Imagine a custom-built home: one-third Gothic, one-third Modern, one-third Craftsman. There’s a white-picket-fenced front yard with a wishing well, and an aluminum-and-zoysiagrass backyard shrine to Garrett Eckbo. Kind of a mess, you’d say? If you were an architect, would you work for a builder who demanded such a design? If you were a builder, would you hire an architect with such a schizoid vision? Of course not. Who would?

I’ll tell you who: almost every American college and university from Cambridge to Berkeley.

I’ve seen it all. Art-Deco next to rustic. Italian-Romanesque Revival next to Industrial Modern. Greene and Greene tree houses next to Pop-60s moon bases. Geodesic domes with cobblestone walkways; neo-Moorish dorms overlooking antebellum administration buildings. Walk most any campus and you’ll see a patchwork of four, five, maybe six different architectural motifs, often slammed up against each other and separated only by thin strips of cement sidewalk (which, mercifully, is timeless).

One can almost tell the age of a campus by its architectural spread, the way one would read the age of a tree. Let’s take a look at Any Venerable University—AVU, for short. The core is traditional, borrowing from the past—grand, ornate, and European. Next comes a ring of the post-traditional—less ornate, possibly Deco. Then the War Years, traumatized and functional—think Quonset huts. Next the Fabulous 50s, when grammar schools, college libraries, and just about everything else ended up looking like automobile assembly plants. Then come the 60s—we were either living with the Jetsons or op-arting with London swingers.

The 70s brought us Roman Modern and the return to nature—Crosby Stills and Nash, and wood and glass. The 80s brought post-apocalyptic concrete, and the 90s unvarnished confusion. Now, in the 00s, we get crystal-meth-inspired ‘toon towns. It’s a mess, all right. The best of it is ruined by its proximity to the worst of it, and the worst of it jars the senses like a horsefly in the butter. Why do campuses see themselves less like homes and more like Disneyesque architectural theme parks? Over here, Tomorrowland; over there, Yesterdayland (Pssst, it used to be called Tomorrowland). But …

Before any of you get your mechanical pencils in a wad, I’m not advocating the planned-community approach, where the supermarket, the mortuary, and every other building look exactly alike. What I have in mind is simple aesthetic judgment. Brown shoes, khaki pants, pale-yellow shirt—that kind of thing. One would not make it very far as a landscape or interior designer without aesthetic judgment. Yet what we find on most campuses these days isn’t even a legacy of bad aesthetic judgment. What we see is no aesthetic whatsoever.

Why is that? Maybe campus architects are only concerned with the myopic task at hand and the fad-du-jour. Maybe college presidents are ill-prepared to orchestrate a coherent and sustained vision. Maybe shared governance precludes coherence and sustained vision. Maybe donors have too much power. Or maybe it’s just the hegemony of straight men. Whatever. I guess the next question is: What does it take to get a building torn down?—Marc Mayerson

Marc Mayerson, assistant dean of social sciences at University of California at Los Angeles, is the Buildings & Grounds guest blogger for July. You can read his previous posts here and here.