William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books Network: William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Date: August 11, 2026
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Professor William Whyte

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between Dr. Miranda Melcher and Professor William Whyte about his new book, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood". Whyte’s book takes a unique approach to the history of the university, focusing on the significance of materials—like stone, straw, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—in shaping academic life from medieval times to the present. The discussion traverses centuries and continents, examining how physical matter and the places we inhabit influence intellectual culture, institutional growth, and the ongoing debate over the role of the university in an increasingly digital world.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Focus on Materials?

[02:22-04:13]

• Professor Whyte explains his motivation: a 25-year fascination with how physical environments shape thought, teaching, and academic culture.
• His prior work mapped the evolution of British universities, leading him to explore the global, historical relationship between materiality and academia.
• Quote:

  "Is there a future for the university as a place within a world in which everything is moving online?" [03:43, William Whyte]

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2. Structuring the Book: Materials as Emblems

[04:30-07:18]

• Each chapter uses a key material as an emblem for a historical era:
  • Straw: Early medieval, transient, and flexible academic life.
  • Stone: Universities gaining permanence through buildings.
  • Blood and Flesh: Renaissance/Reformation (anatomy, violence, religious conflict).
  • Silk: 17th-century debates around wealth, abundance, and opulence.
  • Paper: 18th century, explosion of print and knowledge dissemination.
  • Iron: 19th-century industrial expansion and philanthropy.
  • Concrete: 20th-century architecture and massification.
• The structure highlights both linear development and cyclical patterns in university history.

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3. Origins: Straw and Early Universities

[08:00-10:42]

• Medieval universities were nomadic, lacking permanent buildings—students bought straw for floor seating.
• The “university” was more a set of people and rules than a fixed place.
• Quote:

  "Even though the university doesn't have a place...it's still dependent on stuff." [09:14, William Whyte]

• Early universities managed their autonomy by moving between towns, showing an enduring tension between intellectual abstraction and material needs (money, food, shelter).

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4. Becoming Permanent: The Transition to Stone

[11:08-13:01]

• Growth in books, students, and administrative needs prompted universities to settle.
• Rulers and towns supported permanent buildings to foster learning and economic benefit—control and containment became possible through physical environments.
• Quote:

  "The stone buildings...these are about trying to take an institution made up of young and often quite violent men and trying to make it settle down, trying to contain it within a system of rules." [12:40, William Whyte]

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5. Architectural Forms: Creating a University Space

[14:28-16:40]

• Lacking a precedent, colleges borrowed from monasteries, Roman villas, and royal residences.
• The quadrangular college—single entrance, enclosed courtyard—emerged as a functional and symbolic form, soon becoming a global template.
• Architecture facilitated both community and surveillance.

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6. Unintended Consequences & Critiques

[17:07-19:05]

• Physical investment demanded conformity—to donors and societal expectations.
• Buildings required maintenance, became targets in uprisings, and sparked recurring criticism:

  "Why are you spending money on buildings? This is a university, it should be a place that's spending money on learning." [18:46, William Whyte]

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7. Surviving Upheaval: Reformation, Revolution, and Adaptation

[20:10-23:07]

• Universities survived turbulent eras (Reformation, religious upheaval) by adaptability and physical continuity.
• Creative adaptations, like repurposing monastic imagery, allowed institutions to survive shifts in ideology and patronage.
• Memorable moment:

  "All they do is attach a plaster beard to the statue of the monk, changing the meaning of it completely and enabling the institution to be refounded..." [22:24, William Whyte]

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8. The Age of Silk: Status, Regulation, and Appearance

[23:45-26:04]

• In the 17th century, universities fiercely regulated academic dress to maintain hierarchy and decorum, but wealth and imported textiles disturbed social order.
• Dissent about opulence reflected broader anxieties about decay, substance, and authenticity:

  "Universities throughout most of their history are obsessed with what people wear." [23:45, William Whyte]

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9. Paper: Empowerment and Crisis in the 18th Century

[26:52-29:41]

• Paper enabled mass literacy, publication, and examination systems but also overwhelmed scholars and weakened universities’ control over knowledge production.
• Notable quote:

  "Universities [were] filled, fueled, powered and disempowered by paper." [26:56, William Whyte]

• The proliferation of print led to existential threats from intellectual movements outside the academy.

