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Abstract

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Munger Hall, a planned dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was expected to house 4500 students in a single structure, with 94% of their rooms windowless. Designed and partially funded by philanthropist Charlie Munger, Munger Hall is a classic illustration of the hubris and power of philanthropy in the twenty-first century. For many donors, new ways of thinking about the ills of society and the optimal implementation of philanthropic benevolence impact the direction of their philanthropy and the process of gift-giving itself. For example, the importance of directly controlling all aspects of the gift as well as leveraging funds, assessing a return on investment, and cultivating new subjects are key features of contemporary philanthropy. Acceptance of this type of philanthropic intervention has increased due to the neoliberalization of higher education, alongside precipitous declines in state funding. While much of the scholarship on philanthrocapitalism has addressed the social and organizational impacts of large gifts, we emphasize the spatiality of the process, showing how the actual physical spaces of buildings and other forms of institutional infrastructure are often implicated in philanthropic gifts, with potential effects on the experiences and subjectivities of users. In higher education, these types of experiential effects can have wide-ranging consequences, operating to direct students and faculty toward or away from certain kinds of research opportunities or into particular forms of collaborations and social relationships and away from others. This article investigates these recent trends with an in-depth examination of Munger Hall.

Keywords

Architecture campus design higher education neoliberalism philanthrocapitalism philanthropy university

Introduction

If it had been constructed, Munger Hall at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) would have been the largest dormitory in the world. Designed to hold 4500 students in a single structure of 1.68 million square feet, the building featured 8 single rooms in a suite, with 8 suites located in 8 “houses” per floor, spread out over 11 stories (see Figure 1). In the design, 94% of the student rooms were windowless, with artificial light controlled by the student. The ground and top floors were designed to have numerous amenities, including restaurants, fitness spaces, and a Costco (Bernstein, 2021; Academic Senate Panel on Munger Hall, 2022). The proposal came under sustained critique by architects worldwide, but the $200 million gift from businessman Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, was predicated on strict adherence to his vision and he firmly rejected any changes to it (Cramer, 2021).

Figure 1.

Rendering of Munger Hall (image by VTBS architects).

The massive dormitory (nicknamed “Dormzilla” in the media) is a superb example of both the hubris and the power of philanthropy in the twenty-first century. Widening income and wealth gaps and diminishing state assistance over the past four decades in the United States and globally have greatly influenced the form, capacity, and impact of major gifts (Barman, 2016; Kumar and Brooks, 2021; McGoey, 2021). As less well-endowed campuses, especially public universities, face the long-term impacts of neoliberalization in higher education, including declining state funds and/or reduced student numbers resulting from skyrocketing tuition and growing economic precarity, the need for outside support from philanthropists has greatly increased (Elliot, 2006; Newfield, 2008, 2016; Eaton et al., 2014; Hundle and Vang, 2019; Mintz, 2021; Meranze and Newfield, 2023). Additionally, increases in both housing insecurity and student indebtedness resulting from decades of austerity have driven the imperative for universities to invest in public–private partnerships that reduce their own levels of control and place it largely in the hands of the private sector. Thus, elite philanthropists such as Munger are now able to direct the core workings of campus design and planning, affecting the very heart of the university, and offering “solutions” to problems—such as the lack of affordable housing—that their own capitalist machinations often caused in the first place (cf. McGoey, 2015; Sklair and Gilbert, 2022).

While extreme, this illustrative case comes from a long history of philanthropy impacting the form and direction of college campuses in the United States (Turner, 1984; Horowitz, 1984, 1985; Thelin and Trollinger, 2014; Kapp, 2018). These types of outside economic interventions in campus life are not a new phenomenon, as alumni and others have sought to shape the next generation of faculty and students since universities were first founded. However, as philanthropy itself has changed and grown in importance over the past two decades (Reich, 2020; Barnett, 2023), so too has its impact on universities. Both the functions of buildings and their architectural designs are, once again, and in increasingly significant ways, controlled or highly influenced by the targeted gifts of philanthropists such as Munger (O’Grady, 2021).

To understand the recent changes in the forms and practices of contemporary philanthropy, it is critical to see how it has co-evolved with the larger capitalist restructuring occurring over the past several decades. Looking back as far as the post-war period, it was through greater emphasis on demand management and social welfare that the Keynesian period provided a temporary fix to capitalism's crisis tendencies in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. With stagflation, declining profitability, and intensifying class struggle in the 1970s, however, this model came under tremendous pressure, opening up the political terrain to proponents of a more individualized, laissez-faire system of economic governance—ideas that had gained currency since the first Mont Pèlerin meetings launched in 1947. Backed by free market devotees and corporate interests, several leaders in advanced industrial nations advanced a neoliberal agenda in the 1980s and 1990s that transformed social and economic relationships, policies, and practices, promoting a shift from a Fordist/Keynesian regime of accumulation to one modeled on Hayekian principles of individual responsibility and limited government (Tickell and Peck, 1995; Peck, 2002; Harvey, 2005; Peet, 2007).

The shift to neoliberalism represented a strategic response by capital to restore class power and profitability, involving the rollback of welfarist policies and regulatory practices administered by the state, an expansion of its repressive capacities, and the simultaneous rolling out of programs and strategies of privatization and financialization on behalf of business (Peck and Tickell, 2002). Crucially for our argument here, this transformation encompassed not only an economic shift, but a wholesale reorganization of social relations, spatial configurations, and modes of governance—a process of creative destruction that reshaped the global landscape (Harvey, 1989; Massey, 1995). It is these broad political, social, and economic transformations that are productive of new forms and practices of humanitarianism and philanthropic intervention in the twenty-first century (Mitchell and Pallister-Wilkins, 2023). While “much of philanthropy might still be summarily described as capitalists rescuing capitalism from capitalism,” there are nevertheless important shifts that we wish to highlight with our example of philanthropic interventions into university life today. Among these are efforts to shore up “global market practices and rationalities through local social projects that at once acknowledge and cover for market failure while simultaneously cultivating new market subjects” (Mitchell and Sparke, 2016).

