It’s an unlikely thing to wait in line for. Head down a side street, in through an anonymous door, and you’ll join a long line people waiting to go upstairs. Open a spiked metal gate at the top, and there you have it: the university jail. I’m in Heidelberg, visiting a series of small rooms covered in graffiti where students were imprisoned for centuries.
In Germany, in fact, the possession of a prison was a distinguishing feature of universities. It was a sign that the institution possessed legal authority over its members. It was also a product of the fact that students often misbehaved. Punishable crimes included the capture and cooking of pigeons, or dressing up like women.
In England, similarly bad behavior among the student body allowed for corporal punishment. Further north, in Sweden’s Uppsala University, bad apples could face even more severe sanction: The last student to be sentenced to death there suffered his fate as late as 1772.
These remarkable histories serve an important reminder: At a time when more and more universities are shifting the learning experience online, it can be easy to forget just how much the material structure of a school can affect students. A stroll through the history of the university’s shape reveals what mattered to the generations that came before us — as well as how that story shapes our expectations today.
The University of Padua in Italy doesn’t have a prison, but in 1595, it opened its anatomy theater. The six-tiered theater hosted dissections that could last for weeks — or at least until the body stank. It was designed not only to further the research of its professors but to lure students. Without such scholars, observed one academic, the town would itself “be a dead body.”
Books and libraries too proved formational to the birth of universities. “Without copies,” declared the statues of the University of Padua in 1264, “there would be no university.” So valuable were these objects that scholars offered them as collateral for loans. It follows that the buildings housing them were equally esteemed. Sometimes, the priorities became mixed up: When benefactors sought to create a scientific library in 18th-century Oxford, they spent so much constructing the magnificently domed Radcliffe Camera that there was no money left to buy any books.
Even the seemingly bland concrete buildings that litter so many campuses have their meaning. It’s easy to joke that these uncompromising grey blocks are the result of a mistake in which plans for a prison or lunatic asylum were swapped with a school. But such concrete megastructures as Simon Fraser University in Canada were conceived as a declaration of confidence in a new, technocratic, globalist age.
Concrete gained this prominence during a university-building boom in the 20th century. From 1944 to 1989, the number of universities across the globe more than doubled. So popular was concrete during this time that the people of Mexico dubbed it “el polvo magico” — the magic powder.
Scale can be as important as style. In the New World, competition on this front was fierce. When it opened in 1642, Harvard was the largest building in the North American Colonies. Princeton stole that title in 1756. Brown was described as “a College near as large as Babel.” Each successive expansion to these campuses reaffirmed the importance of education in the Americas.
During the Cold War, the battle for bigness went international: Seeking to outbuild the West, Stalin personally commissioned the monumental home of Moscow State University. With 20 miles of corridors, 5,000 rooms, and crowned by a 12-ton, five-pointed star, there was no doubt about the significance of this institution. Khrushchev, in turn, condemned the soaring height of the skyscraper. “Why fly to the sky?” he demanded. “What’s wrong with the ground?”
And it’s not just buildings that tell the history of universities. Fabrics and furnishings, food and drink: All have formed the focus of intense debate. In France in the 18th century, arguments about the robes worn by academics were among the factors that tipped the country into revolution. Decades of disputes over who got to wear red gowns — as opposed to the less desirable black — only resolved when the university itself disbanded.
Today, universities are moving increasingly toward the virtual. There is no doubt this will reshape the university, just as the invention of printing did. But even online universities advertise themselves with images of storied buildings. Worries that schools will be unseated by this e-options massively underestimates the continued appeal of the university as a tangible place.
People form universities, but universities form people. The material structure of a campus has no small influence on our history. Over nearly a millennium, the university has acquired a distinguished and material history. It will have a material future, too.
William Whyte is the author of “The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood” (Harvard University Press).
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