Introduction

Abstract

Abstract We in the United States have been so captured by the tradition of Anglo American academic pastoralism that we forget how much more common has been the tradition that associates universities with great cities. The revival of cities and the revival of learning under the aegis of the university in medieval Europe were coincident, and since then the city and the university have shared more of a common history than we usually recognize. Although some of America’s greatest universities are closely identified with great cities-two of them, the University of Chicago and New York University, taking their names from their host cities-our inclination is to idealize the rural campus. (Indeed, the word campus in its modern meaning was first used in the eighteenth century to describe the greensward surrounding the newly built Nassau Hall at Princeton.)