For 900 years, the structure of a universityhas shaped students what happens when school moves online?

It’s an unlikely thing to wait in line for.Head down a side street, in through an anonymous door, and you’ll join a long line people waiting to go upstairs.

Open a spiked metal gate at the top, and there you have it: the university jail.I’m in Heidelberg, visiting a series of small rooms covered in graffiti where students were imprisoned for centuries.

In Germany, in fact, the possession of a prison was a distinguishing feature of universities.It was a sign that the institution possessed legal authority over its members.

It was also a product of the fact that students often misbehaved.Punishable crimes included the capture and cooking of pigeons, or dressing up like women.

In England, similarly bad behavior among the student body allowed for corporal punishment.Further north, in Sweden’s Uppsala University, bad apples could face even more severe sanction: The last student to be sentenced to death there suffered his fate as late as 1772.These remarkable histories serve an important reminder: At a time when more and more universities are shifting the learning experience online, it can be easy to forget just how much the material structure of a school can affect students.

A stroll through the history of the university’s shape reveals what mattered to the generations that came before us — as well as how that story shapes our expectations today.The University of Padua in Italy doesn’t have a prison, but in 1595, it opened its anatomy theater.The six-tiered theater hosted dissections that could last for weeks — or at least until the body stank.

It was designed not only to further the research of its professors but to lure students.Without such scholars, observed one academic, the town would itself “be a dead body.” Books and libraries too proved formational to the birth of universities.

“Without copies,” declared the statues of the University of Padua in 1264, “there would be no university.” So valuable were these objects that scholars ...