Town/gown hostilities and memory entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

Increased controversy over the truth and meaning of the past has fueled an economic surge in public memory spurring competition between universities and cities for material and symbolic resources. Relations between “town and gown” are often fraught with distrust and sabotage as university administrators and government officials carve out their own memory territories for profit. As rhetorical scholars, educators, and practitioners critically engage our places of employment, careful consideration must be paid to how memory boundaries are drawn, and who stands to gain from the monopolization of culturally relevant narratives of racial struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Town and gown
• campus memory
• neoliberalism
• rhetoric
• entrepreneurship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021), 64.

2 Claudia Dreifus, “Following the Civil Rights Trail,” New York Times, March 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/arts/civil-rights-trail.html.

3 Allison Keyes, “The ‘Clotilda,’ the Last Known Slave Ship to Arrive in the U.S., is Found,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 22, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/clotilda-last-known-slave-ship-arrive-us-found-180972177/.

4 Marcus Anthony Hunter, Kevin Loughran, and Gary Alan Fine, “Memory Politics: Growth Coalitions, Urban Pasts, and the Creation of ‘Historic’ Philadelphia,” City & Community 17, no. 2 (2018): 345.

5 Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021).

6 Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

7 Hunter, Loughran, and Fine, “Memory Politics,” 345.

8 Lore/tta Lemaster et al., “Against the Grain,” Communication Education 78, no. 3 (2022): 165–87. doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2022.2070921.

9 Arthur N. Dunning, Unreconciled: Race, History, and Higher Education in the Deep South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021).

10 Jessa Reid Bolling and Rebecca Greisbach, “Autherine Lucy Foster’s Legacy Honored with Historical Marker,” The Crimson White, September 18, 2017, https://thecrimsonwhite.com/41103/news/autherine-lucy-fosters-legacy-honored-with-historical-marker/.

11 Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 33.