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10. Iron and Expansion: The 19th Century University Boom

[29:55-32:17]

• Contrary to Enlightenment predictions, the university multiplied, driven by middle-class educational needs and largesse from the wealthy and the state.
• Foundations such as Stanford entailed both progress and injustice (e.g., dispossession of indigenous land).
• Quote:

  "It's one that's driven by...an educated middle class...and you see rich people, and you see rich states...to mark that with the foundation of institutions." [30:08, William Whyte]

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11. Concrete and Modernity: The 20th Century Campus

[33:56-36:57]

• Universities in the mid-20th century embraced concrete as a symbol of progress, modernity, and nation-building.
• The use of concrete reflected global architectural trends and a desire for visibly modern institutions.
• Quote:

  "What concrete is about is that concrete is a material which almost every country is capable of producing and which every country sees as an instrument of modernization." [34:56, William Whyte]

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12. Materiality vs. Virtuality: A Defense of Place

[37:24-39:16]

• Whyte reflects on what unites universities across eras: material settings shape mental life, and the tension between thought and place is persistent and productive.
• With virtual education on the rise, Whyte defends the significance of physical, communal learning environments.
• Quote:

  "Even the virtual, even AI, has a material component to it...learning in place...is the best way of learning...a form of culture, a form of enlightenment...worth defending." [38:05, William Whyte]

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Notable Quotes

• On Early Universities:

  "Even though the university doesn't have a place...it's still dependent on stuff."
  (09:14, William Whyte)

• On Stone and Control:

  "The stone buildings...these are about trying to take an institution made up of young and often quite violent men and trying to make it settle down, trying to contain it within a system of rules."
  (12:40, William Whyte)

• On Surviving Upheaval:

  "All they do is attach a plaster beard to the statue of the monk, changing the meaning of it completely and enabling the institution to be refounded..."
  (22:24, William Whyte)

• On the Power—and Problem—of Paper:

  "Universities [were] filled, fueled, powered and disempowered by paper."
  (26:56, William Whyte)

• On Concrete as Modern Identity:

  "What concrete is about is that concrete is a material which almost every country is capable of producing and which every country sees as an instrument of modernization."
  (34:56, William Whyte)

• On Materiality and Virtual Futures:

  "Learning in place...is the best way of learning...that, in fact, is worth defending."
  (38:16, William Whyte)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction to the book’s thesis – 02:22
• Explaining the structure: material emblems – 04:30
• The era of straw: medieval beginnings – 08:00
• Stone: settling, architecture, and social control – 11:08, 14:28
• The unintended consequences of building universities – 17:07
• Surviving the Reformation: adaptation through material change – 20:10
• Silk and status: regulating academic dress – 23:45
• 18th-century print explosion – 26:52
• 19th-century university boom and philanthropy – 29:55
• Concrete and campus growth in the 20th century – 33:56
• Reflections on materiality vs. virtual learning – 37:24
• Upcoming projects (Dictionary of National Biography, new biography) – 39:34

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Memorable Moments

• Plaster beard on a statue (A creative survival tactic through iconographic adaptation. 22:24)
• Stone buildings as means of social control (12:40)
• Universities as both empowered and threatened by paper (26:56)
• Every country building universities in concrete as a statement of modernity—visible on every continent (34:56)
• Subtle challenge to current debates about online learning and the inescapable materiality of education (38:05)

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Final Thoughts

Professor Whyte’s conversation offers a sweeping, tangible history of how universities arose, adapted, persisted, and sometimes imperiled themselves through the very materials out of which they are built—with “stone, silk, and blood” providing both literal and metaphorical cornerstones for his argument. The episode is highly recommended for anyone interested in the intersection of intellectual history, architecture, material culture, and the future of education.

