Day: September 17, 2026

We tend to think of universities as places full of physical things: laboratories, libraries, property, above all, buildings. They’re more than that, of course. They’re communities of scholars with missions and values. Some people think they should be less, that education would be better off in the cloud, online, and liberated from mere place. But for most of their history, universities have been undeniably place-based, material to the max. Today, my guest is William Whyte. He’s a professor of social