Mentally comparing NYU’s campus integration, where my office is currently embedded, to Columbia’s walled fortress, where I worked for a year, solidifies the vivid picture Death and Life paints during some of its pontifications:

“Big universities in cities, so far as I can see, have given no thought or imagination to the unique establishments they are. Typically they either pretend to be cloistered or countrified places, nostalgically denying their transplantation, or else they pretend to be office buildings. (Of course they are neither.)”

Read More