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Transcript

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor William White about his book titled the University A History in Stone, Silk and Blood, published by Harvard University Press in 2026. Now, this subtitle already tells us some intriguing things about the conversation I think we're going to have. The university is obviously the subject of goodness knows how many books, but I don't think we usually think about it in terms of materials like stone, silk and blood. And yet those words are in the subtitle for a reason. We're going to be talking about those kinds of seemingly inconsequential material objects and what they mean for this institution to some extent today. But we're going to be going pretty far back in time as well to examine all sorts of connections between everyday objects. You know, we're going to be talking about paper, for instance, or concrete. And what the university kind of means, has meant, will mean there's clearly a lot of intriguing connections for us to discuss. So, William, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor William White]

Well, thank you for having me. It's a great. It's great to be here.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us what you why you decided to write a book about the university that focuses on materials?

[Professor William White]

So I'm a professor of architectural history in the University of Oxford and a fellow of St. John's College. And for the last, I don't know, 25 years of my career, I've been, amongst other things, fascinated by the question of whether things matter to thought, whether the place you're working in matters to what you're thinking, what you're writing, how you're teaching, what's the relationship between stuff and academic life, as it were. And so I wrote my first book was on an architect who built a lot in Oxford and Cambridge, and then I moved out to think about the other universities in Britain, what are called the red brick universities, which were founded in the 19th century. And there's an interesting question, whether it matters they're red brick universities. Does it matter that they feel and look different from the ancient English universities? And then this is the, I suppose the third part in what was never meant to be, but become a trilogy of books about universities and their places. And so what I did here was to go even bigger. Having started in Oxford and then moved out to Britain, then I thought I'd take on the world and think about the very long history, as you said, of the development of the university and the ways in which it accretes material in way in which it becomes a place. And also part of what's driving that question for me, of course, is a contemporary concern, which is, you know, is there a future for the university as a place within a world in which everything is moving online?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So, you know, small questions, tiny ones, really. Yes, super tiny. No, we've got big questions, we've got a big scope of time, we've got a big geographic scope. So how do you approach this in terms of materials? Which materials did you choose to focus on and how did you make that decision?

[Professor William White]

Well, the decision I made was that I would try and think. It's been a really interesting process for me trying to write this book, because on the one hand, there is a linear story. There's a story about the development of a particular sort of institution from its medieval origins to the present day. On the other hand, that linear story is deeply, deeply episodic. So it's broken up by periods of crisis, but also periods of sudden change as new materials, as new ideas arrive in the university. And then thirdly, I suppose it's also the story of something in which there's a definite sort of cyclical model, because of course, every year universities begin the year and every year they develop. And there's a kind of recurrent pattern in which that doesn't just mean that the universities operate like that, it's also that Materials that are introduced in one period suddenly emerge again or maintain a constant importance or grow in significance, just as the institution itself grows and changes. And so what I thought I'd do is I'd try and take as a kind of emblem for each chapter a material that seemed to be particularly consequential or particularly representative for that period. So I open thinking about straw, thinking about the straw that medieval students bought in the street of Str in medieval Paris. And I move on to think about stone and the ways in which the universities and colleges take on a kind of physical being. And then on to think about the Renaissance and the Reformation and the flesh and the blood that's shed and the flesh that's burnt, but also the flesh and blood that are being exposed in newly built anatomy theatres as a new form of. Of knowledge is developed in that period. And then silk is thinking about the 17th century crisis of the university, which is a crisis of abundance. I try to show as well as of dearth paper. The 18th century university is saturated, I think we'll talk about it later, is saturated in paper, but also challenged by it. And then in more modern periods, the 19th century university is built in and of and fuelled and powered by iron. And then the 20th century is the age of concrete. And so each of those is meant to be a way of trying to describe a linear process of development, a kind of episodic process of change, and also this kind of recurrent, you know, recurrent ways in which universities turn back on themselves.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

All right, so that's tracing out quite nicely a whole journey for us to go on. Now, as a warning to listeners, we are not going to be here for 10 hours going into every possible detail, so we are going to skip around a little bit. But I do want to start off with straw, because this is, I think, a really intriguing starting point, because as you mentioned briefly, if we're looking at students in Paris buying straw, that doesn't sound like anything like a university now or even in the last few hundred years. So what does looking at straw help us illuminate, going that far back in time to the early medieval European universities?

