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Most large American Universities are not part of the surrounding town or city. They are in effect their own municipalities.

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Some of the literally are their own municipalities.

Two examples: The University of Notre Dame is in Notre Dame, Indiana, which happens to be surrounded by South Bend, Indiana. Same with Stanford... which is technically in Stanford, California.

Even more literally, the city of College Station, Texas, is a city built around the main campus of Texas A&M. Thus the name.

Ah, interesting - thank you! So it's the civic structure rather than a particularly lawless student base. :) Not so bizarre then - just different!

Is there anywhere else that has the US model? I worked on a UK university campus for a few years and I don't think they had any security guards (certainly I never met any and I was in and out of buildings at all hours) let alone armed police!

The really ancient ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_University_Constabul... (I think that may be the last left).

I think UK universities mostly include limited security in their general pastoral support, rather than having dedicated security guards. So there's someone who can e.g. ask a stranger loitering on campus at night what they're doing, but anything serious will be handled by the police.

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