There’s something distinctive about universities that were founded in the 1960s. Maybe it’s the brutalist architecture. Maybe it’s the wild, naive but hopeful sounding principles on which they were formed, but they seem very different. And even though decades later, their distinctiveness may have been worn down by the winds of isomorphism, there’s still something that  lingers and distinguishes them from both their older and younger neighbors. The phenomenon is perhaps most pronounced in England, where these universities were at the forefront of higher education massification, but the movement has echoes all around the world. Here in Canada, most notably at Trent, York, and Simon Fraser Universities.

A few years ago, two historians, Jill Pellew from the University of London, and Miles Taylor, now at the University of Berlin, brought together a group of historians of education around the world to produce a set of essays called Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s. It’s an absolutely fascinating and thoroughly cosmopolitan book.

Today, my guest is one of those co editors, Miles Taylor. In our interview today, we tackle a whole range of questions. What was it that made utopian, interdisciplinary focused universities such a fad around the world for a decade or so? How did governments, who thought they were buying a lot of new STEM programs, react to being loaded with these utopian and occasionally revolutionary institutions? And finally, what happened to utopianism? Why did the dream slowly fade away in the 1970s and 1980s? Was politics to blame, or did Utopian University simply get mugged by massification?

It’s a fun interview. So without further ado, let’s go to Miles.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 3.8 | Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960 with Dr. Miles Taylor

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Miles, you titled this book of essays Utopian Universities, and you use that term as a way of connecting a set of similar institutional births. You talk about 200 universities built in the 1960s that share some interconnecting themes. What were those themes, and why did they transcend international borders so easily?

Miles Taylor (MT): We chose the title Utopian for this collection of essays, edited by myself and my colleague and friend, Jill Pellew, partly to capture the strong idealism and the atmosphere of sense of opportunity that emerged after the chaos of the 1940s and austerity of the 1950s. This era felt like a brave new world. We felt it was legitimate to use the term utopian because people at the time did use it about aspirations for education in a variety of formats—not just higher education for the baby boomers, but also continuing education for those coming out of the armed forces and those in blue-collar jobs.

What seemed unique to this period, though there are differences across time and space, was the commitment to public higher education in a way that hadn’t been seen before or since. It wasn’t yet the massification of the student experience we have now, but governments worldwide were using taxpayers’ money to create a tertiary education sector. And part of that meant building newly designed campuses that broke from the urban university model, looking and functioning differently from what had gone before.

AU: You make the point early in the book that these universities were products of state-led processes. But did states really set out to create utopian universities? I mean, states tend to be conservative by nature, and revolutionary institutions often take on a life of their own. So, did they truly intend to create something utopian, or did things just take on that shape along the way?

MT: No, I don’t think they set out to create utopian institutions. This was a wartime generation planning for a postwar world, they were used to a particular organization of society during the war times and during the reconstruction eras that happened all over the globe. They unleashed something that became utopian, but I doubt they anticipated places like the University of California or the radical universities in Paris, London, and parts of Italy and Germany in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In some ways, they unleashed a “monster” they couldn’t control, and it certainly wasn’t there in the blueprints. Early on, the expectation was to create a technocratic society in today’s parlance with people who were rather nerd-ish, focusing on research and technology without much attention to disciplines that critique society, like the arts and humanities. But that’s not what happened, and I think it was unexpected. The goal was to expand higher education to a larger proportion of the population. I think it surprised many planners who by the early ’70s felt they may have pushed too far in a certain direction.

AU: So, what allowed these institutions the wiggle room and flexibility to take a government’s STEM-oriented plan and turn it into something more utopian?

MT: The economic brakes were off. Financial restraints around investment in public facilities, services, and buildings lifted at different points in the ’50s and early ’60s. There was a flood of public money available for these projects, unlike what we could imagine today. And then there was the demographic shift; baby boomers were coming of age, needing new universities to supply the growing public sector—new teachers, civil servants, and managers. These new universities were essentially training the future public sector workforce.

AU: A lot of the essays in the book focus on the role of visionary founding vice chancellors. That makes sense to me because they have a lot to say about the way an institution debuts. How did a state-led process end up giving so much effective control to these local vice chancellors? And why do you think so many visionaries ended up in charge of these institutions at the same time in different parts of the world?

MT: Taking the second question first, there was a global interaction at play. This was a remarkably cohesive generation of vice chancellors, particularly in the Anglophone world, who were speaking to one another. The UK learned from the U.S.; universities in East Asia and parts of Africa sent visitors to look at UK experiments. There was dialogue between European universities and Americans—the Freie Universität in Berlin and other West German reform universities were stimulated, and in some cases funded, by American foundations. There was a lot of international discussion going on and you could see this international exchange in journals like Minerva and at congresses in the late ’50s and early ’60s, where vice chancellors were coming together as an international community of university designers.

As for how they ended up in these roles, many of these men, and they were all men, were state actors during the war, part of the intelligentsia involved in wartime planning. They transitioned smoothly from working with the state to higher education roles. So in a way, they were state actors already. Many also came from traditional universities like Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, and now they had the freedom to experiment in ways they couldn’t in their older medieval-originating institutions.

