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Hartwick Tackles the Urban-Rural Divide

As part of President Darren Reisberg’s inauguration celebration, Hartwick hosted an academic symposium, Bridging the U.S. Rural and Urban Divide: Hartwick College Takes on the Challenge.

Students, faculty and staff bring a host of life experiences from both rural and urban settings to the Hartwick campus. Representatives from a variety of College perspectives examine the challenges and opportunities of living and working on our diverse campus. And given the well-documented urban-rural divide in the contemporary U.S., discuss what the community can do to reach mutual understanding, respect and unity.

Hartwick College faculty, staff and student panelists during discussion: Bridging the U.S. Rural and Urban Divide: Hartwick College Takes on the Challenge

Panelists included:

(pictured from left) Jade Killikelly ’24; Kathleen Ash, clinical assistant professor of nursing; Adaline Colliga ’23; Heidi Tanner, director of wellness and health promotion; Biama Charles, director of the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB); and James Buthman, associate professor of political science. The moderator of the discussion was Karl Seeley, professor of economics.

Addy Colligan ’23 grew up in a tiny town in Rensselaer County, where her mother raised chickens and sheep in their backyard and the closest grocery store was 30 minutes away.

Jade Killikelly ’24 spent her childhood in Jamaica, Queens, where she could walk to a corner grocery, an assortment of restaurants, or the subway station to catch a ride into Manhattan.

When they arrived at Hartwick, these two students embarked on different journeys as they eased their way into college. Colligan, a political science and environment, sustainability and society major, made friends with other rural students who loved to go for walks in the woods. Killikelly, a public health major, tended to socialize with other urban students who liked to check out the restaurants downtown.

While they interacted with a range of students in their classes and campus activities, Colligan, a senator in the Student Government Association, and Killikelly, captain of the women’s tennis team, each felt more comfortable with students from backgrounds similar to their own.

“We cling to what we know as humans, naturally,” Killikelly said. “Coming to a new place, you want some form of consistency and some form of familiarity, so you just go naturally to people you would know and people you would get along with because you’re from the same area.”

As part of the inauguration of Hartwick’s new president, Darren Reisberg, the college held a symposium exploring the urban-rural divide and how it could be bridged. The 90-minute discussion, featuring a six-member panel of students, staff and faculty, attracted 175 people from across campus and the community.

The symposium, proposed by President Reisberg, who comes to Hartwick from Chicago, not only addressed the urban-rural gap on campus, but also the growing schism among citizens across the country. As they discussed ways to narrow the divide, the panelists and audience members agreed that the symposium helped to more clearly define the problem while offering strategies for reaching mutual understanding on campus.

“I think the veil has been lifted for a lot of people who may not necessarily have felt the need to look closer at where they stand within that divide or how they can potentially make it worse or better,” said Biama Charles, a panelist and director of the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at Hartwick, who hopes a second symposium will be held on the issue, with new voices contributing to the conversation.

"For a lot of urban students, it’s an adjustment to be in a rural area like Oneonta, and lose the things that they’ve been accustomed to for the past 16 to 18 years. That’s why my office does the work that it does in creating opportunities for them to still feel that sense of home here."

BIAMA CHARLES

Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging

An Increasingly Diverse Campus

While 71 percent of Hartwick’s students are from New York State, the majority of the college’s student body is far from homogenous. Of the 788 students who are state residents, 30 percent are from the New York City area, 16 percent are from the Otsego County region and the rest are from Upstate.

Urban and rural students not only from New York, but also from around the world, converge on a 475-acre campus in the center of a rural community in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, and each group faces a distinct set of challenges.

“At Hartwick, we are a very small college in a very rural area and not a very big town, so there are issues that come up with students that relate to what they’re comfortable with and what they’re used to,” said James Buthman, a panelist and associate professor of political science. “If they’re used to the city and they’re coming up from New York City or Boston or wherever, this is a different life and a different way of connecting with the world.”

Black and Hispanic students from New York City and other urban areas may find it challenging to acclimate themselves on campus because of the small, though growing, number of students of color at Hartwick. Over the past five years, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students on campus has increased from 18 percent to 24 percent; this semester, there are 157 Black students and 107 Hispanic students enrolled at the college.

