campus

Campus in Latin meant a flat, open field — specifically the Campus Martius in Rome, the field dedicated to Mars where Roman citizens gathered for military exercises, athletic competitions, and public assemblies. The word carried no educational meaning. A campus was a field. Period.

The American usage began at Princeton. In the 1770s, students and faculty at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) began referring to the open lawn between Nassau Hall and the town as 'the campus.' The word was appropriate: it was a field. By the early nineteenth century, campus had expanded to mean the entire grounds of a university — buildings, walkways, lawns, and all. The word jumped from Princeton to other American colleges within a generation.

British universities did not adopt the word until the twentieth century. Oxford and Cambridge use 'college grounds' or 'the university.' Their physical layouts — colleges scattered through a medieval city — are architecturally incompatible with the American campus concept, which implies a bounded, planned space separate from the surrounding town. The American campus is an enclosure. The British university is an infiltration.

The word has escaped academia entirely. A corporate campus, a hospital campus, a tech campus — the word now means any collection of related buildings with shared grounds. Google's campus, Apple's campus, the Mayo Clinic campus. The Roman field where citizens trained for war became the Princeton lawn where students studied theology became the Silicon Valley compound where engineers write code. The field got smaller, the buildings got larger, and the word stayed flat.