AU: Miles, I want to talk about curriculum. Some ideas that I thought were new in the 2000s and 2010s about university organization actually had roots in the 1960s, like experimenting with the traditional structures of departments and faculties. Some institutions did away with faculties altogether, allowing departments more autonomy to foster flexibility. What was the impulse for that kind of experimentation, and how long did these experiments last because I don’t think there are many institutions in the world where that is still in place.

MT: There was a strong push for interdisciplinarity, which, as you mentioned, came back strongly in the 2000s and 2010s. It was about asking questions across scholarly subjects rather than being confined to silos like biology or history. Much of this push was ideological in the 50s and 60s. After witnessing how universities in Nazi Germany used science for fatal ends and humanities for propaganda, there was a desire to humanize science and make arts and humanities critical disciplines again. The intellectual exile from Nazi Germany and Austria to the US and to the UK influenced this drive, particularly in sociology where students , which became a hallmark of the new universities in the ’60s.

AU: Right, so the Nazi exodus didn’t just affect STEM with figures like Einstein; it also had a lasting impact on humanities in universities, influencing the trajectory of the institution itself.

MT: Absolutely. In disciplines like sociology which was the poster child of the new universities, you see that impact—a critique not only of the scientific basis of study but also of the qualitative basis, to resist the “nazification” of academia. There was a push to prevent universities from becoming partisan or state-controlled, which had happened in authoritarian regimes in the ’30s and ’40s. The utopian universities weren’t happening in totalitarian states; there was little expansion in places like China during the Cultural Revolution or in the Soviet Union, where funds for university expansion were scarce. This was largely a Western-world phenomenon.

AU: So how long did these experiments last? At what point did these universities revert to more traditional faculty structures?

MT: I’m not an economic determinist, but I think funding played a role. Public funds supporting these innovations became available around 1956-57, coinciding with the Sputnik moment, but by the oil crisis in 1973, few new universities were being founded. And in the ’90s and 2000s, expansion was mostly in private universities. So, funding was a constraint, but idealism faded, too. The student revolutions of ’68 and ’69, which were global, were a shock to the taxpaying public funding these experiments. By the mid-’70s, the utopian spirit had largely diminished.

AU: Another prominent theme in the book is the role of architecture. Some of these institutions, like Simon Fraser in Canada and the University of East Anglia in the UK, are known for their distinctive architectural styles. Why was architecture so important, and how did it interact with the curricular experimentation?

MT: There was a radical approach to campus design that minimized hierarchy. You didn’t have a dominant administrative building; instead, teaching spaces were scattered, mixing disciplines and you don’t create silos and you lean towards seminar rooms instead of being tradition lecture theatres. Many campuses were designed as 10-minute campuses, where you could walk from one end to the other within ten minutes. They were also designed to be traffic-free, with roads on the perimeter, walkways connecting learning, library, and residential spaces. There was a common belief in the ’60s that this setup would foster harmony among students from different social backgrounds and that they would enjoy living together. It didn’t always work out, but that was the vision.

AU: And why were so many of these campuses built in concrete? That brutalist style, which often looks worn and aged today, is a defining feature.

MT: Behind the concrete of course sits the asbestos so these are major buildings of disasters these days. Concrete was readily available, and so were public architects. It wasn’t just university campuses—housing projects and shopping malls also adopted this style. Financial constraints were lifted, allowing architects, many with Bauhaus influences, a playground to try new things. And this trend wasn’t limited to the West; brutalist campus architecture can be found in British Commonwealth countries, South America, and the Middle East, where American and Canadian influences were strong. So, I think it was the moment. Another 25 years, and it might have been chrome and steel. Another 50, and it might be more environmentally friendly materials. But some of these designs, despite being polarizing, have retained a certain aesthetic.

AU: None of the universities discussed in the book would still be considered utopian today. They got mugged by reality. Over time, they faced realities like budget cuts and massification. Which institutions managed to hold onto the utopian ideals the longest?

MT: In my view, the most successful ones were smaller institutions, similar to classic liberal arts colleges like Reed or Swarthmore. They focused on the campus experience and on teaching undergraduates, with only a few master’s or PhD students. They emphasized liberal arts, without pushing into hard scientific research, which was often reserved for specialized government or private labs, particularly in the UK. Over time, many of these institutions expanded, and some lost their distinctiveness. Today, a place like Sussex dominates the economy of Brighton. Warwick, for instance, is now so large that you need a bus to navigate the campus—definitely not a 10-minute campus anymore.

AU: Can you imagine a future where utopia makes a return to higher education?

MT: It’s a very good question. I’ve thought about that a lot since we finished the book. But yeah, of course. The green agenda offers an opportunity for universities, as they understand the science and have the expertise in pedagogy and curriculum. So, in terms of the format, universities could return to a kind of utopia. But I think we may have missed the moment. Today, the state doesn’t see higher education as an area worth heavy investment, and the economics often don’t add up. Publicly funded higher education is increasingly difficult to afford in places like Germany, the UK, Canada, and the U.S. That said, the materials for a utopian campus—a thoughtful blueprint for combining residential living with inspiring and challenging subjects—are still there. So, I think it could happen again.

AU: Miles, thank you so much for being with us today.

MT: Thank you very much.

AU: That was Miles Taylor, co-editor with Jill Pellew of Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s. I just need to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes, please get in touch at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to never miss an episode. Join us next week when our guest will be Chris Whelan, Chief Executive of Universities New Zealand, talking about that country’s new review of higher education policy known as the University Advisory Group. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.