A Tale of Two College Towns

I began life in a Michigan college town, and I may spend the rest of it in another one. It surprises me to put the matter this way, because the two places do not seem similar: Alma, a small town far too vulnerable to globalization and deindustrialization, and Ann Arbor, a rich city that seems, at first glance, far too insulated from everything. One of Michigan’s lovable qualities, of course, is its tendency to transform across relatively small distances: the beach towns to the west seem to belong to another order of things than the picturesque or dingy farm towns only so many miles to the interior, the Upper Peninsula constitutes its own multiple worlds, and so on. Still, the two towns feel particularly dissimilar. You could reduce them to battling stock personages in any number of morality plays: red vs. blue America, insular past vs. centerless future, one awful phase of capitalism vs. some later awful phase of it. At least, you could do that until very recently—less than a year ago, as I write this. Now, as we’ll see, they face the same axe.