Photo of Johns Hopkins Commencement by Will Kirk / HIPS, 2007
Earlier today I passed by a group of jubilant looking people in black robes who were either very young judges or newly minted graduates. Trailing a few paces behind were relieved looking people I assume were the parents. It seemed they were all headed off to a celebratory lunch somewhere near the harbor.
Seeing students Downtown is becoming more of a regular thing. Graduate and professional students tend to blend in with the office crowd on the streets, but it's easy to spot a Peabody enrolee lugging an instrument case, a med student in scrubs, a culinary student in their whites, or someone from the School for the Arts or MICA sketching up in Mount Vernon.
Downtown may not fit the stereotypical image of a campus town because there are so many other elements that define its identity (business, tourism, etc.). And we don't really have the leafy campus with the Georgian architecture and fraternity row. But Downtown Baltimore is a college town all the same.
Consider this: there are nine academic institutions that ring Downtown. Of the approximately 160,000 people in Downtown on any given day, 20,000 of them are students. That's about the size of Cornell, and twice as large as the undergraduate population at Harvard.
-mike
