Athens and Chapel Hill

Until last weekend I had never been to Athens, Georgia before, though I'd heard a bunch of course. Here are a few thoughts.

The University of Georgia likes to act as if it has some claim on being the first public university  because it was chartered before UNC (1785 vs 1789). This is complete and utter bullshit, and could only be put out there by a state that was founded as a penal colony. Georgians might point out that it was not really settled by many felons, but if you follow their logic on the university question, the idea that it was supposed to have been takes precedence. UNC built the first building and opened its doors first, so they need to just shut the hell up.

Athens has a downtown that is a good deal more usable than Chapel Hill's. It's a bigger city and it's not built on the spine of a hill, so it has a gridded downtown with more cool-looking bars and restaurants. It wins the rock and roll argument hands down, many more significant bands have spent a lot of time there than here. All in all, it's probably a better place to enjoy ones self while in college.

Though it has a lot in common with Chapel Hill, at a certain point in time their characters diverge. Right now, for example, Chapel Hill is one of the most vaxxed places on the planet, whereas Athens and its surrounding county are at ~50% vaxxed. The public schools there aren't very good, partially because there is a white flight county just across the way where people decamped. Of course, Chapel Hill's dirty little secret is that it itself is a white flight place in a sense, or, rather, it is a place from which blacks have been made to flee by relentless real estate pricing pressure and hypercompetitive schools. 

In many ways, Athens is more like Ithaca or Charlottesville -- it is the center of a region, whereas Chapel Hill is an affluent corner of a large conurbation. Also, like Ithaca, it is a good distance away from a major interstate, so it feels surprisingly way back in there.