Academic Settings

Town and gown. That is what they call the relationship between college and community in towns across America. But in Southern California, there is not just one college in the urban landscape but scores of them of various sizes. And here, as in other areas, the relationship can range from love to hate. Communities like students’ spending power but often frown on youthful rowdiness. Here are overviews from three Orange County campuses:

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Russell Hargrobe lives in Upland but says he spends most of his time in Fullerton.

“I’m here all the time,” said Hargrobe, a 20-year-old sophomore at Cal State Fullerton. “I work here, go to church here. I just sleep in Upland.”

The biology major said he feels more a part of the campus than he does of the city he commutes from.

“This is a commuter school,” he said. “Everyone just comes for class and then leaves.”

But Hargrobe, who has been working as a groundskeeper for the building engineering department on campus for more than a year, has found ways to connect.

Hargrobe said a 130-member Christian fellowship called Souled Out, which meets Wednesday nights for Bible study, has helped him develop friendships.

“In some ways we are our own community,” said Chrystal Santoyo, a new member who started her freshman year in August.

Santoyo decided to move out of her parents’ home in Santa Ana to an off-campus apartment.

“I wanted to be part of the college town and get away from parents,” the 18-year-old arts major said.

Once a vast orange grove, the 225-acre campus--which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year--is surrounded by an affluent suburban neighborhood in north Fullerton, neighboring Placentia by a few blocks to the east and Brea to the north.

Rick Burnett, a business marketing student who expects to graduate in the spring, is one of hundreds of regulars at the Off-Campus Pub, a hangout on Nutwood Avenue, which is the southern border of the campus just west of the Orange Freeway.

The family-style restaurant has become a second home for students like Burnett, a La Mirada resident who makes it a weekly ritual to have dinner and a beer at the pub with his childhood friends.

On a recent Wednesday evening, the pub was nearly empty except for an after-work crowd, men in suits at the bar, and a group of women who were smoking on the patio.

“We’re here when they’re not,” said one law student from Western State University College of Law across the street, about avoiding the bustling Cal State crowd on Thursday nights.

The immediate area surrounding the four-year public university has become an area densely populated with young people, students from Cal State, Fullerton College or Western State University.

Even the employees of the area’s businesses tend to look a lot like youthful students.

Maite Arama, a 26-year-old waitress at the pub, said that if it weren’t for the student community, the restaurant wouldn’t be so packed every night.

“We have students here every day, little study groups sometimes with teachers,” said Arama, a Fullerton resident who has worked at the pub for five years.

“The same people hang out here. And on Thursday nights, when we have College Night, that’s when I make the most money,” she said, attesting to the line that forms outside the restaurant after 9 p.m. as students wait to be seated.