Member Price: $31.50
Description
A sweeping history of the buildings and materials that have shaped nine centuries of university life, from parchments and silk robes to glass atriums and sprawling parking lots.
We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads. The University puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution's 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material--straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete--William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university's shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University, Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline. A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay.Product Details
ISBN-13
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Page Count
448 pages
Product Dimensions
9.4 x 6.4 x 1.8 in
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Harvard Square COOP
1400 Massachusetts
Avenue,
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: (617) 499-2000
Monday – Saturday
10am – 8pm
Sunday
10am – 6pm
Harvard COOP
9 Brattle Street,
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel (617) 499-2000
Monday – Saturday
10am – 8pm
Sunday
10am – 6pm
Harvard Business School COOP
Spangler Center,
117 Western Ave,
Boston, MA 02163
Tel (617) 499-3248
Monday – Friday
10am – 5pm
Saturday - Sunday
Closed
Harvard Law School COOP
1595 Massachusetts
Avenue,
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel (617) 499-3255
Monday – Friday
9am – 5pm
Saturday 11am – 5pm
Sunday Closed
The COOP Concept Store
40 Western Ave, Boston, MA 02134
Monday - Saturday 10am - 6pm
Sunday 10am - 3pm
Ground floor of The Atlas Hotel, across from Harvard Business School
Harvard Medical School COOP
Countway Library,
10 Shattuck St,
Boston, MA 02115
Tel (617) 499-3300
Monday – Friday
10am – 5pm
Saturday – Sunday
Closed
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