[Professor William White]

What I wanted to do was to try and get back to a point before the university becomes a place, before the university gets a campus, before it has buildings, before it has anything really that's distinctively university. And to go back to the Paris of the 12th century, where the Rue du Fou, the street of straw, is, as I said, where students are buying straw in order to put on the floor, because that's where they sit. All you needed to do in order to set up as a teacher, a university teacher, in the very earliest years of the university was a room which was largely a room you rented, and a chair which was the chair you sat in. And, you know, there's some connection back or forward, I suppose, to our modern environment because of course, you know, we still appoint people to the chair in English or the chair in physics. That's the chair that the masters in 12th century Paris were sitting in. And that speaks of a world in which the university is really a collection of people, it's a collection of rules, because slowly but surely they develop rules as to what it is you need to study in order to graduate, in order to be able to go on to teach yourself, but also a university which is like straw, pretty temporary, pretty movable. That's one of the key features of the earliest universities, is that it's not just they don't have their own permanent accommodation, they don't necessarily have their own permanent location. And so one of the ways in which universities manage their relationship with the wider world is if things don't suit them, they just up and leave and move to another town. But thinking about straw also starts us off right from the beginning, which is to recognise that even though the university doesn't have a place, even though the university doesn't have a fixed location, it's still dependent on stuff. There is still a need for somewhere to lecture, there's still a need for the chair for the master to sit in, there's still a need for the straw for the students to sit in. And also they need money to pay for all this. And so you get from the very beginning the inherent tension of university life that exists to this day, which is between the ideas of an institution which is abstract, which is about thought, which exists beyond the purely material, and yet has always been dependent upon food and drink and places and people and money.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, it's very interesting to see kind of quite how far back these things are intertwined. To what extent, though, do some of these concerns maybe lessen or change when the early universities move to not just being sort of people in whatever place they might be able to fit into, but we're now talking sort of physical stone buildings. What enables that transformation and what sorts of change does that impact on these questions of what the university is?

[Professor William White]

So it's a huge change, and you're absolutely right to identify that as a key moment is the settling down of the universities. And what enables that is a number of different factors coming together. One is the desire of those who are members of the university to settle down and to have a stability. And they need that because they're acquiring more books, they're acquiring more students. In fact, it's becoming the case that it's harder and harder for them to get up and go in the way that they would have done before. Another is the desire of rulers to demonstrate their patronage of learning, to train up the increasing numbers of literate men who are required for the service in state or service in church. Another reason is that towns, quite early on, I mean, from the 13th century onwards, begin to realise that having a university isn't such a bad idea, it isn't such a bad deal. All these people arriving are going to spend money, all these people who are needing accommodation are going to pay rent. And so you find towns competing with one another to try and host universities. And perhaps above all else, there is a desire to control the university. The stone buildings, particularly the colleges that start to be founded from the sort of late 12th into the early 13th century, these are about trying to take an institution made up of young and often quite violent men and trying to make it settle down, trying to contain it within a system of rules. And that system of rules has a physical form. It takes on a kind of rule of stone, if you like.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hmm. Very interesting to think about these, this transformation then. But of course, decisions have to be made if we're going to have sort of concrete stone things that don't move around. So what were these stone Universities drawing on, in terms of kind of architecture or how space is organized, were they just creating new things entirely out of nothing? Like, how do we get the buildings that look the way they do?

