Why do we need the university? Episode 12: The Campus as Social Infrastructure

Here are more thoughts on academic life! Episode 12 is at your service:

What the university has that cannot be delivered

Two episodes ago I argued that the university’s peculiar gift is slow time — the licence to sit with a question for fifteen years. In the last one I argued that its other gift is the encounter with what has not yet been written down. Both arguments have a problem I did not address: they describe activities, not places. If slow thinking and fieldwork are what the institution protects, why does it need buildings at all? Why not disburse the salaries, license the databases, stream the lectures, and sell the land?

This is not a hypothetical. It is a live budget proposal in a great many places. The pandemic supplied the proof of concept and the accountants have not forgotten it. Once teaching has been decomposed into modules, assessment into rubrics, and the degree into a credential, the campus looks like exactly what a cost-conscious administration would call it: an underused asset with a high maintenance line. Add generative systems that can tutor, summarise, and mark at scale, and the case seems to close itself. The content can be delivered. The building cannot be justified.

I want to argue that this gets the university backwards. The campus, in fact, is the infrastructure without which the thing we call formation does not reliably happen. What the university transmits is not information. It is a way of holding oneself towards a problem, and that is learned in corridors.

The universitas had no campus

The campus was not part of the original design.

McNeely and Wolverton (2008) points out in their history of the institutions that have organised knowledge in the West: the first European universities, at Bologna and Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had no buildings, no quadrangles, and no corporate real estate. A universitas in Roman law was simply a sworn association of persons — a guild, in effect, formed for mutual protection and the regulation of a trade. What made it a university was the oath, not the architecture. Lectures were held in rented rooms, in churches, in the master’s house.

The physical campus emerged afterward, and it emerged from need. Students and masters had to sleep somewhere, eat somewhere, argue somewhere, buy books somewhere. They clustered around the infrastructure that made a collective intellectual life sustainable, and over centuries that cluster hardened into the thing we now photograph for the prospectus.

The campus was never a strategic asset acquired by a knowledge corporation but emerged out of people needing to be near each other in order to think together.

Everything that happens outside the timetable

What exactly does proximity supply?

Mostly the things that never appear on a syllabus. Learning theorists have a term for this — legitimate peripheral participation, the process by which newcomers become practitioners not by being taught the practice but by hanging around its edges until they absorb its rhythms (Lave & Wenger, 1991). One learns to be an academic the way one learns any craft: by loitering. By overhearing two colleagues disagree about a manuscript in a corridor and registering, without anyone stating it, what counts as a serious objection in this field. By watching how a supervisor handles a hostile question. By sitting in the departmental kitchen while someone complains about a rejection and learning that rejection is survivable.

These are what Goffman would recognise as focused interaction — the co-ordinated, embodied attention of people in each other’s presence, held together by glance and posture and the small corrections of face-to-face life. Strip it out and you can still transmit the curriculum. What you cannot transmit is the habitus: the tacit sense of how the work is done, which is precisely the un-inscribed knowledge I argued in the last episode that no archive contains.

This is why the fully online university is not a cheaper version of the residential one. It is a different institution that happens to award the same certificate.

Presence is an achievement, not a location

The ethnographic literature actually cuts against a romantic perspective: Beaulieu (2010), writing from science and technology studies, argued explicitly that co-presence should not be confused with co-location: she had spent time physically sharing a laboratory with scientists and learned remarkably little from it. Presence, on her account, is an interactive accomplishment, something participants and researchers achieve together — and it can be achieved at a distance, or comprehensively failed at close range. Mollerup (2017) develops this into the notion of thick presence, and her argument runs in a direction that should give campus romantics pause: media technologies allow us to bring distant places into the field and to be present without reciprocity, so that presence becomes layered rather than binary.

It is that co-location on its own guarantees nothing. Anyone who has sat through a departmental meeting knows that a shared room can host an almost perfect absence of presence, and anyone who has had a five-year intellectual friendship conducted entirely over email knows the reverse. So the case for the campus has to be made more carefully, and I think it is stronger when it is: the campus is the most reliable machine we have ever built for manufacturing the conditions of thick presence. Not presence itself — that still has to be earned, and often is not. But the campus produces, at scale and by default, the unplanned collisions, the shared temporal rhythm, the ambient atmosphere, and the accumulated small encounters out of which thick presence can be assembled. Online, every encounter has to be scheduled, which means every encounter has to be justified in advance. The corridor asks for no justification. That is its entire value, and it is not a value that a platform has yet learned to fake.

Free spaces and invisible colleges

There is a second function, harder for administrators to see because it is by definition not on the timetable.

Polletta (1999) gave social movement theory the concept of free spaces: small-scale settings, removed from the direct supervision of dominant groups, where people participate voluntarily and where oppositional identities and alternative visions can incubate. Coleman (2017) put the concept to work on hackers, showing how semi-autonomous gathering places allowed a technically privileged group to develop a political consciousness that none of their employers had any interest in cultivating.

