Colleges and universities might be ivory towers, but at the base of these towers are the cities in which they live and often thrive tax-exempt. Town and gown are inextricably linked and, often, a romance made in Hell. Yale, where I went to graduate school, had a notably sour relationship with New Haven.
Being indigenous, I tended to take the city’s side. Yale hogged prime real estate, walled itself off from what the school, more or less, considered riffraff, and championed the catastrophic experiment called urban renewal. It eventually became a good citizen, as it is today, after exhausting all the ways of being a bad one.
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