There was once a time when universities were small-scale, highly mobile, and often short-lived. The early history of universities—the history of higher education in the Middle Ages, in other words—is a series of stories about institutions that derived their strength from their mobility, their willingness to pick up and move whenever their interests were threatened. In 1209, for instance, scholars in Oxford found that the city council was unwilling to acknowledge their autonomy—so they shut up shop and migrated. Thus did the University of Cambridge come into being.

The universities of the twenty-first century, by contrast, are increasingly massive, increasingly immobile beasts. Harvard's campus amounts to something like 85 hectares; Princeton's is apparently 202 hectares; and Berkeley more than twice that, at 499 hectares. They are the size of small towns, and their impact on their host communities is extraordinary. With its payroll of more than 190,000, the University of California system is the single largest employer in the state. Moreover, their global ambitions do not involve migration but something like colonization, as they plant satellite branches across the world.

Despite the massive change in scale, certain features do link the early universities with their enormous, sprawling successors. In the first place, even the most transitory institutions soon acquired property. Among the first formal acts of any medieval university was the promulgation of rules about rent: who could hire a space to teach, and how much they should pay. Secondly, and still more importantly, the first universities and their most recent instantiations share a similar enthusiasm for sovereignty, freedom from control and—ideally—from taxes. It was this that led to the medieval migrations and this, too, that underwrites modern-day expansion.

Finally, and most important of all, even the smallest, most ephemeral universities are part of the world in which they work. They shape that situation and are shaped by it. The schools of Paris resonated with discussions about the streets outside. Even the biggest universities of 2018 are not immune from outside influences. Indeed, their need for money, their expansive, expensive, and extensive campuses, and their desire for independence makes them—ironically enough—all the more involved, enmeshed with their wider environment.

In this well-researched and finely written study, the architectural historian LaDale Winling explores the ways in which these themes have played out at universities in modern America. Building the Ivory Tower sits at the intersection of urban and educational history and handsomely demonstrates the value of an interdisciplinary approach, with the author confidently exploring issues of planning and architectural design, political economy, and the politics of race, curriculum reform, and federal funding. At its heart is an attempt to explore “universities’ roles as both actors and stages in twentieth-century urban transformations,” and it succeeds in doing just that (p. 12).

The book consists of a chronological series of case studies. The first chapter looks at Muncie, Indiana, tracing the complex and ambiguous story of how the bankrupt and redundant Indiana Normal Institute was transformed into the wealthy and successful Ball State University. Usually understood as a happy tale of generous benefaction—a story symbolized in the sculpture “Beneficence” erected to celebrate the donors who made it possible—Winling presents instead a more complicated narrative. In Muncie, he argues, the university's development reflected the dominance of business interests over urban development: Ball State was a means of segregating the city along class and racial lines.

These twin themes—the links between corporate cash and social segregation—emerge still more clearly in the following chapters. Chapter 2 looks at the University of Texas in Austin and shows how, in the interwar period, federal funds and oil money enabled, on the one hand, the rebuilding of the university and, on the other, a concerted effort to reinforce racial segregation in the city. In chapter 3, attention turns to the University of Chicago, where in the 1950s and 1960s the administration fought a long and bitter battle to “secure its surroundings and its reputation” (p. 90). Slum clearance and the rhetoric of urban improvement were the vehicles by which the university cleared its locale of blighted buildings and African American tenants. Although there was growing criticism, this chapter in particular makes plain just how successful postwar universities became at mobilizing their financial and political backers to reshape the town around them.

The final two chapters take the story up to the present. Chapter 4 looks at Berkeley and the struggle by activists first to assert control of the campus and then, in the 1970s, to preserve the older buildings that surrounded it. It is, at one level, an account of genuine radicalism, with students and members of the wider community banding together to thwart a seemingly all-powerful institution. Yet it is also, as the author notes, the result of “a conservative ideology of traditional urban form” (p. 150). Moreover, as the final chapter shows, the university's defeat in Berkeley did not mark any sort of sea change in America as a whole. Chapter 5—“The Working Class versus the Creative Class”—is a detailed study of how Harvard and MIT overcame opposition to their ambitious plans for Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, respectively.

Taken together, these case studies very successfully show how universities have become big players in modern urban life. They also, as the author goes on to suggest, do something to help explain how it is that some cities have escaped the decline experienced by others. “Throughout the twentieth century,” he concludes, “higher-education institutions helped create a new type of urban community”: sites of culture, of commerce, of gentrification (p. 184). Perhaps above all, Building the Ivory Tower shows the compromises—and even the grubby, rather disgraceful deals—that universities have made, and still make, to secure their growth and their expansion. It is a history that anyone interested in higher education or in urban planning really ought to read.