Clarksville, Ark., is home to the U. of the Ozarks, and the university is hoping more of its employees will call the city home. It’s offering incentives to faculty and staff members who buy homes there.Lisa McCarley
When Steven and Amy Oatis accepted positions at the University of the Ozarks 19 years ago, they moved into a house in the university’s home city, Clarksville, Ark. “City” is a bit of a misnomer: Clarksville is a 9,500-person community approximately 100 miles from either Little Rock or Fayetteville. The University of the Ozarks, a small institution that is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, opened there in 1891.
Mr. Oatis, a history professor who now serves as dean of the division of fine arts, humanities, and social science, remembers Clarksville in the 1990s as a town with empty storefronts and little traffic. He and Ms. Oatis, an associate professor of English, eventually moved about 10 miles away to the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.
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Clarksville, Ark., is home to the U. of the Ozarks, and the university is hoping more of its employees will call the city home. It’s offering incentives to faculty and staff members who buy homes there.Lisa McCarley
When Steven and Amy Oatis accepted positions at the University of the Ozarks 19 years ago, they moved into a house in the university’s home city, Clarksville, Ark. “City” is a bit of a misnomer: Clarksville is a 9,500-person community approximately 100 miles from either Little Rock or Fayetteville. The University of the Ozarks, a small institution that is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, opened there in 1891.
Mr. Oatis, a history professor who now serves as dean of the division of fine arts, humanities, and social science, remembers Clarksville in the 1990s as a town with empty storefronts and little traffic. He and Ms. Oatis, an associate professor of English, eventually moved about 10 miles away to the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.
It’s to us a way to harness more facets of the economic driver small, private higher education can be in a community.
But now the Oatises are planning to move back into town. They are doing so in order to take advantage of a new homebuyer program offered by the university that’s meant to encourage faculty and staff members to live closer to campus. The university hopes it will keep professors involved in university life later into the day while helping to develop the community into a thriving college town.
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“It’s to us a way to harness more facets of the economic driver small, private higher education can be in a community,” said Richard L. Dunsworth, the university’s president. “If our roughly 200 employees are dispersed among 20 communities, there’s not as much impact. What we’re trying to do is harness that impact and focus on our community, and we’ve defined that community as the city in which we are located.”
Roughly half the students at the University of the Ozarks come from outside Arkansas, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, so the institution wants Clarksville to be an appealing home away from home. Mr. Dunsworth described Clarksville as a town with a university that is in the process of becoming a university town. He said local officials have decided to embrace that identity.
Revitalizing Neighborhoods
A vibrant and attractive college town can be an important feature for colleges and universities trying to compete nationally for students. Over the past several decades, interstate highways and big-box stores have gutted small towns and cities that were once commercial hubs for large, rural regions. But colleges in some of these towns have recognized that they can mobilize their own employees to help reverse the trend.
In this special report, we look at the role urban universities play — for better and worse — in their communities, new insights into the history and future of cities, and the barriers that get in the way of good research.
Colby College has broken ground on part of a $45-million project that is meant to revitalize downtown Waterville, Maine, a former mill town of about 16,000 people. The project includes a 200-student residence hall, a hotel, and the renovation of an old bank into a technology center. The residence hall will include eight apartments for faculty and staff members, said David A. Greene, Colby’s president. The college also plans to build more condo-style housing for employees downtown.
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“It’s really important for us to make sure Waterville is an attractive place to live and work,” Mr. Greene said. He noted that programs at larger universities in urban areas, such as Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, had been successful at keeping faculty members local and developing their surrounding neighborhoods.
Yale has put $28 million toward a homebuyer program in New Haven, Conn., that has helped more than 1,100 university employees purchase homes in designated areas of the city since the program was established in 1994. The University of Pennsylvania offers forgivable $7,500 loans to employees who want to buy homes in its West Philadelphia neighborhood, while University of Chicago employees can get up to $10,000 in down-payment assistance to live in the institution’s neighboring communities.
Mutual Benefits
The bet in Clarksville is that small colleges can have a similar impact on small towns. The University of the Ozarks will offer employees a bonus amounting to 20 percent of their annual salaries, up to $20,000, for the purchase of a house within the Clarksville city limits. Jeff Scaccia, the university’s chief financial officer, said the administration was aware that some employees might worry about getting stuck with a house in rural Arkansas that could be hard to sell some day. To quell those concerns, the university also says it will buy houses within the city limits at 93 percent of their appraised value. Houses within a smaller area closer to the university may be bought back for 100 percent of their value.
The university hopes to build up its housing stock so it also has more nearby properties to rent to employees, Mr. Scaccia said. It currently owns about four or five residencies, he said. The university has allocated 2 percent of its nearly $100-million endowment to purchasing these properties and expects to see returns of 5 to 7 percent on the investment once they’re rented out.
Already, a handful of employees have expressed interest in purchasing a house with the university’s help. Aaron Gentry, the head baseball coach, said he and his wife, Lauren, an adviser and academic-skills coach at the university, were just about to purchase a piece of land outside town to build on when they got an email in July about the new benefit.
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“I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” Mr. Gentry said. “So we quickly did something else.”
The Gentrys are now in the process of purchasing a $170,000 home in Clarksville. They will move into the 2,000-square-foot house in September while paying almost no out-of-pocket costs, thanks to the subsidy. “We would not be able to get into that house without this incentive,” Mr. Gentry said.
We want these kids to graduate and start businesses here.
Over the last five years or so, the university and Clarksville have worked together more closely on infrastructure projects, Mr. Oatis said. The city built a traffic island on a street that runs through the campus, for example. The town’s historic Main Street still has many vacant storefronts, but a new boutique opened two years ago, a sports bar opened this year, and a couple of restaurants draw tourists from Arkansas’s biggest cities, said John Williams, communications and marketing manager of the Clarksville Chamber of Commerce.
“We want these kids to graduate and start businesses here,” Mr. Williams said of the University of the Ozarks students. Like the university, he said, the Chamber of Commerce is eager to transform Clarksville into a college town.
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Ultimately, the housing plan is about better attracting and serving students. Mr. Dunsworth said students will benefit from a livelier town and faculty members who spend more nights and weekends on the campus.
“We’re part of the community,” Mr. Dunsworth said. “Let’s own that.”
Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.