[Professor William White]

It's an intriguing process, because how do you. You know, it's a really interesting question is how do you plan for an institution that's never existed before? How do you come up with a concept of a planned physical home for something that's really quite new and something that hasn't had a home before? And what you find is that they draw on a variety of different sources for that. The first colleges, I mean, even rather grand colleges like, you know, the Sorbonne in Paris or Merton College in Oxford, founded in the mid 13th century, they are just a sort of collection of buildings. They're a sort of assortment of different, you know, somewhere to eat, somewhere to sleep, somewhere to read, probably a wall around it, possibly a garden, almost certainly somewhere to go to the toilet, but otherwise a sort of aggregation of different functions. What happens in the 14th century is that influenced by Roman villa architecture, influenced by the architecture of monasteries, influenced by royal architecture, because these are institutions that are being funded by the monarchy, you come up with a kind of model for a college, which is this quadrangular form in which everything is gathered into a single building with a single entrance, where everyone can be observ. Everyone can be monitored, where that form of control I was talking about is sort of perfected, if you like. And that model, which becomes first a model for colleges, then becomes a model for universities. And so you begin to see the development of a kind of characteristic university architecture which is going to be repeated again and again and then exported from Western Europe, where it originates across the world.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, this is very interesting as a design challenge, right? As you mentioned, kind of, how do you imagine this thing and what it could do? And of course, anything that hasn't been done before has sort of, kind of hoped for consequences, maybe even expected ones, but also unexpected ones, too. So can you tell us a little bit about kind of what did happen and maybe what was surprising to happen in terms of these universities becoming more physically planted places?

[Professor William White]

One of the things that happens for the universities as an institution is that the process of settling down and of establishing themselves as places is a kind of Faustian bargain, is that, on the one hand, they find themselves much better off, they find themselves better accommodated, they find themselves often in the grandest building in whichever town or city they're living. And this is all how an institution survives and thrives. But on the other Hand, of course, they've needed to make a bargain with the people who are paying for this. They've needed to agree to behave in certain ways. They have to start to conform because otherwise the money doesn't keep coming, otherwise they can't keep supporting themselves. And so that's the kind of big picture, as a smaller picture in each of the institutions. Of course, as soon as you build, build something, that thing needs maintenance. As soon as you build something, that thing can become the focus for dissatisfaction. As soon as you build something, that thing can fail. And so what we find is, you know, in moments of civil uprising, these buildings become the focus for attack. We find when students are dissatisfied, these are spaces that can be occupied or vandalised or in some other way damaged. We find that, you know, what you get with a building also brings with it consequences and also brings with it problems that are going to be the problems that then face the university thereafter. Not least attacks from those who emphasise. And we can go right back to the first buildings of the university, the attack which we still hear today, which is, why are you spending money on buildings? This is a university, it should be a place that's spending money on learning.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Very interesting to see how a kind of dissent can immediately sort of come up with these sorts of things. And in fact, speaking of dissent, if we move forward in time and sort of expand our scope on society beyond just the university, you discuss something in the book that, as soon as you said it, I was like, oh, of course, that's intriguing and makes sense, but until you said it, I think I'd sort of taken it for granted, right, because when we're moving, for example, through the scene, 15th, 16th, 17th centuries in Europe, there's a lot changing, right? Politics is changing, economics is changing, religion is certainly changing, and yet the university is there kind of the whole time, which I think when we look back on it now, we're like, oh, you know, these are really old, of course, they're sort of fixed in place, they're not movable. And yet, of course, as you've already demonstrated to us, they had to be created in the first place. And given all these other big institutions that did turn out to be pretty vulnerable and movable and changeable, what does and doesn't happen to universities during all of this tumult?

