Why aren’t people talking about college towns? We talk so much in this country about the importance of a college education, but there’s comparably little talk about the places where that education takes place. We talk as if learning is (or can be) divorced from the place where it occurs. We might be able to do that in the future, but from our historical experience, the two are intimately related—what we learn and where we live matters.

Earlier this year I was talking with Chris Buchignani and Kevin Horne, two friends in State College, Pennsylvania, and we decided to try having “private conversations, publicly shared” about college towns in a way that we could share them publicly. In the spirit of our time, this means something that might be a podcast. We recorded a very rough pilot episode using Anchor, with me calling in from my Milwaukee hotel room and Kevin and Chris joining from Park Forest Village in State College:

If we continue these, the idea would be to do seasons of something like a dozen episodes. The first season would consist of episodes focused on specific aspects and themes of college what’s, and what make these places so distinctive.