For many donors today, new ways of thinking about the ills of society, as well as the optimal implementation of philanthropic benevolence, impacts both the direction of their philanthropy as well as the process of gift-giving itself. For example, the importance of directly controlling all aspects of the gift, as well as leveraging funds, assessing a return on investment, “cultivating new subjects” and nudging behavior and ways of thinking are key features of contemporary philanthropy. These practices, often referred to as venture philanthropy or philanthrocapitalism, are particularly evident in sectors such as health and education, both of which have been devastated by neoliberal forms of austerity over the past several decades (Kelly and James, 2015; Mitchell and Lizotte, 2016; Rowe, 2023; Saltman, 2023; Sparke and Williams, 2024).

In this article we bring together the literatures on neoliberalization in higher education with those of contemporary philanthropy to manifest the growing impact of this articulation for the spatial organization and design of US campuses. We offer an analysis of one building, Munger Hall at UCSB, but note that significant donations are increasingly apparent throughout higher education (see Figure 2). Moreover, while the case study focuses on a university building, we believe this trend is important to underscore and theorize more broadly, as it is connected with donor-led shifts in a wide variety of increasingly underfunded institutional spaces and infrastructure worldwide, including schools (Saltman, 2010; Quinn et al., 2014; Cohen and Lizotte, 2015; Cohen, 2021), parks (Katz, 2013; Lang and Rothenberg, 2017; Nisbet and Schaller, 2020), and hospitals (Reiser, 2018), among others. Much of the scholarship on venture philanthropy and philanthrocapitalism has addressed the financial and organizational impacts of large gifts, while we emphasize the spatiality of this process, showing how the actual physical spaces of buildings and other forms of institutional infrastructure are often implicated in philanthropic donations, with great potential effects on the experiences and subjectivities of end users.

Figure 2.

Donations of $100m + for buildings at Public Universities since 2013² (map by authors, data from Natural Earth).

While Munger Hall was never built and we cannot directly assess the impacts of these types of interventions with our case study, we point toward a robust, geographically informed scholarship on the relationship between economic conditions under late capitalism, cultural, social, and spatial forms, and formations of subjectivity and consciousness. In The Condition of Postmodernity, for example, Harvey (1989) argues that the shift from modernity to postmodernity is fundamentally rooted in transformations of political-economic practices, particularly the transition from Fordist-Keynesian capitalism to a regime of flexible accumulation. He contends that changes in the material practices of economic production and social reproduction have profound implications for cultural, political, and experiential dimensions of life (see also Harvey, 1985; Jameson, 1991; Lefebvre, 1991; Mitchell, 1993). Similarly, we argue, the reconfiguration of capitalism under neoliberalism in the twenty-first century, especially the growth in scale and influence of philanthropy, has a great capacity to reshape space and human subjectivity, producing new forms of consciousness and experiences of the social world. This transformation is not merely ideological but is materially embedded in the reorganization of space, institutions, and everyday practices.

In the educational milieu, these types of experiential effects can have wide-ranging consequences, operating to direct students and faculty toward or away from certain kinds of research opportunities or into particular forms of collaborations, social relationships, and ways of thinking, and away from others (Brint, 2005; O’Grady, 2021; Haddad, 2021). In another study, for example, we demonstrate how philanthropy today is implicated in directing students toward STEM fields and industry partnerships through the funding of programs as well as the production and design of buildings on a university campus (Mitchell and Woolston, in review). While the attempt to influence academic life through philanthropic investment is not new, we believe that the impact of these efforts has grown substantially given the underfunding of public institutions discussed below, as well as the increasingly hands-on control, orchestration, and leveraging employed by many philanthropists and foundations today. Many universities now aim to become central drivers of societal and economic advancement, seeking to elevate their role in shaping the future by enhancing financial, technological, and social outcomes (Marginson, 2011; Peters, 2013; Fraser, 2013). Consequently, philanthropy has become an absolutely critical player in the contemporary cultural logics of capitalism through its impact on spatial organization and the cultivation of entrepreneurial, goal-oriented subjects focused on providing technical solutions to global challenges (Mitchell and Sparke, 2016). To be clear, we are not critiquing the use technology and finance to problem-solve global challenges per se; our concern is with the increasing influence of philanthropy on these educational directions.

The article is structured as follows: in the body of the paper, we provide historical context to the moment, highlighting the dire funding challenges for public universities (with a focus on the UC system), as well as the critical power of philanthropy to shape institutions such as higher education in an extended period of state disinvestment and roll-over neoliberal retrenchment (Peck and Theodore, 2019). Following this is an examination of how philanthropy has influenced spatial design and subjectivity on college campuses in the past, probing and comparing these types of historical interventions with the current period of philanthrocapitalism. The case study gives an in-depth analysis of Munger Hall as the contemporary culmination of these multiple, articulated processes. We argue that the donor's sense of power, authority and entitlement over the building project extended well beyond the design itself, edging into a desire to influence student behavior and normative forms of sociality. This type of nudging and controlling intervention can expand—with negative effects—the role of philanthropy in broader forms of social and spatial engineering today (see e.g. Wirth, 2020). Despite the money and power behind the project, however, we discuss in the conclusion how multiple actors, including architects, students, faculty, journalists, policymakers, and parents, successfully contested the design for the massive building. These forces arose to ultimately defeat the development of Munger Hall, an important reminder of the efficacy of organized dissent and the power of democratic action.

