I've never heard this term before. I think I would hate living in a town so small that the presence of a college or university divided the place in two, with students and faculty marching around like smug bastards for the few years they're around.

Perhaps 'townies' isn't actually a term of derision. Sounds like it is. Is it?


The distinction makes me think of really studenty students. Kids who self-identify uncritically and enthusiastically with being in college. Wear branded collegiate hoodies and such and are totally indifferent to people and communities off campus. Boy these kinds of students annoy me!

The correct term is 'cutters'

As for the breed of people known as townies, not crap. I've lived in a college town my entire life. Most of all of my friends grew up around here.

College towns are in the same situation as tourist towns. Every year students come in september, give us a lot of money (though they mostly patronize non-locally owned businesses), make a big mess then go away. They go to the sardine can style bars and have very little interaction with the community.
Sure, these are gross generalizations, but I think they're pretty accurate.

I lived in a college town for a while. After dropping out of school and just living and working there for a few years, I started calling myself a townie when I realized I knew at least three people everywhere I went and I was better aquainted with the bartenders and waitstaff than any patrons. That, and the kids were starting to just get on my nerves, so anything to distance myself from that.

Of course, the real townies hung out in the pool hall around the corner where I never wanted to go. This was a small southern town, and I ain't a caucasian after all.

So I guess Me=Not Crap
Them=Scary and perhaps Crap.

I don't think it's that common here, although a generalized antipathy towards students exists in many quarters the only place I've heard it mentioned as a subject in its own right ('town vs. gown') was in Cambridge* which is an extreme example being one of only a tiny handful of places in the UK where the University dominates everything. It's also exceptional in having Yale-like levels of privilege and brilliance. When I last visited (some years ago now) there were still vestiges of graffiti from the bad old days - 'Bash a Grad in '83'.

Studenty students, I think LAD has it - the guffawing, smug halfwits who live in an isolated bubble on campus and never participate in life beyond the redbrick walls probably draw a distinction between themselves and 'townies'. If it is to be taken as a pejorative term for non-students like this then it's crap off the scale. Of course there's nothing wrong with associating mostly with your peer group or not going to places you don't feel comfortable but that's entirely different.

*I didn't think this was really good enough to mention in the 'Tell us something cool and true about someone else' thread so I present it here. My friend Matt was a junior lecturer in History for a while at Cambridge. One morning he was absentmindedly driving into his college and had to break suddenly to avoid ploughing into what appeared to be a golf cart that he'd almost mounted. Getting out to apologize to the driver he discovered he'd almost mown down Stephen Hawking.

cjh wrote:Studenty students, I think LAD has it - the guffawing, smug halfwits who live in an isolated bubble on campus and never participate in life beyond the redbrick walls probably draw a distinction between themselves and 'townies'. If it is to be taken as a pejorative term for non-students like this then it's crap off the scale. Of course there's nothing wrong with associating mostly with your peer group or not going to places you don't feel comfortable but that's entirely different.

Such students disgust me (I dislike this term "townies"). Bennington College is a good example of this dichotomy: elite children of privilege living in a town of working/middle-class folks.

cjh wrote:I don't think it's that common here, although a generalized antipathy towards students exists in many quarters the only place I've heard it mentioned as a subject in its own right ('town vs. gown') was in Cambridge* which is an extreme example being one of only a tiny handful of places in the UK where the University dominates everything. It's also exceptional in having Yale-like levels of privilege and brilliance. When I last visited (some years ago now) there were still vestiges of graffiti from the bad old days - 'Bash a Grad in '83'.

On the vote: crap, but with a large waffle factor, and I'm a grad student at Cambridge, and I'm voting about the whole fear-and-loathing thing rather than the actual people. I'd vote "crap" on students, too, given half a chance.

There's still a big town/gown divide. The privilege thing, not so much - of course there are some rich, obnoxious students, and the whole place is enormously, smugly fundamentally middle-class, but that's true of every university pretty much. The big divide is people who've moved to Cambridge (mostly involved in the tech industry or connected to the University) and people originally from Cambridge, and there's a large (perceived) income/social-circle/whatever gap there. It's just, fundamentally, damaging.

It can get very ugly. A guy I knew was assaulted and killed the other year when he was misheard; "you've got all day" became "are you calling me gay?"

It's just... sad.