For most of the history of higher education, a university has been ineluctably tied to a particular city: Bologna. Oxford. Cambridge. The other Cambridge. In the United States, the first wave of satellite campuses began to appear in the post–World War II period as the share of Americans attending college surged. To meet growing demand, public universities opened branches in far-flung areas of their state. (Most Texans, for example, live far from Austin.) That’s how systems such as the University of California evolved into sprawling behemoths.