Declining state support in higher education

Declines in state support for higher education, coupled with growing hostility toward publicly provided goods and services in general, has had profound and far-reaching consequences in the United States. Among other impacts, it has led to the increasing commodification of education, with universities adopting market-driven approaches and students being recast as consumers, burdened with mounting debt to finance their studies (Readings, 1997; Castree and Sparke, 2000; Giroux, 2014). In this section, we offer an overview of the precipitous drop in state support for public higher education in the United States, focusing on the UC system. While we focus on the UC system (and, in our case study, its Santa Barbara campus), the decline in support is not exclusive to California. While never robust, financial support for public universities throughout the United States has significantly eroded since the late 1960s and the rise of austerity forms of neoliberal governance (Newfield, 2008; Giroux, 2014; Frabricant and Brier, 2016; Schrecker, 2021; Jones and Ball, 2023). State appropriations for higher education previously made up the largest percentage of funds for university budgets, but represented just 15.5% of revenues in 2021 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). During this period of reduced support, undergraduate enrollment not only increased (see Figure 3), but also became far more demographically diverse, with increasing numbers of Latinx, Black, and Asian students attending university. This has led some scholars to suggest that popular support for “free” education at colleges and universities decreased (beginning in the late 1960s) when it became apparent that it was no longer predominantly white students who benefited the most from these munificent state programs (Newfield, 2020).

Figure 3.

Undergraduate enrollment versus percent of funding from state, 1900–2020³ (data from UC Information Center; based on Douglass and Bleemer, 2018).

State funding for higher education in the United States has rarely been sufficient, and it has only grown worse over time. According to historian Verne Stadtman (1970: 85), writing about the UC system: “The original financial support of the University was scandalously inadequate, and based, unbelievably, on nothing more than the relatively small state and federal endowments that were created in 1868.” As such, philanthropic gifts have always supplemented the system to some extent, including the purchase of lands and construction of facilities in the late nineteenth century. In 1896, for example, Phoebe Apperson Hearst funded a design competition for a comprehensive building plan and later the construction of some of the proposed facilities at UC Berkeley. Despite the largesse of donors in the early years, however, the system's financial difficulties continued to worsen in the early twentieth century as the student population grew and state funding failed to reflect enrollment increases. There was some respite as voters approved bond issues for additional facilities in Berkeley in 1914 and land in Los Angeles in 1925, but the system remained underfunded until World War II.

Following the war, Keynesian attitudes about the importance of funding social services and public infrastructure impacted higher education in multiple positive ways. Funds from federal loans and state reserves enabled construction at the Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Davis campuses, while state appropriations supported the development of campuses at San Diego, Santa Cruz, and Irvine in the 1960s. From 1957 to 1967, the UC spent over $700 million (nearly $6.5 billion in 2023 dollars) on new buildings or improvements across its campuses. “The generosity of the legislature during this period was a vital factor” for capital improvements, and it was further supplemented by successful statewide bond issues from 1956 to 1964 (Stadtman, 1970: 421). During this time, the funding extended beyond the built environment, supporting expansions in research and innovations in education, and enabling the rapid growth of the student population.

The generosity did not last. In 1966, during his run for governor, Ronald Reagan targeted anti-establishment efforts and student protests in the UC system, promising to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” (Kahn, 2004). His pointed opposition to higher education in general, and the UC system in particular, was part of a deliberate campaign strategy, articulating “all of his ideological themes into a single figure for disorder, a subversive menace of sexual, social, generational, and even communist deviance” (Bady and Konczal, 2012: 10). This early law and order platform was paired with disdain for systems of welfare and government support in general, articulating what was to become a more widespread attack on post-war Keynesian ideas about social and economic governance.

Once elected as California governor in 1966, Reagan cut state support and proposed a tuition-based model for the UC system (Nations, 2021). These efforts—transforming “common sense” about the right to higher education and social services more generally, enacting austerity throughout the system, and promoting individualism and the idea of private goods—foreshadowed the neoliberal perspectives and policies with which Reagan governed as president in the 1980s. It also anticipated the sharp downward trajectory of higher education funding in other states. Reflecting the country at large, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, saw state support drop from 35% of the budget in 1988, to only 21% by 2004 (Weerts, 2006). State support for the City University of New York (CUNY) declined by 40% between 1992 and 2012 despite a 40% rise in enrollment during this period (Nelson, 2022). And in California, the early decline was sharply exacerbated by later policies—notably, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Higher Education Compact¹ in 2005—and subsequent economic crises. For example, after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, Schwarzenegger cut state funding for higher education by a remarkable 20% (Newfield and Lye, 2011: 530). In this way, owing to economic recessions and political policies over time, state support in California has decreased dramatically from approximately 60% to a paltry 10% of the current UC system's budget (Douglass and Bleemer, 2018; cf. Rice, 2011 for the UK).

The chronic and ongoing decline in state support for the UC continues to impact all aspects of the university, including its built environment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the state provided between 55% and 75% of funding for new facilities. By contrast, in 2011, the California State Legislature opted not to fund capital projects, with the UC “expected to fund its capital needs out of its general operating funds and to seek private partners or use its own authority to issue bonds” (Douglass and Bleemer, 2018: 17). Throughout the 2010s, the state provided minimal funding for capital projects (University of California, 2023). While the system received some funding from the state for new construction—notably, $2.65 billion in revenue bonds in 2020 (Evans, 2020)—the amounts received were insufficient as the cost of building and renewing infrastructure continued to rise (Petek, 2023). In addition, the cost of housing at most UC campuses, especially Santa Barbara, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz, increased significantly. Not only is there a current shortage of affordable housing on these campuses, but also widespread community opposition to new construction. Given these various pressures across scale, it is unsurprising that the UC system, like other public universities nationwide, has turned to other funding sources, including philanthropy, to meet its infrastructural needs.

