Can a university, like a neighborhood, become gentrified?

Starting in fall 2015, Salem State will host (and rabidly patronize) a new Starbucks coffee shop on Central Campus. It will be situated in the building housing Salem State's newest residence hall, Viking Hall, which also opens its doors for the first time in fall 2015. We already had a Dunkin' Donuts on North Campus. But the contrast between the pre-existing Dunkin' Donuts and the newly arrived Starbucks seems like an uncanny parallel of larger changes.

It seems fitting that a Starbucks has landed where and when it has at Salem State. On Central Campus where the newest classroom buildings and dorms have been built, and indeed, in the newest building of them all - Viking Hall (go Vikings!). In addition to being the newest building, Viking Hall is also the first campus residence building to house a cafe. By contrast, Dunkin' Donuts sits within a building devoted primarily to classrooms and administrative offices - part of an older campus building and, maybe, an older orientation toward students and campus life.

Starbucks has also arrived at a curious transition point in Salem State's evolution. When Viking Hall fills with its 350 student residents, and when one adds this number to the number of students residing in other residence halls across the university, Salem State will house 40% of its full-time undergraduate student body. This number - 40% - marks a significant step in the direction of our President's stated goal of having 50% of our undergraduate students living on campus. It implies, at the very least, a significant move away from Salem State's long held identity as a commuter school (and all that implies). To be clear, Salem State is still mostly a commuter school, especially if you also count part-time students, graduate students, and non-matriculating students. But still. There is a lot of symbolism in this number, in this moment. And Starbucks is here to mark the occasion.

There is certainly a lot of class symbolism for both Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks. The former is an old staple in New England, associated with blue collar, unpretentious simplicity. The latter, a relatively recent arrival from the 'left coast,' is associated with yuppies (do people still use this word?), non-fat soy lattes, and of course, pretentiousness.

A few years back, a student in my GIS class analyzed the distribution of Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks coffee shops across the entirety of Massachusetts (over 1,000 stores in all!) and found - without much surprise - that Starbucks tended to be located in slightly wealthier communities than its native rival.

The other students nodded their heads knowingly at this revelation (somewhat smugly, I thought). What no one expected was that Starbucks also tended to be found in communities that are more racially diverse, while Dunkin' Donuts tended to be in communities that were whiter. Keep in mind that he only looked at where the stores are located, not who actually patronized them. But still. It seemed like a provocative finding. The apparent class distinction seemed to agree with their preconceptions (even though one does not discuss 'class' in polite company in America), but they did not know what to do with the race findings. Race is a confusing and uncomfortable topic for my students (as it is for most Americans).

Salem State's demographic trajectory seems to parallel that of Starbucks communities, seeming to confound easy interpretation. Since 2009, an increasing proportion of incoming students are first-time freshmen, rather than transfers (transfer students being roughly analogous to commuters). Over the same time period, the average GPA of our incoming students has gone up, from an average of 2.94 in 2009 (roughly a C+) to over 3.1 today (roughly a B-). And finally, the proportion of incoming students who identify as non-White has consistently gone up as well, from 21% in 2009 to over 30% today. Is this what gentrification looks like? I don't have data on the average wealth of incoming students, but I wonder. More importantly, gentrification implies displacement. If this is gentrification, who is being displaced?

Right before the fall 2015 semester began, I was on Central Campus for a meeting, and I bumped into a colleague I hadn't seen for a while. She now works in a different administrative department, helping students strategize on their finances so that they can afford to stay in school. As we stood in the shadow of the gleaming, new Viking Hall, and looked in through the blue-tinted windows of the soon-to-be-opened Starbucks at its base, she fumed. "What does this say to our students who are struggling to pay for school? Here I am, trying desperately to educate students about spending their money wisely, and then we put this in front of them. Imagine the pressure they're going to feel. It sends the wrong message."

After my meeting, I walked out with another colleague and we found ourselves once again in front of Viking Hall and its Starbucks. This colleague looked around admiringly, not only at Viking Hall and Starbucks, but at all the new buildings around it. "This campus is really looking beautiful now," he said. "The transformation is amazing. It's really changing the look of the school. It's like Salem State was this working class school, and now ..." "It's middle class," I finished for him. We laughed and then headed back to our offices on old North Campus.