Faculty Feature: What did you call me?

By Michael Selover

For most of us, living in the Sauk Valley Community College district means we live somewhere that we would consider rural. But when you identify a place as rural, what exactly are you saying? For many, rurality is about the look and feel of a place. It’s an agrarian or pastoral scene that might feature farms and barns or a few houses dotting the side of a winding road. For others, rurality is a lack of human involvement, so places like wilderness areas and parkland are rural. Still another group may call a place rural if it’s too far from certain services like public transportation or shopping. 

Since these people may not all agree, it becomes important to ask who gets to decide what really is rural and what is not. As it turns out, there are about as many definitions of what makes a place rural as there are dots on the map. These definitions are written by government agencies and other organizations who have a need to separate people and places into groups, most often to determine eligibility for a program. The federal government has at least 23 current definitions of what it means to be rural, and states have anywhere from one to 46! Nationally, there are at least 140 definitions in operation overall. 

Some of these are simple definitions, such as the United States Census Bureau which says that rural is anything outside an urbanized area or urban cluster. But then consider a definition from a United States Department of Agriculture loan program that says that rural is, “any open country, or any place, town, village, or city which is not part of or associated with an urban area and which has a population not in excess of 2,500 inhabitants, except places with populations up to 10,000 if they are of rural character, and areas with up to 20,000 people if they are rural in character and have “a serious lack of mortgage credit for lower and moderate-income families.”

Can you imagine trying to explain that definition to your friends? As you could envision, with so many different definitions existing there is bound to be disagreement, and that includes right here in the Sauk Valley. Take the city of Sterling as an example. As an urban cluster, the Census Bureau says it’s not rural, but the first house outside the city limits is. What about a town like Deer Grove or Coleta? Rural by most definitions, certainly, but according to a definition from the Congressional Office of Management and Budget, Whiteside County has enough people to be considered urban. That means for policy purposes that every small town, every farm, no matter how remote, is every bit as urban as downtown Chicago. 

I wear a few different hats here at Sauk Valley Community College, and, luckily for me, most of them focus on teaching and learning. Depending on the season, you may catch me out in the field working with the college’s farm equipment, in the gym flying a drone, or in the cafeteria testing the water in our hydroponic towers. But one of my favorite things to do when I’m not teaching is performing research about interdisciplinary issues that affect how we access services like education. Through this work, I can help highlight what’s going on in the everyday lives of the students I teach, their families, and the communities that serve them. 

In this case, the issue is that words have meaning. And sometimes that meaning isn’t exactly what you’d expect it to be.