Philanthrocapitalism, space, and subjectivity

Alongside, and related to the rise of neoliberalism and defunding of public institutions and services noted above, the scale, power, and influence of philanthropy has grown markedly in the United States. This expansion is the result of conscious public policy decisions over both funding allocations and taxation policy in the country over the past several decades (Hay and Muller, 2014; Reich, 2020; see also Friedman and McGarvie, 2003 for an extended history). These decisions and policies have empowered and enriched the wealthy, leading to a vast accumulation of capital held by a diminishing set of families and individuals, in concert with a declining middle class and expanding list of needs in the public sector (Peet, 2008; Piketty, 2013; Brown, 2015; Christophers, 2022). In this larger context, philanthropy has served as both a tax advantage to the wealthy, as well as a way of shoring up failing market and government systems in the wake of the damaging legacy of neoliberalism (McGoey, 2015; Mitchell and Sparke, 2016; Giridharadas, 2018; Sparke and Williams, 2024).

Philanthropy in the past two decades has frequently been labeled venture capitalism or philanthrocapitalism owing to the use of business principles and practices in giving strategy, as well as the objective to garner some kind of return on the original investment, known as ROI funding (Mitchell and Sparke, 2016; Sklair and Gilbert, 2022; Garcia-Arias and Mediavilla, 2023). This can be a financial or a social investment, but it presupposes a logic of doing well by doing good (i.e. contributing to society and making a profit at the same time). These types of practices are related to what has become known as social impact investment, which has the similar logic of creating a positive impact on specific social problems and/or environmental issues beyond a financial return, yet within a financialization framework (O’Donohoe et al., 2010; Chiappelo, 2015; Mitchell, 2017; Kish and Fairbairn, 2018; Langley, 2020a). Impact investment practices are common in the world of “poverty finance,” studied mainly in the global South (Roy, 2012; Rankin, 2013; Roy and Crane, 2015; Mader, 2015), but also evident in many sectors of the global North, “where private investment is mobilized for behaviour-change social policies and in support of social economy organizations that provide for social services and social change” (Langley, 2020b: 330; see also: Chiapello and Godefroy, 2017; Rosenman, 2019).

In areas such as education, the ROI logic of philanthrocapitalism is often both financial and social, with the privatization of public education a clear financial end goal for many educational funders such as the Broad and Walton foundations (Ravitch, 2013), while the social return can take many forms, such as the mandate to produce “successful” students. Of course, what constitutes success in human development is highly contentious, raising questions of who and what determines successfulness in students, and how these qualities can be measured and evaluated. Despite the concerns raised, however, human capital measurement, including the increasing deployment of metrics designed to evaluate social returns in multiple areas of life, has become a key feature of both philanthrocapitalism and impact investment (Mitchell, 2017; Rosenman, 2019; Berndt and Wirth, 2018; Sklair and Gilbert, 2022). In higher education, these metrics are variously directed toward time to degree and graduation rates as critical measures of student success, as well as more amorphous (and yet categorized and ostensibly measured) indicators such as “productive mindsets,” “management of life circumstances,” and “relations with others” (Lane et al., 2019: 954; York et al., 2019; Haddad, 2021).

Philanthropists now frequently partner with market forces, as well as public resources and systems, in public–private partnerships (P3) that aim to cultivate “successful” human subjects in the field of education, while simultaneously allowing for rapid exits in the case of “failed” projects (Mitchell and Lizotte, 2016). The nurturing and development of human capital through these forms of P3 interventions is one of many forms of contemporary philanthropy in which subjectivity formation is a primary goal (Richey and Ponte, 2011, 2014; Roy, 2012; Gabor and Brooks, 2017; Burns, 2019). While earlier forms of philanthropy in previous centuries also sought to create good citizens and productive workers (Lagemann, 1989; Gallagher and Bailey, 2000; Zunz, 2011), current efforts are more directly involved with the inculcation of subjects as self-regulating moral agents (Mitchell and Lizotte, 2014; Barnett, 2023; see also Friedman and McGarvie, 2003, who argue that philanthropists have always had this intention). Contemporary philanthropic interventions, such as the Munger Hall design, for example, encourage the formation of healthy, social, and highly responsible or “responsibilized” subjects, able and willing to compete productively in modern society—to become “entrepreneurs” of themselves (Rose, 1998).

Current efforts to inculcate certain experiences and ways of being like this are paired with explicit demands by large philanthropic foundations such as the early Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as individual donors like Munger, to be directly or heavily involved in every aspect of giving. This involves decision-making on the type of intervention deemed best to “solve” a large-scale problem such as malaria or low graduation rates, or to influence or even design every floor plan or façade in an architectural design (McGoey, 2015; Bond et al., 2023; Sparke and Levy, 2023; Saltman, 2023). The insistence on directing the form and flow of gifts and donations manifests the hubris of contemporary philanthropists, many of whom made their money through financial or technological acumen, and who believe that their business savvy can and should translate to all aspects of decision making, including in areas of health, education, agriculture, architecture, or any manner of subjects in which they have no or limited training and expertise (Giridharadas, 2018).

