Collegetown USA could be anywhere undergraduates gather. If you have seen Disney’s The Absent-Minded Professor, read Randall Jarrell’s Pictures of an Institution, just about any novel by David Lodge, or Matthew Arnold’s The Scholar Gypsy, you can imagine the town, the campus, its environs, and its denizens.

Collegetown USA and Liberal Arts College USA are completely fictional. I invented them to represent a real institution and real people, but that’s all they are, representations. The flesh-and-blood faculty and administrators were far, far more venal than my descriptive powers are capable of capturing. The events taking place in Collegetown USA, however, are all true.

Should you recognize any elements of your institution in my descriptions of Liberal Arts College USA, all I can say to you is “good luck!”