A brief history of the university, from Oxford and Cambridge to Harvard and Columbia, then from the University of Virginia to the University of California. The chapter focuses on the Morrill Act of 1862 (known also as the Land Grant Act) and on the influence of the German research university in the late nineteenth century. Considers the analysis of Laurence Veysey that the university was in some respects “incoherent” from the late nineteenth century on, given the competing constituencies made up of faculty, students, and alumni. Traces the twentieth-century history of the American university, especially the role of federal funding for research, the GI Bill after World War II, and then the Master Plan forged between Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, and Pat Brown, Governor of California, in 1960.