Finally, the prospect of major gifts can nudge individuals and institutions in new directions through the types of housing, education, or general programs that are offered. Institutions, such as universities, are enticed into philanthropic partnerships through both the lack of state funding support discussed above, as well as the opportunity to initiate an exciting new area of research, construct a much-needed building on campus, or aid in student success initiatives, such as the “college completion agenda” (Haddad, 2021: 897; O’Grady, 2021). Meanwhile, by encouraging and eliciting interest and participation from faculty and administrators, donors are able to leverage their own donations, which are often monetary fractions of the entire amount needed to finish a project (Tomkins-Stange, 2020).

Philanthrocapitalism today thus wields extraordinary power to influence the direction and form of higher education, with critical ramifications for the design and function of buildings, including dormitories, as well as the experience of being a student and the formation of student subjectivities and consciousness. How exactly can a building's design affect student experience? And what specifically is and was the role of philanthropy in this process? In the section below, we look briefly at some of the early geographic work on how spatial design can affect experiences of place and sense of self, before moving to an historical analysis of campus planning and building designs intended to do just that in the early twentieth century.

Spatial design and social engineering: The power of philanthropy then and now

Scripps college

In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist geographers and architects developed a substantial body of empirical and theoretical work on the deeply gendered nature and effects of spatial design. They showed concretely how the production and layout of space and the design of buildings impact women and men in different ways, and how notions of internal and external, domestic and foreign, public and private, and who belongs in each kind of space, can have strong material ramifications, including in the labor market (e.g. Boys, 1984; Hanson and Pratt, 1988; Bondi, 1990; McDowell 1992; Rose, 1993; Domosh, 1998). As the gendered experience and impact of spatial design often intersects with other axes of identity, this early work was augmented and exponentially expanded with critical studies on the differential impacts of disability, class, age, race, and sexuality (for a few examples in this large body of early work see Jackson, 1987; Kobayashi and Peake, 1994; Gleeson, 1998).

While the differentiated experiences of space are not always considered by planners and designers, there are many examples of deliberate efforts to construct landscapes that influence social behavior and identity. They include the designs of many corporate buildings, which not only encroach on, and thereby privatize sidewalks and other public spaces (Blomley, 2010), but which simultaneously encourage certain kinds of actions, such as shopping, and discourage other kinds of behaviors, such as congregating or “loitering” (Lipsitz, 2007; Schindler, 2014; Bader, 2020). Through carefully designed architectural spaces and related cultural symbols and markers, people are recruited into different subject positions and feelings, experiencing the space as welcoming or hostile and related activities as “for them” or antithetical to their presence (Sibley, 1995).

Even when designers’ intentions are benevolent, their efforts to socially engineer welcoming, enjoyable, and productive spaces often unconsciously rely on assumptions of a universal human subject and experience. Through time and across cultures, the understanding of what a universal experience is or should be has varied greatly, with the result that hegemonic groups and powerful individuals have frequently imposed societal norms on others. This has been manifested in multiple places and time periods—for example, in assumptions about appropriate and inappropriate relations between women and men on college campuses. One of the clearest examples of intentional social engineering through spatial design on US campuses is Scripps College in Southern California. In the article, “Designing for the Genders,” historian Helen Horowitz (1985) tells the story of how philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps, in collaboration with several administrators and an architect, shaped the new college campus for women. Through a comparison with the reworking of the (at the time) all male campus of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena by the same architect, George Kaufmann, Horowitz shows the dominant attitudes about gender, sexuality, and the appropriate higher education curricula for men and women in California in the early twentieth century.

One of the dominant attitudes about women in higher education during this time and in this place was the belief that the East Coast women's colleges were promoting radicalism and sterility, which was leading to a form of “race suicide.” This was the concern, expressed in conservative scholarly journals of the period, that the graduates of women's colleges like Vassar, were not marrying and producing enough children (Horowitz, 1984, 1985). This patriarchal, racist, and classist anxiety was accompanied by fears of lesbianism and that close female friendships might lead to “perverted” relationships if not adequately supervised and monitored. Even more importantly, these types of unacceptable relations were seen as something that effective design could circumscribe and eventually suspend. In order to actualize, in space, the assumptions about women, sexuality, and domesticity, Kaufmann designed a set of small “home-like buildings” on an inward-facing courtyard at Scripps College (Horowitz, 1985: 449). These intimate spaces each had a single public entrance, which could be easily monitored, a large common room, and smaller connected public alcoves, known as “dating rooms.” Small and spartan individual rooms of identical size—similar in many ways to the tiny Munger Hall bedrooms—were all upstairs off a single corridor. The design was quite different from the spaces Kaufmann designed for Caltech, where there were no fears of male bonding. Indeed, there was a strong effort on that campus to inculcate feelings of “group intimacy” through the creation of generous rooms on all levels, with warm and comfortable chairs, multiple entrances, and public rooms grouped around the entryways, with connections between the spaces (Horowitz, 1985).

We provide this example of social engineering on an early twentieth century college campus to indicate the long-standing nature of efforts to universalize and regulate the behavior of women and men on US campuses, as well as to show some of the ways that these place-based prescriptions of appropriate sexuality and social relations were influenced by philanthropy. In the case of Scripps College, the donor Ellen Browning Scripps wanted women to be “clear-thinking and high-minded,” but beyond this she left the campus guidelines and design to the president and trustees (Horowitz, 1985). Nevertheless, her gift—and her relationship with the highly influential trustee William Bennett Munro—was instrumental in creating a separate college for women. It was largely Munro's ideas, working in concert with the architect Kaufmann, that led to the particular spaces and designs described above. What was thought important for women, gender relations, sexuality and the continuation of the “races” was set in the campus designs—in an attempt to influence students and thus the future of US society.

