The University

Scintillating…The combination of all this high-table gossip with Whyte’s urbane prose style make The University a surprisingly brisk and entertaining read. – Jacob Mikanowski * The Chronicle of Higher Education *
[Whyte] speckles his book with vignettes of masterminds confident they could shape a university’s inhabitants with just the right arrangement of furniture and walls…It’s still incumbent on administrators to attend to the built, embodied aspects of the university, especially as these aspects increasingly become the thing that a university uniquely provides. – Noah Swank * The Dispatch *
Cleverly interprets the long history of these places of learning through the physical materials that led to, influenced or grew from its development: straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron and concrete…A serious history that gives the reader an exceptional overview of the university, with the appropriate balance of breadth and depth. – Andrew Cusack * The Catholic Herald *
Though it is primarily an examination of the physical university, The University offers a balanced look at the nature of the institutions…Interesting, informative, and a very refreshing alternative to another polemical take on higher education. – Elizabeth Stice * Orange Blossom Ordinary *
An imaginative architectural history of higher education, told as a tale of masonry and majesty. * Kirkus Reviews *
Whyte ranges eloquently over a thousand years of university history in this timely and riveting book. As higher education is beset on all sides by criticism, universities described as rootless and out of touch, and AI promising learning without human contact, William Whyte offers a powerful counternarrative. The University is as challenging to those leading, funding, and attending universities as it is appealing in its light touch and fascinating detail. Every university president, every higher education minister, and even every columnist fighting the campus culture wars from afar would do well to read this book. – Louise Richardson, president of the Carnegie Corporation
From medieval lecture halls strewn with straw to concrete campuses shaped by war, empire, and protest, William Whyte shows how universities have always been built as much from materials as from ideas. This is a global history of power, learning, and survival told through the stones, silks, paper, and blood that made the modern university. A true tour de force. – Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Original, massively well-informed, and beautifully written. Whyte vividly documents the vital and contested role of material developments in the spread of advanced education, from the treatment of dead bodies in anatomy classes to the use of concrete in new campuses across continents. In the process, he contributes to important debates about the present and future of higher learning. – Linda Colley, author of The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World
William Whyte’s book is a complete history of the physical university, sweeping the reader across the globe and through more than a thousand years of history. It will be an indispensable reference work for all who work in, or care about, institutions of higher learning, but it is also a thought-provoking read for those concerned for the future of universities in a digital age. – Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books
A delight to read. Whyte provides a fresh view of the world of knowledge, concentrating on its material components, from the carved stone of medieval Salamanca to the curved steel of Abu Dhabi’s Zayed University. Masterfully weaving together the history of universities and the history of architecture, The University abounds in original insights. – Robert Darnton, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of The Writer’s Lot

William Whyte is Professor of Social and Architectural History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has written for The Guardian, History Today, and The Conversation.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.