Looking out the window of an airplane flying over Boulder, Colorado recently, I was reminded of how much America’s universities stand out from their surroundings.
I had never been to Boulder, or visited the flagship University of Colorado campus there, but even at 30,000 feet I could tell exactly where it started and ended. The red-tiled roofs and quadrilaterals of campus formed a small, self-contained world, entirely separate from the grid of single-family homes that surrounded it.
In urban universities, the line between campus and community can be even sharper. At the University of Southern California, for example, students must check in with security guards when entering the university gates at night. At Yale, castle-like architecture makes the campus feel like a walled enclave.
America’s elite university today is a paradox: even as social justice concerns continue to preoccupy students and administrations, these universities often seem disconnected from the society they claim to care so much about. Many on the right and in the center believe universities have become ideological echo chambers. Some on the left see them as “sepulchers for radical thought”.
These critiques aren’t new — for generations people have viewed America’s universities as ivory towers, isolated from reality — but they’ve taken on new urgency as public debate about the state of education higher education has intensified in recent years. Ideology and institutional culture often attract attention, but one key factor is often overlooked: geography.
The campus is a uniquely American invention. (The term originated in the late 1700s to describe Princeton.) Efforts to create segregated environments for scholars emerged at a time when the American elite believed cities were hotbeds of moral corruption. . It was thought that keeping students in rural areas and on self-contained campuses would protect their virtue.
Although such ideas have waned in recent years, to this day American universities are radically more isolated from their surrounding communities than are their European counterparts. And being located around a strongly defined central campus, often featuring characteristic Gothic-style architecture, remains a point of pride for elite American universities.
But what students and faculty gain in the heightened sense of academic community that comes from campus life, they can lose in regular interaction with people who don’t live in the world of the academy. The campus, by design, limits opportunities to meet people from a wider range of professions, education levels, and class backgrounds.
Of course, students like to hang out with other students, and academics associate with other academics. And it’s good for education and research. But it is not necessary to impose a geographical separation of the company in addition.
We all instinctively extrapolate ideas from our own communities and daily interactions, imagining that they are true for the nation as a whole. Inevitably, this means that our view of the country is a bit distorted – but for those in college, the distortions can be extreme. Stuck on campus, scholars risk limiting their knowledge and tolerance of a broad spectrum of American society.
In other words, what is most dangerous to the health of America’s intellectual elite is not that most professors have similar cultural tastes and similar liberal politics. It will probably always be the case. It’s that the configuration of the campus makes it easy for them to forget that reasonable people often don’t share their point of view.
Student bodies and faculties have diversified in recent decades, but that shouldn’t lead us to believe that elite universities have become microcosms of society: highly educated people are far more liberal than the average American. . The divide is not only political: regardless of their socio-economic background, students and professors have daily routines very different from those of lawyers, shopkeepers or workers, and this shapes their worldview.
Life at a university with a dominant central campus can also reduce students’ view of the world, especially at colleges where most undergraduates live on campus. Letting the university take care of all student needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing bad behavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse still, it distorts the political thinking of students to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and to live in dorms that others keep clean.
It also robs them of the chance to meet people with different roles in society, from retail workers to landlords – interactions that would remind them that they won’t be students forever and raise questions about the social relevance of ideas they encounter at university.
Community outreach programs can help broaden student perspectives, but the best approach would be to configure the physical footprint of universities in a way that makes interactions with surrounding communities natural.
Overall, urban state universities like Rutgers University’s Newark campus have done a much better job of integrating with their surroundings than elite private universities – with the possible exception of NYU. But colleges in small towns, cities and suburbs could also do more to integrate their physical presences more harmoniously with the surrounding environment. The university and the community have much to gain.
Some have already begun to break down the boundaries between town and dress out of financial necessity. After reopening in 2011 after three years of closure, Antioch College, a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio (2020 population 3,972), constructed new residential buildings on disused portions of its campus, providing residents access to university events and the library.
Housing fewer undergraduate students on campus would be a good start to encourage greater overlap between university and society. If universities had less total control over the lives of their students, they could do without so many administrators, which could reduce exorbitant tuition fees. It could reverse the trend of college crackdowns on independent student life.
It could also make student activism both more grounded and more effective. Greater interaction with surrounding communities would encourage students more to advocate for issues that have material impacts on society (e.g. housing rights) and less for those who do not (e.g. if certain personalities should be allowed to speak on campus).
Of course, students will likely continue to congregate in certain off-campus areas — some of that is unavoidable and not a bad thing. But universities and local governments should try to prevent students from dominating neighborhoods like Westwood, which is adjacent to UCLA, or they will come to function as extensions of the campus, running counter to these efforts to integrate the student population in surrounding communities.
Bringing American universities into closer contact with society would invigorate academic research and produce graduates with broader minds and greater social awareness. How to do it? One option is political. The federal government has massive influence over higher education through its funding powers and could provide additional funds to colleges that configure their physical footprint less centrally.
There’s also a cultural shift that needs to happen: Americans need to stop associating central campus with prestige and despise – often tacitly – so-called suburban schools, where most don’t live in on-campus housing. . Finally, a fledgling university has the opportunity to demonstrate that higher education can be successful even when not oriented around a campus. A university that does not fortify itself against its surrounding community can make much better use of its cultural resources.
Reconnecting the university to society is also an opportunity to redouble our attention to American urban planning. For urban universities to blend into their surroundings, cities need to be safe, affordable and enjoyable. Colleges should work with local governments to address issues such as homelessness, crime, and cost of living. Wealthier universities could take the first step by using their full coffers and vast real estate holdings to build homeless shelters and affordable housing, then capitalize on the improved health of their host cities.
The university should not be made indistinguishable from other institutions. It would mean replacing his much-needed critical instinct with conformism and commercialization. But she badly needs more integration into society, and the best way to achieve this is to break down some of the many barriers that separate her from the outside world.