The University as a Space and the Future of the University

Abstract

Those who seek to understand the present crisis in the university might well begin by analyzing the university in spatial terms. Yet spatial considerations are almost entirely absent from recent discussions of the causes and possible remedies for campus unrest. We are asked to believe that disturbances are caused by administrative blunder, faculty irresponsibility, student intransigence, a hard core of anarchists, and so on, but never by anything so simple yet so profoundly important as the spatial arrangement of the university itself. Peter J. Caws, in a recent collection of essays on The Embattled University, has suggested that ideally the university is a place not just to work,... but to live and work. Its physical design should reflect the nature of the living and working, and the ancillary services provided should be so arranged as to facilitate a certain quality of life and work. ' But Caws does not explain how this general desideratum is to be achieved. Whatever changes in administration, faculty, and curriculum are indicated for the emerging university, a basic requirement will be that it be situated in a new kind of physical environment. A hodgepodge of conventionally and nonfunctionally designed buildings of derivative style arranged on a sterile grid system accommodated increasingly to the hegemony of the private automobile will not answer the demanding requirements. At the very least, colleges and universities should abandon their