Why aren't universities popular tourist attractions?

Many of them are.

How many people visit Boston without checking out out Harvard Square and the university flanking it?

To name just a few, Duke, Cornell, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Wellesley, West Point, Naval Academy, U. Colorado at Boulder, U. Va., have stunningly beautiful campuses and splendid architecture.

They provide huge cultural and intellectual resources for the outside communities as well as the student bodies.

It depends on the university. Some of them are boring (my alma mater, for instance, except for the libraries), but the ones with some history on them aren’t.

The ones with great architecture or famous founders or whatever sometimes are. Some universities are basically part of a city’s background, especially in dense urban areas. They don’t all have big sprawling campuses, so I don’t know why anyone would visit them just for fun.

And of course Oxford and Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and many of the other older European Universities draw mobs of tourists

I have no desire to spend vacation at a school….

Well maybe because most only hold fond memories to those who worked their way through them.

Some are and use to be, until the securtiy of college campuses has become a major factor in protecting the students and college liability.

Security is a big issue nowadays. Also, Universities don’t advertise themselves as tourist destinations, they want your money and getting you into school makes them more money than their being a tourism site.

Most universities (at least in the UK) are not open to the public. They wouldn’t want non-students milling around. One of my local ones has a museum that’s open to the public, and I have been known to wander into the Student Union cafeteria to get a cheap lunch…

Maybe when the American Universities are a bit closer to 1,000 years old (and still among the most prestigious in the world) they will be.

While you’re waiting, See: ‘Europe’

They are for us. Whenever my wife and I travel the US and we stop at a location with a good university we walk the campus. We also tried this in Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, but we found many closed gates.

Tour buses full of Japanese tourists often visit UCLA. I offered to take pictures for them once, since they were running back and forth trading cameras to get pics of each other, but they decided to take pictures of me instead.

They are- just recently visited one in Padua, Italy, it’s the second-oldest University in Europe I think ;)