Why do we all love Ohio University so much?

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Ohio University is having a nice spring. The school announced it will host in-person commencement ceremonies. The men’s basketball team made the NCAA Tournament and won a first-round game. OU was even a Jeopardy! answer recently. On my socials, there’s a lot of love for the old alma mater right now.

Then again, there’s always a lot of love for OU. (I know it’s technically “Ohio” and not “OU” anymore, but you can pry “OU” out of my cold, Quad-soaked hands.) OU is a college that is beloved, in my experience, to an unusual degree. I know a lot of people look back fondly on their college years, but with Bobcats … it’s a whole other level. Others might look back on college and say, that was fun. Or, worse, necessary. If you went to school in Athens, life was for many of us – in the Greek philosopher sense – good.

But … why?

I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this.

Let’s start with the obvious. Anytime thousands of teenagers live away from home for the first time, things are going to happen, and yes, I am asking the words “things” and “happen” to do a lot of work in this sentence. You’ll always look back fondly on wherever you spread your wings. Unless you were raised by the kind of maniac parents who let their kids start making major life decisions at age 11 (“Please respect Cloud’s emotional spacing while she pairs with the ayahuasca…”) you probably and correctly had very little freedom to be a blundering dolt until you left home. This makes college anywhere good times. But … that’s universal, so it’s some part of it, but it’s not that.

Traditions? Every school has those. Halloween sets Athens apart a bit. So does the marching band. Sports? OU has some good teams, but it’s not like Ohio State, where kids go just because the football team is good, which has to make Ohio State’s renowned medical school feel just great. The Greek system? It’s well-established but not the dominant form of social life. The bucolic splendor? Oh, there is bucolic splendor aplenty, but there are plenty of beautiful campuses in Ohio that don’t get OU’s love. So, it’s a little bit all of those things, sure, but it’s not really any of them either.

I’m leaving education out of this. You get a good one at OU, but you can get a good one at a lot of Ohio colleges. I had some great professors. I’m sure you did, too. As with the traditions above, though, it’s a plus, but not a differentiator, in terms of sentiment. 

Maybe it’s the geography? I think we’re getting closer. Athens is as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get in Ohio, and I say that as someone who has been to and enjoyed adult beverages in Chillicothe. When I went to OU, most freshmen didn’t have cars on campus, for lack of a place to park, and also for lack of owning cars. This had an unintended effect -- it forced students to remain on campus during those first nervous months, which got them to socialize, which no doubt led to an eventual surplus of friendships and relationships. By junior year, when more students did have a car, most chose not to leave. It’s way more fun to be in Athens all weekend than the suburban Subway-and-CVS strip mall hellscape from which they escaped. I’d say about 15 percent of OU’s appeal comes from the social benefits of extreme geographic isolation.

The rest of it, I think, has to do with two things: 1.) The layout of Athens, and, specifically, how Ohio University and its students are situated within the town 2.) The types of students the school tends to attract.

The town

Let’s start with Athens and the area around downtown where students live. It’s walkable. All of it. You don’t need a car to go to class. You drive to get food when you live off-campus, and that’s once a week. The rest of the time you are either walking from your dorm or from the student neighborhoods near campus. Know what happens when you walk instead of drive? You run into people. You see friends. You talk. You make plans. You grab a bite. You flirt. You get coffee. You hacky a sack. (Sorry -- ‘90s reference. The ‘90s were the best and also, at the same time, the worst.) When you walk everywhere, your odds of a serendipitous encounter go way, way up. Organized activities are easier, too. It’s easier to work on projects, to study, to date, and to party, when your feet can take you there quickly.

Then you add the fact that the totality of Uptown Athens exists to monetize the student population, with 20-some bars, plus some good restaurants and takeout joints, all of which, again, are walkable. (If you get a DUI in Athens you fail at life.) The student housing offers much in the way of large homes and big porches and patios – perfect for hanging out and gathering socially. The College Green, and open spaces on each green, are welcoming and also invite play. Now you’re combining youth, newfound freedom, bucolic splendor, strong social bonds, plentiful spaces for socialization, plus living the way mankind lived for thousands of years before the advent of the automobile – in a walkable community. It’s all literally at your feet, maybe for the only time in your life, and it’s wonderful. 

It takes three-and-a-half hours to drive from Cleveland to Athens, and every time I made that drive back in college, I absolutely could not wait to get to town and find my friends. I still have dreams about that moment – getting back to Athens and seeing my friends at a party. 

So, Athens and OU are totally walkable and it has places where you’d actually want to walk – I say that’s a good 35 percent of it. It’s not the only isolated, walkable campus in the country, but its population is concentrated, the town is safe, it’s fun, and the scenery is gorgeous. Hard to beat that combo.

The gown

Then there are the students. Traditionally, OU doesn’t attract the anxious strivers who head to the Ivies – students who envision themselves running the world, like that’s more of what we need. There are OU students who do reach the top, but it’s generally not because they had some well-organized life plan at age 16. It’s because they were good at something no one else was good at, or they just tried harder. OU also doesn’t attract a lot of the indecisive 13th graders who head to Ohio State by default or who never stretch their legs and leave home. OU tends to get the kids who want something out of life, and perhaps don’t know exactly what that is when they are 17, but, hey, they get four years to figure it out in a low-pressure setting where they’re not trapped by expectations set by themselves or others. You can figure it out at OU. And once you figure it out, you can get after it. 

The students tend to be, in my experience. the kind of good-humored types who make Ohio a state where you continue to choose to live even though the Game of Thrones winters will never cease eroding the brittle shorelines of your soul. Ohio requires grit, and it also makes fun of you for using the word grit. Bottom line, OU gets more of the right kind of kids than the wrong ones. That’s the last 50 percent – a jovial student culture that is decades in the making. 

The Athens within

Now put it all together. You’ve got this hippie Appalachian town in the middle of nowhere filled with the sons and daughters of business owners in Cincinnati, nurses in Cleveland, and teachers in Columbus, and these kids, with new freedom, spend an inordinate amount of time socializing together, working together, making memories, with the possibility for a chance encounter every time they step outside, and no friction to gather socially. Different college campuses have different vibes, from, “Let’s just get through this, you guys” to “Rah! Rah! Go sports team!” and OU falls somewhere blissfully apart from all that – just a bunch of kids who exist in the realm of generally courteous, yet also deadpan and irreverent, who know college is a thing they ought to do, so might as well get the most from it.

Many of us who graduated and moved on to the city, to places like Chicago, New York and Washington, were able to recapture some of that community in dense urban neighborhoods. Ultimately, though, many of us – sigh – settle in the suburbs. We do this for practical reasons, like school for our kids, and to be near family. But the longer I live in the land of CVS and Subway strip malls, I find my thoughts drifting less frequently towards the life I lived on a long time ago, and more and more, especially with the year we just had, thinking about how to sprinkle a little of that Athens magic in the right here and now. 

Joe Donatelli is a journalist in Cleveland. Have a theory of your own? Subscribe and leave a comment below.