[Professor William White]

Well, it is. I mean, you're absolutely right. It is an extraordinary outcome of the Reformation in particular, that universities aren't replaced by something else. And there are, you know, particularly if one thinks about, you know, here I AM at Oxford College, where, you know, here are these groups of celibate men whose hair is shorn like a monk, who every day are meant to go to chapel seven times a day to pray for the soul of their founders. These are institutions that look awfully like monasteries, indeed, are functioning very much like monasteries. And there is a. There is a moment where it looks as though, just like the monasteries, they. They will be abolished. There are all sorts of changes that are affected in the universities. And so, you know, people are going to be burnt for their beliefs, books are going to be destroyed, windows. There's a moment in Cambridge in the Reformation where somebody calls for the reformation of the windows and they all rush out and smash stained glass syllabuses are going to change in all sorts of ways. These are institutions that are acutely vulnerable, not least because of their strong relationship to the Church and to the state and to the fact, as I say, that lots of these places look a little bit like monasteries or look a little bit like unreformed religion in Protestant countries, and look awfully like dangerous Protestant institutions in Catholic countries. The university, however, manages, and this is one of the intriguing things about it, the university manages to evolve and to adapt in response to the environment in which it's in, often in ways that are deeply material. And a nice example of that, or at any rate of the way in which the material can disguise a profound change. But, you know, it's a gentle hint of that is indeed in my own College at St. John's St. John's College was founded as a monastic college. It was founded as the College of St. Bernard. And out the front of the college is a statue put up in the 14th century of Saint Bernard of. 15th century of Saint Bernard of Clairvoy, this sort of aesthetic monk. It's closed at the Reformation because it's a monastic institution. And what happens is that when the college is refounded, it's founded as the College of St. John the Baptist. And all they do is attach a plaster beard to the statue of the monk, changing the meaning of it completely and enabling the institution to be refounded and then subsequently to operate as a Protestant college. It's a little hint of the ways in which the institution has adapted itself, has changed itself, and as a result manages to survive the Reformation.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Really interesting indeed to think about how this institution kind of did and didn't change, given that, you know, the buildings are still there, even if how we engage with them is so incredibly different. I mean, I'm guessing you don't lead a Monastic life today in your Oxford college, Right. I mean, you're still there, the built, the stone's still there, but kind of how we're using it is very different. And part of that comes through in further changes. So I think it's time maybe to turn to talk to things, talk about things like silk. Right. You talk in this chapter about sumptuary laws and practices. Why was this, for example, a 17th century concern?

[Professor William White]

Universities throughout most of their history are obsessed with what people wear. And we get only a little glimpse of it in the modern university when we get dressed up for graduation or something like that. In the medieval, in the early modern university, it was a critical part of being a member of the university that you wore the right clothes. And of course, that's part of a much broader position in which the regulation of clothing is a key instrument of how communities work. And so you wear the clothing of the state that you're in. This had always been a problem because then as now, students didn't always want to wear what they were told to wear. It had always been a problem because rich, richer people could afford nicer clothes than poorer people. In the 17th century, it becomes a really significant issue because not least the access to the costly textiles that are being produced in the east, in India, in China, in Japan, gives students and their professors the opportunity to dress in ways with a sort of unparalleled opulence. And for many at the time, this is proof that the university is fundamentally corrupt. You see people, I mean, people turn up to Leiden University in the Netherlands, which is one of the great universities of the 17th century, and they turn up and say, well, this place is destined for ruin. And it's destined for ruin because, look, everyone's wearing silk robes. People turn up and they say, look, everyone's dressed for bed. They're not really dressed for work at all. And that scene, in an era in which the university remains profoundly at threat, threat from war, threat from religious and political change, that becomes a major issue of contention. What are people wearing? And does the university, and this is the term that's often used, does the university have a face? Does it present an image of a place where people are actually doing work? And if they are doing work, is it the right kind of work?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Again, these questions of kind of what is happening between these ideas and the thinking work and sort of the physicality of the people and sort of what's around them. So interesting to see that continue as we move forward in time. I have to admit though, given that we are the New Books Network. And obviously I'm part of it for one reason, because of my love of books. I of course opened your book especially intrigued by the discussion about paper. So moving to 18th century universities, you have a great phrase about the impact of paper on these institutions. That they were quote filled, fueled, powered and disempowered by paper. That is maybe not how people thought the phrase was going to end. Please tell us about your thinking here.

