Looking out the window of an airplane flying over Boulder, Colorado, recently, I was reminded of just how much American universities stick out from their surroundings.
I had never been to Boulder and never visited the University of Colorado’s flagship campus there, but even from 30,000 feet I knew exactly where it started and ended. The red tile roof and squares of the campus formed a small, self-contained world, quite unlike the grid of single-family homes that surrounded it.
In urban colleges, the line between campus and community can be even more stringent. For example, the University of Southern California requires students to check in with a security guard upon entering the university gates at night. At Yale University, castle-like architecture makes the campus feel like a fortified enclave.
America’s elite colleges and universities today are a paradox: although concerns about social justice continue to plague students and administrators, these colleges are often estranged from the society they claim to care about. Many on the right and centrist believe that universities have become ideological echo chambers. Some leftists see them as a “graveyard of radical ideas”.
These criticisms are nothing new — for generations, people have viewed American universities as ivory towers of isolation — but public debate about the state of higher education has intensified in recent years. As time goes by, they have taken on a new urgency. Ideology and institutional culture are often given attention, but the key factor, geography, is often ignored.
The campus is a uniquely American invention. (The term he coined in the late 1700s to describe Princeton.) At a time when the views of America’s elite were convinced that the city was a hotbed of moral decay, it created a different environment for scholars. Efforts were made to create Retaining students in rural areas and self-contained campuses was thought to preserve student virtue.
Such thinking has lost its appeal in recent years, but to this day, American universities are more fundamentally isolated from their surrounding communities than European universities. Located around a well-defined central campus, often featuring trademark Gothic architecture, it is the pride of America’s elite universities.
However, students and faculty can lose what they gain in the enhanced sense of academic community that campus life provides in regular interaction with people who do not live in the academy world. Campuses, by design, limit opportunities to meet people of a wide range of occupations, educational levels and backgrounds.
Of course, students love spending time with other students and scholars interact with other scholars. And that’s good for teaching and research. But there is no need to enforce geographical separation from society on top of that.
We all instinctively extrapolate insights from our communities and daily interactions and imagine them to be true about the nation as a whole. Inevitably, that means our view of the country is a little skewed, but for college students, that skew can be extreme. and risk allowing a wider swath of American society.
Put another way, the most dangerous thing to the health of America’s intellectual elite isn’t that most professors have similar cultural preferences or similar liberal politics. that’s right. The campus setting makes them forget that rational people often don’t share their views.
Student bodies and faculties have become more diverse in recent decades, but don’t assume that elite universities are microcosms of society. Students and professors, whatever their socioeconomic background, lead very different lives from lawyers, shopkeepers and manual laborers. It shapes their worldview.
Living in a university with a major central campus can also narrow a student’s view of the world, especially in a university where most undergraduates live on campus. Leaving universities to handle all student needs (food, housing, medical care, security, punishment for misbehavior, etc.) can be infantilizing for young people. Worse, eating only enough food to materialize in front of you and living in dormitories that other people keep clean distorts the political thinking of students.
It also robs them of the opportunity to meet people who hold different roles in society, from retail workers to landlords. Such exchanges remind them that they are not students forever and raise questions about the social relevance of the ideas they encounter at university.
Community outreach programs help broaden the horizons of students, but a better approach is to structure the physical footprint of the university in such a way that interaction with the surrounding community becomes natural.
On the whole, urban state universities like Rutgers University’s Newark campus have had far better integration with their environments than elite private universities — though NYU could be an exception. It exists more seamlessly with its surroundings. Both the university and the local community have much to gain.
Some have already begun to break down the boundaries between town and gown, out of economic necessity. Oak College (population 3,972 in 2020) built new housing on a disused portion of its campus, giving residents access to college events and the library. .
Reducing the number of undergraduates on campus would be a good start to foster more overlap between the university and society. If universities weren’t in full control of their students’ lives, they might not have had so many administrators, potentially cutting down on wasted tuition. It could reverse the trend toward college crackdowns on independent student life.
It may also make student activities more grounded and more effective. Increased interaction with the surrounding community encourages student advocacy on issues that have a significant impact on society (such as housing rights) and issues that do not (such as certain prominent figures should be allowed to speak on campus). (whether or not) is encouraged.
Of course, students may congregate in certain areas off-campus. Some of it is inevitable and not a bad thing. But universities and local governments should try to prevent students from taking control of areas like Westwood, which borders UCLA. Otherwise, students will become an extension of the campus, nullifying the point of these efforts to integrate the student population into the surrounding communities.
Bringing American universities closer to society will revitalize academic inquiry and produce graduates with broader minds and social awareness. One option is political. The federal government, through its funding powers, has significant influence over higher education and may provide additional funding to universities that make up their physical footprint in a decentralized manner.
A cultural change is also necessary. Americans need to stop associating central campuses with prestige and looking down on, often implicitly, her schools, the so-called commuters where most people don’t live in on-campus accommodations. Finally, emerging universities have room to demonstrate that higher education can succeed without being campus-centric. Universities that do not reinforce themselves against the communities around them can make better use of their cultural resources.
Recognizing the university as part of society is also an opportunity to raise interest in urban planning in the United States. For an urban university to fit in, the city must be safe, affordable and comfortable. Universities should work with local governments to address issues such as homelessness, crime, and cost of living. To take the first step, wealthier universities will use all their coffers and vast real estate holdings to build homeless shelters and affordable housing, and benefit from improved health in their host cities. can do.
Universities should not be indistinguishable from other institutions. It means replacing much-needed critical instincts with conformism and commercialization. is to remove some of the many barriers that separate it from