All our golden yesterdays

Universities of all ages create their own history, geography and mythology, suggests Susan Bassnett.

I was recently asked to make a short presentation on the idea of a university community. This seemed pretty straightforward: universities are basically communities of students and their teachers, and interaction between these groups takes place in lecture and seminar rooms, in small offices, in laboratories and workshops, as it has done for centuries. When you stand in the famous anatomical lecture theatre in Bologna, home to Europe's oldest university, you find yourself in a recognisable environment, despite its age, elaborate decor and the clearly hierarchical arrangement of space.

But today's university is a complex entity, and the university community is broader than that, comprising teachers and students, technicians, librarians and administrative staff. Many institutions employ thousands of people in all kinds of jobs - catering, cleaning, gardening, building maintenance. Campus universities such as Warwick are, in effect, miniature towns, complete with shops, hairdressers, a post office, employment agency and sports centre.

How then to sum up this diversity? Two words come to mind: geography and mythology. The geography of a university is enormously important, whether we are thinking about an ancient collegiate organisation, a green-field campus, a city-centre institution or a series of sites spread across a large region. How people relate to the geography of an institution is crucial: walkways develop, often where architects could not have predicted; some areas become centres of activity, others are marginalised; some buildings are loved, others despised; there is good energy in some teaching spaces, bad energy in others. And it seems to me that no amount of money or strategic planning can account for the ways in which a university's geography evolves. Rather it is a cultural phenomenon, dependent on the people who move through those spaces. Sometimes meeting points that emerged decades or even centuries ago continue to serve that same purpose, while at other times a new building can change patterns that had seemed immovable.

The geography of a university and the way people move around it is linked to the history and mythology of that institution in all kinds of ways. In older institutions, myths have had longer to develop, but they come into being even in the newest of places. Some have myths about eccentric professors or deranged but brilliant students; some have hauntings; others have tales of sit-ins and student protests. Some universities have relatively staid and serious myths, others lay claim to a more radical past. Built into the mythology of so many - even those that came into being a decade ago - is that vision of a lost golden age, when students were better prepared, lecturers were more unusual, parties were wilder, the sun shone more often and the decline into mass second-rate education had not yet begun.

Behind all the fantasising, there is usually a germ of truth, but what really counts is the significance of a mythology in the cultural life of a university. No amount of management-speak or corporate ideology can ever suppress the powerful forces that emerge when large groups of diverse people live and work together. The strength of the university community in all its diversity is manifested both temporally and spatially in its geography and through its myth-making.

Susan Bassnett is pro vice-chancellor at Warwick University with responsibility for campus life and community affairs.