Constructing Frostburg’s ‘Cooler’ Future: Sustaining Campus and Community through a Dialogue Series in an Appalachian College Town

Abstract

The City of Frostburg’s letterhead reads, ‘Maryland’s Mountain City, “It’s Just Cooler Here!”‘, and recently, several faculty and administrators of Frostburg State University (FSU) have included ‘Frostburg … It’s Just Cooler Here’ in their university email signatures. A large banner with the phrase was also hung above the door of City Place, a town community centre in Frostburg, on the annual town clean-up day supported by the City and FSU, ‘Beautify the ‘Burg’, in 2013. The slogan, created by an action group that emerged that year during the Sustaining Campus and Community Dialogue Series held in Frostburg, Maryland, has stuck, and in doing so constructs a dialogic identity of ‘coolness’ that promotes a non-violent culture of social sustainability, despite interpretive differences. The phrase helps people to frame experience through metaphor, which Lakoff and Johnson (2003) suggest ‘structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people’ (p. 3). What is meant by ‘cooler’ in this context, and do all community members agree it is truly ‘cooler’ in Frostburg? What are the benefits of and the insights gained by constructing a shared sense of a ‘cooler’ Frostburg together? And, importantly, what will sustain that ‘coolness’ in the future now that the two and half year dialogue series is over?