This article addresses the phenomenon of West Germany’s post-war universities for the masses and the challenges it poses today. Seldom have so many universities of such size — nearly 40 — been founded and built within such a short interval as in the Federal Republic of Germany during the 1960s and 1970s. From a political point of view, the priority was to provide as much space as possible quickly and cheaply. Following the concept of the functional city and the logic of increased efficiency by concentration, the vast majority of the new universities were constructed outside of historic city centres. From the architectural point of view, they introduced extreme technical innovation, flexibility and organic growth being the key considerations. Inspired by systems theory, architects like Shadrach Woods and Helmut Spieker developed megastructures and building systems that would allow the academic communities to modify the buildings in the future according to their changing needs. Although the expectation that these structures might develop the same dynamism as historic towns that had ‘grown organically’ was fulfilled to a very limited extent, the universities for the masses offer impressive testimony to the political, technical and urban planning spirit of the 1960s. In the examples I draw on, in Bochum, Marburg, Berlin, Bielefeld and Konstanz, the opportunity was seized to design the publicly financed complexes as urban utopias on a small scale.