Universities are full of such spaces, and the good ones do not know it. Hannerz (2010) recounts George Marcus’s student years at Harvard in the 1970s, where the official curriculum had gone stale and students responded by convening their own invisible college in the corners of the campus — reading Foucault, Habermas, and Althusser among themselves, outside the syllabus, unsupervised and uncredited. Every scholar I know of my generation has some version of this story. I always praise the sessions I spent with Prof. Sirman and her other graduate students, our weekly reading discussion sessions at her home close to the campus at Boğaziçi University.

What is worth noticing is that this activity is parasitic on physical infrastructure that nobody allocated for the purpose. It needs an unclaimed room, a bench, a cheap canteen, hours between classes that no one is auditing. It needs slack — spatial slack, temporal slack — of exactly the kind that a well-run efficiency drive is designed to eliminate. A campus optimised for room-utilisation rates is a campus with no corners left, and a campus with no corners produces no invisible colleges.

Wittel (2018) supplies the political economy of this. Education, he argues, is fundamentally a gift rather than a commodity: what a teacher actually transfers is time, attention, and care, and the gift relation is obscured when education is delivered as a state service and obscured further when it is sold as a private good. It is only where education operates as a common good that its gift character can properly appear. The campus is the site where that gift circulates in its least commodified form — the unbilled half-hour after class, the book pressed into someone’s hands, the recommendation written for no return.

Tufekci (2017) noticed something adjacent in her work on protest movements: from Tahrir to Gezi to Occupy, one of the first things occupiers built in the squares was a library. People who had taken a public space and had to decide what to put in it kept inventing, spontaneously, a version of the university — free reading, free argument, uncorrupted by monetary relations. That is a striking piece of evidence about what the campus is for, offered by people who did not have one.

The permeable campus

The argument so far should not lead to the impression that the campus matters because it is enclosed, protected, and offline. It may be the opposite: In the chapter of Digital Unsettling devoted to the campus, Udupa and Dattatreyan (2023) treat the university as a site of struggle rather than a sanctuary, and their point about digitalisation is that it has not made the campus obsolete. It has made it permeable. Hashtags, livestreams, and transnational solidarity networks do not replace the physical grounds; they turn those grounds into a node, so that what happens in a quadrangle becomes legible and consequential far outside it. The campus becomes a referent for struggles that are simultaneously local and global — students trolled and surveilled online, and also standing in a specific place.

Where the wider public sphere is monitored, constrained, or simply exhausting, the campus remains one of the very few physical spaces in which people can still assemble, argue in front of each other, and be seen doing so. This has an unlovely corollary. The campus is defensible precisely because it is dangerous, and administrations that treat the campus purely as a service centre are not simply being philistine. A campus reduced to timetabled rooms, card-access corridors, and a food court is a campus that has been made safe — for the institution, from its own members. The efficiency argument and the disciplinary argument arrive at the same building.

What is actually being defended

So when a university sells its buildings, or moves its teaching into modules, or replaces its common rooms with bookable pods, the loss is not sentimental. It is infrastructural. It is the loss of the conditions under which peripheral learning happens, invisible colleges form, gifts circulate, and assembly remains possible.

This connects back to where the series has been going. In Episode 10 I argued that the university is the last institution able to protect slow time. In Episode 11 I argued that it protects the encounter with the not-yet-written. The campus is where both of those are physically underwritten. Slow time needs somewhere to be spent. The encounter with the un-inscribed begins with people who are near enough to each other to notice what has not been said.

The machines have made this easier to see, in their unintentionally clarifying way. A generative system can now deliver the content of a degree — the readings, the explanations, the feedback, the summaries — faster and more patiently than most of us. If the university’s function were the delivery of content, it would already be finished. It is not finished, and the reason is that the thing the university actually does has always happened in the parts of the day that nobody scheduled: the corridor, the stairwell, the walk to the bus.

The neoliberal university wants the campus to be a monetisation site. Its critics sometimes want it to be a sanctuary. It is neither. It is infrastructure — mundane, expensive, under-theorised, and load-bearing. We should say so before somebody sells it.

References

Beaulieu, A. (2010). Research note: From co-location to co-presence: Shifts in the use of ethnography for the study of knowledge. Social Studies of Science, 40(3), 453–470.

Coleman, E. G. (2017). From Internet farming to weapons of the geek. Current Anthropology, 58(S15), S91–S102.

Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press.

Hannerz, U. (2010). Anthropology’s world: Life in a twenty-first-century discipline. Pluto Press.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

McNeely, I. F., with Wolverton, L. (2008). Reinventing knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. W. W. Norton.

Mollerup, N. G. (2017). “Being there,” phone in hand: Thick presence and ethnographic fieldwork with media. EASA Media Anthropology Network e-Seminar 58.

Polletta, F. (1999). “Free spaces” in collective action. Theory and Society, 28(1), 1–38.

Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.

Udupa, S., & Dattatreyan, E. G. (2023). Campus: University as a site of struggle. In Digital unsettling: Decoloniality and dispossession in the age of social media (pp. ??–??). New York University Press.

Wittel, A. (2018). Higher education as a gift and as a commons. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 16(1), 194–213.