[Professor William White]

Well, the 18th century is, I mean, as it said at the time, is the great age of authors of publication. I mean, there's this massive increase in the amount of publication, there's a massive increase in the number of books, the cost of books drops. And for universities, that's terrific, at least at one level, because it means that they're able to acquire these enormous libraries. Individual scholars are able to acquire libraries, forms of note taking, forms of lecture production, forms of examination are able to develop because of the cheap deepness of the material that they're working on. But at the same time, the fact that more people are writing and reading, the fact that there's more access to print culture, means that two things happen for the universities. One, which is a process that's already identified in the 16th century, is it simply becomes impossible for a scholar to read everything in his or increasingly her field. There's just too much out there. And so the idea of being a kind of universal genius, the idea of having been an expert, well, that narrows in all sorts of ways. The other which is even more dangerous for the universities is that the universities claim to have the monopoly on thought. They claim to be the place where new ideas are developed and old ideas are, are tested. They claim to be the origin of, you know, of wisdom in a particular society. That becomes incredibly difficult for them when they don't have a monopoly on the production of knowledge in that way. Amongst the things that universities have done from the minute that they're founded is try and control the production of literature. And they do that by licensing book production in medieval Paris, for example, they do that by developing and acquiring monopolies on printing in 15th, 16th century Prague, for example. By the 18th century they've lost control. And so what you have in fact, is a world in which quite a lot of the most interesting thought, quite a lot of the most dynamic intellectual work is being done outside and increasingly against the universities. And the classic example of that, I suppose, is the great Enlightenment encyclopedia, which, you know, contains an entry on colleges. And it just says, well, what we need to do is to reform the higher Education of our world out of existence.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And yet, if we move into the 19th century, we don't see universities going out of existence. We see, in fact, an increase in their creation. So what's going on here? I mean, for one thing, who even has the money for all of this?

[Professor William White]

It's a radical surprise. By the end of the 18th century, as you suggest. I mean, what's happened is that universities are going out of business. They're being abolished all across Europe. I mean, almost the first thing that the French Revolution does is to abolish the universities in France. So the 19th century revival of universities is a huge surprise. And it's one that's driven by. I mean, in some respects, it's driven by two forces that uneasily cooperate over this. The first is the sort of rise of an educated middle class who are becoming the civil servants, who are becoming the entrepreneurs, who are becoming the teachers and the policemen, and the, you know, the various elements of modern life need an education and they need qualifications, and the university is providing that. And so you see tremendous demand. On the other hand, what you see is rich people, and you see rich states seeking, in some respects, just as they had in the medieval period, to establish their own. Own importance, to establish their own generosity, and to mark that with the foundation of institutions. And this comes together in the foundation of institutions like the one I discuss at the start of the chapter on iron, as the foundation of institutions like Stanford University in America, made possible by the generosity of the state of California and made possible by the dispossession of land owned by Native Americans by the federal government and enabled above all by the extraordinary wealth of the founder Stamford, who, seeking to perpetuate his memory and the memory of his lost heir, established the Leyland Stanford Junior University as a. As a kind of perpetual. A perpetual institution to advertise their importance.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And doing so in ways that go back to a lot of the ideas we've talked about before. Right? Big buildings that look particular ways, in many cases that are made to look as if they're much older than they are by using some of the same sorts of of building materials. Which I think makes it all the more intriguing that if we move to another kind of spike in creation of universities in the 20th century, we're seeing universities that are not trying to look old. We're seeing universities that are using concrete and not necessarily hiding it away either. So what's behind this change of building material as we move closer to the present?