“It can be difficult to find your people, find your environment and find people you’re comfortable with,” said Killikelly, vice president of the Black Student Union. “But I also think that not just that poses a challenge, but also the local environment because it’s completely different from what they’re used to.”

Another challenge for urban students is finding products in Oneonta that they could easily buy back home, such as shampoos, conditioners and natural hair oils. Not only does the Walmart in Oneonta have a limited selection of such products, but Killikelly said there are also no hairdressers in town who can style her hair.

“There are local hair salons for those of the Caucasian community, but we don’t really have a way to get our hair done around here,” she said. “So I have to go home to get my braids done.”

For rural students, the challenge they face is interacting with a more diverse group of people who have different political views, different musical tastes and different interests. In class, rural students with more conservative opinions often do not speak up, and when they face
difficulties dealing with college life, they often do not seek professional help, said Heidi Tanner, director of wellness and health promotion
on campus.

“From a mental health standpoint, our rural students still keep it in somewhat of a box for a much longer time,” Tanner said. “They don’t feel as comfortable talking about their issues with someone else.”

Another contrast between urban and rural students is their understanding of sexual health, Tanner said. In her class Sexual Wellness, Tanner noticed that rural students only had a baseline level of information on pregnancy prevention, while the urban students tended to know where and how to access birth control. During the semester, Tanner has to devote part of the class to bridge the gap in the students’ knowledge about healthy sexuality.

“Our rural students had no idea about birth control,” she said. “It was like maybe something you can get and that was it, whereas the urban students knew that there may be a family planning clinic and you didn’t have to go to your doctor to get information about it.”

Because the lack of public transportation in a rural area means that many rural students cannot access birth control, they tend not to think about how to access it. “Because it was in a sense almost unattainable, it wasn’t worth their time learning about it,” Tanner said.

Impact of National Issues

In many ways, the divide among students at Hartwick reflects the widening chasm between urban and rural citizens across the country. The urban-rural conflict on the national level has been part of the fabric of the United States since the early days of the republic, Buthman said.

During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Buthman pointed out that New York Governor George Clinton did not trust Alexander Hamilton to attend the gathering alone because Hamilton was from New York City, while the governor lived in Albany and represented the rest of the state.

Another historic urban-rural clash later emerged between Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, Buthman said. “Thomas Jefferson had this view that there was going to be a rural utopia and Hamilton believed that it was going to be urban centers that mattered in the democracy,” he said.

In modern politics, the urban-rural schism reappeared in the 1990s, as rural areas continued to suffer economically while urban centers thrived. In the 2020 presidential election, the difference between urban and rural voters had more of an impact on voting patterns than the gender gap, according to research conducted by Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University.

As the rural economy has declined, one key indicator has been the loss of medical care in sparsely populated communities. Since 2010, 100 hospitals have closed in rural counties across the country, said Kathleen Ash, a clinical assistant professor of nursing. The Oneonta area has lost four hospitals since 1988, she said.

In her course Rural Health Nursing, Ash teaches students that the loss of hospitals means that pregnant women often have to drive an hour or more to give birth. Her students in the class travel to Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown to work with women in labor and after delivery.

“The students learn how some rural people live in poverty and the great effort it takes to achieve what might be a simple task to someone living in an urban area, like getting groceries or a prescription filled,” Ash said.

Another issue that has recently highlighted the gap between urban and rural areas is the Covid-19 pandemic. Republicans, who now dominate rural areas, have tended to reject vaccines more than Democrats in urban areas, said Karl Seeley, chair of the department of economics and moderator of the symposium.

“Early in the pandemic, before the vaccines, people of color were getting sick and dying at disproportionate rates,” Seeley said. “Since the vaccines, that has turned around and rural white people have the highest hospitalization and death rates for Covid.”

These national issues are reflected in the views urban and rural students bring to Hartwick, underscoring the differences between the two groups. While the two major parties once incorporated both urban and rural residents, these voters are now polarized along the political spectrum.

