The aging history professor—his beard graying, his posture slouching—parks his 1997 Honda and walks to his office at Johns Hopkins. Along the way he passes two giant glass cubes that, for the last five years, have slowly risen on the edge of campus. Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy.”
How’s that going? he wonders.
In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune. The cost of the building, designed by Renzo Piano, has probably exceeded the entire donation. Scheduled to open in 2023, it was originally budgeted at $100 million—before the postpandemic surge of inflation. Walking past, the professor wonders what the final price tag will be, and who will pay for the faculty and staff who’ve already been hired by the institute, not to mention the robust programming. How much will it even cost to clean all that glass?
He pictures the trustees and donors at the building’s inauguration, whenever that happens. There will be soaring paeans to values of openness and transparency. It’s a glass building, after all. To him, the gargantuan structure doesn’t signal ancient Greek democracy as much as a Singapore convention hall or the atrium of a Dubai tower. It’s the placeless architecture of 21st-century global capital. He calls it “Airport Sublime.”
The day before the fall semester begins, the professor attends a convocation for new undergraduates. They look as eager as he feels jaded.
Johns Hopkins is launching its 150th anniversary celebration. When it was founded in 1876, American universities were still mostly finishing schools for children of the nation’s elite. Hopkins introduced the modern research university to the US, importing the model from Germany, helping reshape American higher education in its image.
At the convocation, speakers announce the coming “sesquicentennial”: once, twice, three times, and then again, lest anyone forget. It’s a great word, he thinks. He tries to use it in a sentence.
The incoming chair of the university’s board of trustees is on hand. He looks nervous. He’s younger than most faculty on stage, the managing partner of a private equity firm based in Boston, with offices in London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Menlo Park. Kept, like all faculty, at a safe distance from the trustee, the history professor asks himself what this person can know about running a university.
Does the Hopkins board still include that retired Navy admiral—the one who once sat on the board of the Silicon Valley blood-testing company Theranos? How did he become a trustee anyway? Did someone think: “Now there’s a guy who knows about oversight!”?
The convocation speeches are, as the genre demands, ridden with clichés. Deans urge students to think differently, explore fearlessly. “Be the class that embraces that sense of limitless possibility,” exhorts the university’s president, a lawyer specialized in corporate governance.
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