Buildings and spaces on college campuses are often perceived in this light, and philanthropists around the globe have historically donated substantially to buildings on universities, particularly their alma maters (Horowitz, 1984; Thelin and Trollinger, 2014; O’Grady, 2021). The current period is thus not unique in the efforts by philanthropists such as Munger to have an impact on campuses and student life. What makes Munger Hall a good example of the expressions and importance of elite philanthropy today is the hands-on control by the donor of every aspect of the building's design, including its individualized, windowless bedrooms and its massive scale. Munger's own design vision and architectural aspirations, combined with his views on universal human experiences and appropriate accommodations for students at public universities, is evident in the building plans and in the building process that we describe below. Further, his desire to leverage his gift with the university's resources, his sense of power and entitlement in the implementation of his gift, and his desire for a social return on investment in the form of increased scale and behavioral nudges toward more sociality and productivity (more happy students in a more concentrated space), are all clear manifestations of twenty-first century philanthrocapitalist interventions.

Munger Hall

How can we get any simpler than using the ship-architecture principles on land? If it works on a ship, it'll work on land, and the minute you do that, you get a lot more density of use of land, get huge economic advantages, and the students are nearer one another, which helps the education because they educate each other.

—Charles Munger (quoted in Zweig and Friedman, 2019)

Munger Hall was a planned residence hall for undergraduate students at UCSB. According to the university, it fulfilled “the obligation of the University to provide beds for the enrollment increase envisioned in the 2010 Long Range Development Plan” (LRDP), while enabling Munger, who practiced architectural design as a hobby, to implement his designs for student housing, as he did at Stanford University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (UCSB, 2023a). After providing $65 million to UCSB in 2014 for a residence hall for visiting scholars at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics—where he made decisions about everything “down to the exact width of décor on the doors” (Brugger, 2016; see also Leachman, 2015)—Munger pledged $200 million in 2016, with the possibility of additional funding, to develop “the best undergraduate housing in the world” (Yelimeli, 2016). In 2018, he also purchased and gifted Las Varas, a ranch and orchard that the university now maintains (UCSB, 2018).

The 2010 LRDP required the university to add beds for 5000 students by 2025, in order to house 50% of its anticipated enrollment. While this was certainly possible based on an earlier Campus Housing Study (Urban Design Associates, 2006: 32), development of new housing was slow. By 2017, the university had completed only two new apartment complexes, adding space for 1500 students (Alfred, 2022b). Another development, called Mesa Verde, was expected to house 550 (and later, 2000) students, but it never moved beyond the planning stage, despite appearing in university materials for 8 years (Alfred, 2022a).

Mesa Verde stopped appearing in these materials by the year 2019, replaced by “Donor Funded Student Housing.” It soon became clear that the university had shifted its focus to a new housing project, one developed for years by Munger and Chancellor Henry T. Yang (Alfred, 2022a). As it turned out, since the mid-2010s, Munger had been developing his own ideas for the campus, invited by Yang to suggest designs for a 28-acre site with existing housing and a 5-acre site with maintenance facilities, the potential location of Mesa Verde (UC Regents, 2016). Munger presented his vision for the larger site—two high-rises with space for 15,000 students—at a Regents meeting in March 2016. At that meeting he also committed $200 million (of an expected cost of at least $1.4 billion) in seed money for the projects at both sites, but also expected the UC to fund an “immense” amount of the cost (Yelimeli, 2016).

Despite a worsening housing crisis for the campus, there was little public development on Munger's proposal or the earlier plan over the next several years. The crisis consisted of a shortfall of beds that occurred after the state conditioned its funding on increased student enrollment from 2016 to 2019 (UCSB, 2022), as well as a lawsuit from the city of Goleta (and later, Santa Barbara County) in 2021, for failing to construct enough housing as per the 2010 LRDP (Yamamura, 2021). The increasing cost of housing, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, further exacerbated the crisis, with some students compelled to live in vehicles and hotels (Sedley, 2021a, 2021b; Thornton, 2022). In the background of this overall context of scarcity and crisis, the university, Munger, and VTBS Architects developed his proposal for Munger Hall, constructing full-scale models in a nearby warehouse (Alfred, 2022a). In July 2021, they announced an updated design, a single high-rise with space for 4500 students at the smaller site (UCSB Staff, 2021).

For Munger, the situation—more students, limited land—represented “a very interesting architectural problem” (Zweig and Friedman, 2019). He envisioned an 11-story hall with ground and roof levels of shared spaces, and a repeated plan of 8 houses with 8 suites with 8 single rooms on the remaining floors (see Figure 4)—“a community-within-a-community,” according to the University (UC Santa Barbara, 2022), or “a prison,” according to critics (Academic Senate Panel on Munger Hall, 2022). To fit that much spatial programming into the building, most rooms were interior and lit by “virtual windows” inspired by Disney Cruise ships (Yelimeli, 2016; Cramer, 2021). Moreover, the single rooms [Figure 5(a)] were only 70 square feet, the smallest the building code allows; between furniture and the door, they contained less than 11 square feet of unobstructed space (Academic Senate Panel on Munger Hall, 2022: Appendix J). It is “a pretty cheerful place, these little bedrooms,” Munger said at the time (Cramer, 2021). Moving up in scale, each suite of eight single rooms (8 students) was designed to share two bathrooms, a living area with a TV, and a kitchenette, while each house of eight suites (64 students) would share a “Convivial Kitchen,” Great Room, game room, and laundry room, as well as windows and a terrace. The building's 72 houses shared amenities on the ground and roof levels [Figure 5(b)]—these included open spaces, as well as a reading room, fitness center, recreation room, market, and restaurant. “We took the penthouse space … and gave it to the students. That, of course, works like gangbusters,” said Munger (Bernstein, 2021).

