.”
Re-learning how to navigate Amherst traffic was the easy part; “Right away I found myself cutting through Bertucci’s to avoid the light… some things you never forget,” he says. And reinvigorating the vocations group—four men from Newman are presently headed to seminary—has been a true blessing.
For a kid from working-class Billerica who came to study at UMass on a shoestring, Amherst can sometimes feel foreign. He tosses out an anecdote, remembering back when he was a student, townsfolk debated whether or not to accept the gift of a bandstand. “It’s emblematic of a place where people feel secure enough to think deeply about such things,” he says.
