Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2021.31 History of Education Quarterly (2021), 61, 320–340 doi:10.1017/heq.2021.31 ARTICLE https://www.cambridge.org/core What Happened to Your College Town: The Changing Relationship of Higher Education and College Towns, 1940–2000 Kate Rousmaniere* . IP address: Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA *Corresponding author. Email:
[email protected] 170.106.33.19 Abstract This essay examines the history of what is commonly called the town-gown relationship in American college towns in the six decades after the Second World War. A time of con- , on siderable expansion of higher education enrollment and function, the period also marks 27 Sep 2021 at 05:58:52 an increasing detachment of higher education institutions from their local communities. Once closely tied by university offices that advised the bulk of their students in off-campus housing, those bonds between town and gown began to come apart in the 1970s, due pri- marily to legal and economic factors that restricted higher education institutions’ out- reach. Given the importance of off-campus life to college students, over half of whom have historically lived off campus, the essay argues for increased research on college , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at towns in the history of higher education. Keywords: town gown; college town; off-campus housing; college student housing; in loco parentis A typical workday for Carl Opp, director of Off-Campus Housing at the University of Florida