First of all, I have been on TOSU’s campus (it sucked, by the way), and I have dined at a restaurant that featured one of Archie Griffin’s Heisman trophy’s.
And since I have seen Columbus from both the ground and the air, I can assure you that in MY universe, a giant suburb-of-itself is not a city. If Pittsburgh were to somehow waive a magic wand and annex Mt. Lebanon and Upper St. Clair, they would still be suburbs – they would happen to pay taxes to the city, but they would still be suburbs. Any city who has gained such a large percentage in its population since 1980, consisting of quarter-acre-per-lot house farms and melrose-place apartment complexes called Hampden this or Summerglen That or Orchard the-Other-thing, is not a city. Phoenix at least gets our homeless people in the summer time – what does Columbus get (other than the tax dollars of the rest of Ohio)?
As for the second largest county spewing TOSU students being Cuyahoga, NO S**T! Once you clear the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Cleveland, the rest of that county is suburbs (which I included in my rant, if you read closely). And for the record, the fact that a land grant school is more than a regional school in its enrollment patterns DOES make it less urban. Shit, you might as well call BC a city school (granted it is across the city lines in Newton) or Case Western. They may be technically in the city limits of large cities, but are they as urban as Pitt, Temple, Cleveland State, etc? No.
As for most of us attending HS outside of the metropolitan statistical area of Pittsburgh, I suggest to you that we are freaks – the products of a recent aggressive attempt to make Pitt less of an urban commuter school and more like a big 10 school (by the way, I was born and lived in the City before moving to Indiana, PA). We all hung out with each other because we had those connections to each other that non-townies tend to have at colleges – we weren’t going home to do laundry at mom’s house each Friday night, and we tended not to drink at our hometown bar with our friends from HS. A lot of our fellow Pitt students, many of whom we rarely encountered because they were taking night classes or CGS courses, were on a different cultural schedule than we were.
Naturally, I would not want anyone to go to a big ten school, especially myself. I chose Pitt because it is a city school without the rah-rah-sis-boom-bah bullshit of the big ten. I like the fact that there are few fraternities, and the favorite pastime is not seeing how many frat boys we can stuff into a phone booth. I like the fact that our football fans are foul mouthed, demanding, and bitter. Better than sitting in a Nuremburg like stadium singing the good-ol’-college cheer the same way my grandfather did along with the other 80,000 drones. Pitt doesn’t have an annual battle for “Ye olde Crusty Puke Buckette” like all those big ten schools do, and I’m glad of it.
But lets face facts – Columbus is a backwater state capital with a HUGE state university in it, which only experienced economic growth in the post-urban office-park-ization-of-America era that we are unfortunately experiencing right now. It is NOT a city. It is certainly more populous than State College, but IT IS A SUBURB!
[By the way, if you realized that English and Scottish teams played each other, why did you cry out for Celtic to beat Man U just once? I guess you assumed, incorrectly, that in all the past meetings of these teams, that Manchester United won or tied in all those games?]