Figure 4.

Plan of typical floor (a) and perspective of suite (b) (images by VTBS architects).

Figure 5.

Rendering of a single room (a) and the rooftop courtyard (b) (images by VTBS architects).

Despite their artificial light and small size, the university described the single rooms in positive terms, arguing that the cramped space was intentional. In an effort to encourage student sociality, it explained that the shared spaces were designed to be more expansive and pleasant, while individual spaces were more functional. “By making the bedrooms as efficient as possible, and greatly expanding the shared spaces, the design emphasizes collaborative and social interactions between students and de-emphasizes their isolation inside individual student bedrooms,” according to the FAQ (UC Santa Barbara, 2022). Similar, in some ways, to Horowitz's (1985) description of the generous public spaces and spartan sleeping accommodations for women at Scripps, the larger, brighter, and amenity-filled social spaces of Munger Hall were designed to entice those perceived as asocial, particularly young men, into normalized “universal” conditions of human community and social collectivity. In his typically blunt and patronizing language, Munger also made it clear that the plan to force students into contact with each other was deliberate. “Throw people together in a pleasant way. Constructively. Let the little darlings educate one another,” Munger told the Wall Street Journal (Zweig and Friedman, 2019). In another interview with Architectural Record, the gendered nature of his design effort was made apparent: the mixed-gender houses are “going to enormously improve the behavior of the males,” he said (Bernstein, 2021).

The effort to recruit students into greater sociality was also a goal of an earlier graduate student residence hall funded and partially designed by Munger at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In that building, a desire for greater social proximity and collaboration was paired with an insistence on interdisciplinarity, with an overarching goal to compel unusual social connections and thereby encourage innovative ideas. The university's assistant communications director for housing noted:

[Y]ou're likely to get an innovative idea if you're working with people outside of your discipline. You've got to be transdisciplinary … We wanted graduate students to meet students from other programs. How can we bridge that gap? One way is part of Charles Munger's vision—housing could do it. When you live close to each other amazing things can occur. (Allen, 2015)

Munger's vision for UCSB generated great controversy. In October 2021, architect Dennis McFadden resigned from the campus's Design Review Committee: “The basic concept of Munger Hall as a place for students to live is unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being,” he wrote (Cramer, 2021). McFadden's resignation boosted the project on social media, where it was largely criticized. UCSB Global Studies Professor Charmaine Chua (2021) criticized the “carceral logic” of the ship-inspired design, arguing “[t]his is hatred of the poor.” For others, Munger's design was an indictment of the profession. “If somebody with no training can not only brag that he has bested Le Corbusier … but can produce something that the profession, by its own standards, cannot find fault with, what does it say about the profession's standards,” asked Aaron Betsky (2021), an architecture critic. For his part, Munger said that McFadden “reacted with his gut like an idiot” (Bernstein, 2021), just one of his many critiques of architecture and its practitioners.

In October 2022, the Academic Senate Panel on Munger Hall published a 204-page report on the hall, concluding that it would be “unwise for UCSB to proceed without significant modifications to the design” (p. 4). Following this report, the university stated that it would explore modifications. The Academic Senate Panel report included an architectural analysis of the hall by UCSB History of Art and Architecture Professor Swati Chattopadhyay, who outlined numerous assumptions in the hall's design premise—most notably, it “projects a ‘typical’ student as the building's inhabitant, who it assumes needs to spend more time socializing than be by themself in their room” (Academic Senate Panel on Munger Hall, 2022: Appendix H). Chattopadhyay goes on to critique the broad assumption of social engineering through space more generally, noting that the design “assumes that social life can be and should be engineered through architectural means.”

Through its small, windowless bedrooms and larger, well-resourced convening spaces, the layout of the building aimed to encourage and cultivate student socialization, which Munger and administrators working for him presumed could be achieved through spatial design of this type. Their social engineering efforts began with an assumption that the impact of these kinds of spaces are universally shared for “improving student happiness” and “educational effectiveness” (UC Santa Barbara, 2021) despite the lack of support for the design from most professional architects. Additionally, the design effort was insidiously gendered, relying on stereotypical and heteronormative assumptions that men have inherently asocial tendencies and need more socializing than women. What is most important to note is the outsized impact of the donor's vision, one that is not supported by data or expertise, but rather which rests on personal observations and the hubris of a self-made billionaire's sense of brilliance and entitlement.

Of all the architectural critiques, one that perhaps best manifests the aggrandized schema and personality of Munger, as well as the context of neoliberalization that made this project seem appropriate, is the massive scale of the building. The goal to house 4500 students under a single roof is an example of a plan conditioned by the logic of austerity and “the bottom-line driven ethos of corporate philanthropism that often prioritizes quantity over quality” (Roche, 2023). The project seeks to control, leverage, and also maximize the limited and decreasing state resources conceded to the public. It provides the bare minimum in terms of sleeping accommodations to a growing number of demographically diverse and largely economically underprivileged students in a period of widespread housing crisis and deepening financial deprivation. Munger's design is an example of the corporatization of the university written in stone, the ultimate manifestation of austerity logic for the poor, paired with flagrant wealth and entitlement for the wealthy.

