Department of Anthropology

Abstract:       This presentation explores the geography of school as embodied by the "campus", an invention of American higher education, from the point of view of a municipal government official.  • It traces the evolution of the campus as a municipality from ancient Athens, where post-Socratic philosophers established the first "schools", to medieval Oxford, where the "college" was invented, to Britain's colonies, where the college was freed entirely from the city, the campus conceived to be the physical antithesis of the local.  • It explores the roles of church and state in medieval Europe in formalizing and governing the spontaneous gathering of scholars called a "university" by pouring it into what one historian describes as an "ecclesiastical liberty - a town within a town, a state within a state."  The campus as a kind of state-run city all but predates (and its medieval-theme-park traditions established to justify its continued exemption from) common law.  • While the college was initially necessary to protect those whose profession was knowledge and learning, the campus came to parody urbanity, democracy, and adulthood in the name of pedagogy.  In its anti-urbanity, the campus parallels Foucault's "carceral city” and Agamben’s “camp”: an exceptional, state-run place, its mission manifest in its physical plant, that upends and subordinates the law to its existential needs. • I confront the modern problems a campus presents:  how this municipal type gets built and governed, how its residents participate in that development - even as the "state-city" presumes those residents incapable of participating in their own governance - and how this exceptional place influences the urban environment around it. Finally, I address the ramifications of this medieval holdover in a post-26th-Amendment society, which pose the question: whither the campus?

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