Ok so this book WAS very fun. Big picture takeaways: - universities have always had an unstable business model, which is constantly evolving. The current bundle of education and research need not last forever either. - all the culture war stuff we're debating now has been there for literally 800 years. Students have always partied and had sex and wanted to overthrow authority and cross dress and haze each other, and parents and governments have always attempted to exert control, and the relative power of each has oscillated. Colleges used to have their own jails! U of Uppsala executed a student via DEATH PENALTY as late as 1770s! - the health of the industry has oscillated a ton, with European enrollments dropping by as much as half in certain decades and centuries. - realistically, the best way to protect universities from being defunded is for all professors to work at least partially on weapons systems - the book (and others on this topic) has made it increasingly annoying to listen to non-historian analysts comment on the academic industry, because seemingly none of them seem to be aware that basically none of the phenomena they are analyzing are new. The book is not perfect. It's ostensibly a history told via architecture, but that connection is meh. And there's not an attempt to give a proper socio-economic analysis of the evolution of universities, it reads more as a collection of facts. But the facts are awesome, so I highly recommend!