The only quad I remember at GW was tiny. But mostly the GW buildings look like the rest of DC. I think the campuses that most feel like oases - have walls and gates around the main campus, so even though the campuses usually spill out beyond that central campus (at least at Tufts, Harvard and Columbia), there’s a place that feels very secluded. Carnegie Mellon doesn’t have a gate, but the central quad still feels very separate from the city.
Quite a bit of Harvard is actually across the River in Boston (Allston). I don’t think MIT crosses the river.
In the SF Bay Area, you’ve got University of San Francisco, San Jose State, San Francisco State, Santa Clara U. UC Berkeley bleeds into the surrounding community a little bit, in that many of the dorms are a few blocks away from the campus.
As mentioned, there are lots of schools that meet your description.
With a daughter who attends Temple University, I have had many visits and I have observed that tbe campus certainly seems centralized and well defined, with most buildings continuous across a number of city blocks. Temple continues to grow and expand gradually outward, and while there is not a perimeter road (or moat) isolating it from the rest of the city, it feels very cohesive, including tbe many student apartments in the surrounding blocks.
@thumper1 Indeed you are correct! My perspective is tainted by the distance we traveled to see Clark. For us, it FEELS just outside Boston.
Despite that mistake, Clark University does fit the description that the original poster asked about. It is an urban campus with a very nice well-defined campus. It’s just in Worcester, not Boston!
There’s a spectrum of definition for campuses. I can see the Temple campus from my office window (and I have spent plenty of time there). It’s not intermingled with private businesses and apartments the way NYU is, and lots of Harvard, too, for that matter. Everything is pretty much contiguous – which has been easy for it to do, because the real estate in that area is not so high-valued, so Temple has been able to assemble plenty of contiguous land on which to build. It’s not right next to a big business area, like BU (which is also mainly contiguous). It does have some big, arterial streets running through it, though nothing quite as big and wide and busy as the Massachusetts Turnpike or Commonwealth Avenue.
The OP never came back to say what he was looking for in a campus other than ‘not NYU.’ There are community colleges that have a well defined campus. There is Metro State in Denver that actually has train tracks ringing the campus (really three campuses combined into one, but one of those bleeds a little into the city). We don’t know if OP is okay with Yale as a contained campus but not okay with Harvard because there are ways to escape the castle without having to lower the drawbridge. We also don’t know how OP defines ‘city.’ Is Boulder big enough? Is he looking for a school in LA or Miami sized cities?
Although most of the campus is located in Clayton, WUSTL could be considered an urban school with a well defined campus. It’s close enough to the Central West End and most of the attractions of St. Louis.
For the Bay Area, San Jose State and Berkeley are definitely urban campuses. San Jose State is literally in the middle of downtown and same with Berkeley and Telegraph Avenue.
Santa Clara is not an urban campus-went there as an undergraduate and graduate and it felt like an island. There is no well defined downtown and the school does have a sense of isolation from the community.
Much depends on where you’ve come from. I consider Amherst, MA to be very “urban” because population density is much higher than the boonies I grew up in.
How true! My nephews who grew up in one of the small hill towns in the Pioneer Valley used to fantasize about moving into Amherst, because there was so much more to do there.