Understanding Campus and Community Relationships through Marriage and Family Metaphors: A Town-Gown Typology

In this article we argue that the scholarship on marriages and families provides invaluable insights into town-gown relationships. Marital typologies are used to generate insights into what happens between campus and community relationships over time, and a line of family scholarship provides some additional illumination about the ways in which institutions and municipalities can strike a healthy balance between meeting their idiosyncratic needs and pursuing shared goals and objectives. We use four case examples to illustrate the application of the typological structure, and these examples are followed by a discussion of implications for leadership on both sides of the town-gown relationship.