The corporatization of higher education is directly linked with federal and state disinvestment in public infrastructure and the assumption (greatly expanded under Reagan's governorship and presidency) that public goods and services are not an entitlement and that basic human dignity in sleeping accommodations and education is not a right. The power and growing acceptance of this logic is evident in its expansion into other areas of society, including affordable housing in New York City. In March 2023, amid a housing affordability crisis, Mayor Eric Adams asked, “Why can't we do a real examination of the rules that state every bedroom must have a window? You don't need no window where you’re sleeping, it should be dark!” (Brand, 2023; Roche, 2023). In turn, Architectural Digest asked, “are windowless bedrooms going to be a thing?” (Avery, 2023).

Munger's power as a major donor and elite philanthropist enabled his widely disparaged architectural ideas to shape the design of a dormitory that, by virtue of its massive scale, would have satisfied most of the 2010 LRDP's entire student housing requirement. Administrators were under great pressure to accept his donation and design because of insufficient funds for capital construction in the UC system as a whole, alongside a major affordable housing crisis across California. These decisions were also made amidst a widespread neoliberal logic of austerity and corporatization for public institutions, a discourse and set of practices that has affected much of higher education globally over the last several decades (Castree and Sparke, 2000; Silvey, 2002; Schrecker, 2010; Robertson, 2014; Lieberwitz, 2022). While the building will not be constructed, the cost of its architectural plans and extensive design process are in the millions of dollars. As with many other characteristics of contemporary philanthropy, the donor can “exit” in the case of failure, while the recipients are left to pick up the pieces.

Conclusion

In this article we considered the design for Munger Hall as an illustrative example of broader changes in the cultural logic of capitalism, indicating some of the ways that philanthropy in higher education, as in other sectors, is impacting society and subjectivity today. Owing to the decline of public funding and huge need for resources, wealthy individuals and foundations can exert influence over academic priorities, research directions, institutional governance, and even the interests and experiences of students. Moreover, they can use their own financial resources as a catalyst to attract and steer much larger amounts of public funds or limited community resources toward their chosen initiatives and priorities.

Philanthropy has infiltrated every aspect of state and civil society, influencing decision making, organization, and the form, production, and experience of space itself. Investigating the role of philanthropy in an era of ongoing austerity and crisis in areas such as education and housing, remains critical for understanding one of the key mechanisms by which capitalism continues to reinvent and sustain itself. Moreover, honing in on the spatial ramifications of these interventions adds new insights into the many ways that contemporary philanthropy attempts to nudge behavior and impact consciousness about appropriate behavior and common sense. Despite its ultimate defeat, the UCSB project has continued to resonate, including assumptions about what is needed and appropriate (i.e. windowless housing) for low-income people. Further, the new emphasis on massively scaled housing projects has also continued, as the university now recommends a replacement design that will accommodate up to 3000 students at the site (UCSB, 2023b).

While it's important to point to the ongoing effects of these types of interventions in society and on campus life, we want to end by highlighting the democratic forces that arose to successfully contest the design of Munger Hall. That the project was ultimately defeated because of the actions of thousands of people—various petitions, McFadden's resignation, oppositional writings and posts, protests by students and faculty, and the Academic Senate Panel's report—is testament to the power of individuals acting together to stand up for the right to postsecondary education, the right to quality public infrastructure, and the right to human dignity (Peerzada et al., 2024). Shortly after the initial announcement about Munger Hall, a petition was signed by over 14,000 people to halt its construction. This was followed by another petition, signed by 3000 architects and other professionals in the building industries (Roche, 2023). After McFadden, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, resigned in protest of the building's design, many members of the mediasphere subsequently wrote critical articles and shared information about the project. Negative views of “Dormzilla,” in terms of its scale as well as the potential effects of windowless bedrooms on the mental health of students, became major news stories and were amplified in national, and even international news outlets (Miranda, 2021; Butterfield, 2021). Back on the campus, students and faculty protested the planned dorm from late 2021 through early 2023; their signs labeled the project “Munger Hell” and demanded “Humane Housing Now” (Do, 2021; Shuda, 2023). The report by the Academic Senate Panel, published in late 2022, added further evidence and analysis to this opposition. Following the sustained attention and ongoing critique of the project, what initially seemed like an inevitable outcome in 2021 turned into an admission of defeat in 2023, as the university sought new proposals for the site in July and announced that two architecture firms had been chosen in October (Hayden, 2023; Callahan, 2023). Before his death in late 2023, Munger was surprisingly quiet about the project's demise, and the university has not yet revealed whether any of his contribution remains nor how it will be used if the gift is continued.

The case of Munger Hall illustrates both the power and influence of philanthropy in a period of neoliberal austerity, but also its weaknesses. “[I]t is rare when a bad idea championed by an unfettered billionaire like Charlie Munger comes to a decisive end, thanks to genuine grassroots opposition,” wrote organizer Deb Callahan (2023), but it does happen. While an analysis of structuring forces, such as we have outlined here, remains critical, it is equally important to underscore the more quotidian efforts of organization and persistent critique—the hard work of individuals and collectives to challenge authoritarian initiatives and create better societies (and buildings) through democratic processes.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Katharyne Mitchell

Gregory Woolston

Notes

Author Biographies

Katharyne Mitchell is Dean of the Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Recent books include Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (2018), the Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration (2019), and the Routledge Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism (2023). Her current work is on the politics of conjuncture.

Gregory Woolston is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research considers contestations of architecture and landscape in the United States through the fields of cultural studies and critical race and ethnic studies. Recent work has appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and City.

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Philanthrocapitalism,Neoliberalism,and the University

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Declining state support in higher education

Philanthrocapitalism, space, and subjectivity

Spatial design and social engineering: The power of philanthropy then and now

Scripps college

Munger Hall

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author Biographies

References