Musing - Universities historically were easy to create in rural/underdeveloped areas with cheap land. (Particularly the ag/tech variant funded by the federal go

Musing - Universities historically were easy to create in rural/underdeveloped areas with cheap land. (Particularly the ag/tech variant funded by the federal government.) A very small number aggregated enough people to generate sustained urbanization. The rest have always been tenuous in the sense that they exist because of a state-federal consensus that they are worth subsidizing. Without this, urban/suburban universities are more likely to sustain themselves. Further thought - on the timescale of history, professors have always been (lower) middle class. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see a return to the mean…