The rural Tennessee isn't really the part you should worry about. It's suburban Tennessee. The suburb culture throughout the state is basically white supremacist.
I agree on a lot of your points. However, I would say Memphis does have a lot to do if you know where to look.
Nashville might be solid blue, but the politics of the state is ran by it's suburbs. The worst republicans imaginable live in Franklin and Murfreesboro. And you can not avoid them if you live and work in Nashville. To make matters worst, the corporate democrats in Nashville just rubber stamp everything the republican's do as long as it benefits Nashville. I managed to last two years in Nashville. The culture is sick.
I really wished they considered a majority African American community that has the capacity to grow. This is just going to increase inequality. Sad really.
We have issues with people dredging sand in Memphis on our Wolf river. Awful stuff. The philanthropic community has been working on buying up most of the land next through a conservancy.
Memphis is built on a thin layer of clay on top of sand. Which is actually great, we have one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the country under us. The only problem, we don't know all the locations that the aquifer gets refilled. :(
We should move more research to lower cost cities like Memphis or Detroit that have affordable housing. In addition, we need to prioritize funding to our middle tier Universities.
I don't understand how people expect us to subsides wages in high cost cities. It's not the only problem, but we do have a prestige issue.
Except the federal government pumps money into those AAU universities in research grants, therefore they are more prestigious and have better job prospects after you graduate.
The system is stupid. But it won't change. You won't see the public university in Memphis or Baltimore get more money federal money than a school like Stanford.
The major issue is that typically states ignore the needs of critical infrastructure in those cities like Tier One Carnegie Classification Universities.
The health issues are a serious problem. I ended up in the hospital with stress induced gastritis one semester. I was lucky I dropped the course, for a W, before the deadline.
This program is no joke, especially if you don't avoid certain courses. If I had one piece of advice for anyone in the program, you should trust the crowd source student reviews of the courses.
But yeah. It's not that great of a music town to be honest. Unless, you like the corporate stuff.