“If you look at electoral maps, one of the strongest predictors of voting Republican or Democratic for Congress or President is whether the census bureau has designated those counties are rural, urban or suburban,” Seeley said. The Republican shift in rural areas and Democratic in urban centers, he added, “shows up massively in national election politics.”

Not all students, however, fit neatly into those categories. Colligan, for example, describes herself as a rural Democrat who leans more conservatively on the issue of gun control. When her family moved to a more isolated community in her senior year of high school, she said her mother bought a gun, primarily to shoot the coyotes and foxes preying on their livestock.

“I think I’m more open to both sides of the argument,” she said. “I understand wanting to get rid of guns and I see a value in that, but I also think that in the culture of America, especially rural areas, people are very connected to that history of guns — just like people love hunting. I know so many people who are ‘do-not-take my-guns-away’ kind of people and I don’t see a problem with it.”

"The students learn how some rural people live in poverty and the great effort it takes to achieve what might be a simple task to someone living in an urban area, like getting groceries or a prescription filled."

KATHLEEN ASH

Clinical Assistant Professor of Nursing Professor
Ash is speaking in reference to her Rural Health Nursing class.

Bridging the Divide

When students from urban and rural backgrounds come together at Hartwick in classes, athletics and campus activities, the barriers between them often break down.

In 2020, the college took a major step to promote interaction among students from different backgrounds when it created the Office of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging. Every semester, the office organizes programs that highlight the culture of different groups of students, such as the annual Caribbean Carnival weekend that celebrates the Caribbean-American student population on campus.

“For a lot of urban students, it’s an adjustment to be in a rural area like Oneonta, and lose the things that they’ve been accustomed to for the past 16 to 18 years,” Charles said. “That’s why my office does the work that it does in creating opportunities for them to still feel that sense of home here.”

Another initiative the office launched to ease the transition for urban students is the SOAR mentoring program, geared for Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and first-generation students. Students in the program, which started in 2021, are matched with a faculty, staff or older student who identifies as a person of color. The students regularly meet with their
mentors, who offer tips on succeeding in college and provide personalized support based on the mentees’ articulated needs.

“The data shows that students from those populations tend to not make it to graduation because of the lack of support that they have in navigating predominantly white institutions specifically,” Charles said. Of the 12 mentees in the first year of the program, however, all returned to campus this fall. “We’re proving that this works to have that additional layer of support,” she said.

Rural students, especially those who may find Hartwick more diverse than the towns they grew up in, also need activities to help them adjust to campus. Targeting a wide range of students, the Office of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging offers fun events such as Left Handers Day or National Middle Name Day — “just quirky, cute things that make people feel a sense of belonging here,” Charles said.

"There’s no formula that’s going to give us a solution to the struggles and the differences of what it’s like to live in the United States in the 21st century. I trust in future generations who I am helping to guide because they are going to be our future leaders. If they are able and willing to learn from each other and from people who disagree with them, that is going to be the way to address these issues."

JAMES BUTHMAN

Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Faculty

The more than 60 student clubs on campus and activities such as field trips to Albany and Syracuse also bring urban and rural students together. “Our campus activities group really does have a pulse on the campus community and does a good job creating and providing events that just get students connected and out and about and enjoying being together,” Tanner said.

Beyond campus activities, urban and rural students find connections through their classes, where they learn to confront new ideas, express their opinions and discover that they have common ground with their classmates, regardless of where they are from. “In class, I get to hear different opinions every day, whether it be from the professor who might be from a rural area or from another student,” Killikelly said. “I think, in general, the whole college experience is something that bridges that divide because on a daily basis, you get to interact with people from all over.”

Faculty play a key role in helping students understand and respect the opinions of others by teaching them how to engage in thoughtful conversation on divisive issues, Buthman said. Mastering the skill of interpersonal communication, he added, is essential for students from diverse backgrounds to learn how to resolve the issues they face.

“There’s no formula that’s going to give us a solution to the struggles and the differences of what it’s like to live in the United States in the 21st century,” Buthman said. “I trust in future generations who I am helping to guide because they are going to be our future leaders. If they are able and willing to learn from each other and from people who disagree with them, that is going to be the way to address these issues.”

View the Recording of the Discussion

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