[Professor William White]

This for me is one of the most exciting and intriguing parts of the book because as you say, it's not just that they do this, it's that they are utterly self conscious in their determination to use concrete. And it's why every university has a building on its campus which was built at some point in the 1960s and which usually people say was originally designed to be a prison or a mental hospital and is then re appropriated for universities university purposes. And why we have some of the most enormous and impressive universities that these huge great concrete megastructures. And there you can see the kind of interaction of two forces really. I mean, one is just architectural fashion. And there is a story. There is a story which we see throughout the history I'm describing, which is about how universities absorb fashions. They want to keep up, they want to be fashionable. They wanted to be fashionable back in the medieval period, which is why they adopt these ideas of planning derived from, you know, Renaissance and Roman forms. They want to be fashionable in the 18th century, which is why we see all these great classical buildings. And in some respects they want to be fashionable in the 19th century, which is why they're absorbing Gothic revival ideas, because that is fashionable. And in the 20th century what's fashionable is concrete. More important than that though, I think, and this is one of the reasons this is a truly global phenomenon as well as just one confined to Europe and North America, is that what concrete is about is that concrete is a material which almost every country is capable of producing and which every country sees as an instrument of modernization. So you see the great concrete Universities of America are designed to symbolize science and technology. Well, the same is true as concrete universities are founded in India, as they're founded in Africa, as they're founded in South America. All of these places have a sense that building in concrete university is somehow building. It's in part to do with building modernity. It's in part to do with building a modern nation. And the idea that these are institutions that every nation has to have and the more, the better that these are institutions that have to be modern, and the more modern, the better the idea that these institutions have to be big and the bigger, the better. All of that comes together in some of the great kind of big, massive megastructures that I look at in the final chapter, and which are, you know, some of the biggest building projects that are seen on Earth at the time.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, they're really quite literally hard to miss.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Which is kind of part of the point here. So, yeah, that's really interesting and in many ways takes us kind of right up to where we are now, where we have these massive concrete universities still very present. We, of course, also have the very old ones, like the one you're sitting in at the moment. So amongst all of this, what do you hope readers take from this history and thinking about the materials of the universe?

[Professor William White]

I think there are two things, really. I mean, the first is to try and understand why when we visit universities or study in universities or work in universities, there is a kind of family resemblance. But more than that, that there is an ongoing question which universities always have, which is about the relationship between the material and the mental, about the place and the thought that go on, and that that's an ongoing tension that can't be avoided. And that universities always live with that, always have done, and I suspect always will do. The second point, which is to return to how we began, really, and this is how I try to finish the book, is to say, look, in a world of virtual learning, in a world of AI, there is a kind of existential question for the universities. And that question is, couldn't it all just be done without all this? Couldn't we remove all this? Couldn't we escape the bonds, as it were, of the material? And the point I want to make is, first of all, even the virtual, even AI, has a material component to it. Just think of the energy it's using. Just think of the water it requires. But more importantly, I think I want to make the argument that in fact learning in place, that learning in an institution, that learning in an environment that brings you together. Actually, that is the best way of learning, that this is, in some respects a form of education, a form of culture, a form of enlightenment, as it were. That, in fact, is worth defending.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Certainly a lot to continue thinking about. Right. Obviously, there's a lot of history here, but still many open questions to consider going forward to. And what, may I ask, will you be doing while we're all continuing to discuss and think about these questions? Do you have any current or upcoming projects you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Professor William White]

Well, yes. So, I mean, as I said, this is the third and, I think, final element of a trilogy of books in which I've tried to think through, you know, what's the relationship between the university, or between learning and place, between things and ideas. I've just. Well, later this year, I will become editor, general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is a hugely exciting project, which is an attempt to try and tell the story of Britain's history, very broadly defined, through the writing of biographical entries. We have 63 or so thousand names already covered, and every year we produce hundreds more. And so I'm going to be taking on that responsibility and that great opportunity. And it seems to me the time has come for me to write a biography now is to move from things to people. And so I'm just getting going on work on a truly unpleasant man who was, nonetheless, I think, rather interested, who was a major architectural patron, who was a major scholar, who was also one of the figures who worked hardest to defend the institution of slavery in the early 19th century. And so I'm getting going on his biography.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, plenty to keep you busy. And of course, while you're doing that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the University A History in Stone, Silk and Blood, published by Harvard University Press in 2026. William, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor William White]

It's been so lovely. Thank you ever so.

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