The hope is that buildings by starchitects will turn the University of Cincinnati into a desirable, glamorous place to spend four years living and studying. Mayne’s imposing Campus Recreation Center — which includes four stories of housing, six basketball courts, lecture halls and bleachers for the football stadium — represents the university’s commitment to improving the ‘‘campus experience.’’ Sparkling new buildings encourage sparkling new neighborhoods. Just south of the university in the Clifton Heights neighborhood, a two-block retail, housing and entertainment complex called U Square @ the Loop, replete with a craft-beer emporium and a yoga studio, recently opened. It is part of a wider development of the area, where campus police patrols have also increased. (In July, a 43-year-old black man was shot and killed by a white campus officer in the nearby Mount Auburn neighborhood.) The university and its students now visibly set themselves apart from surrounding communities.

But expansion can come at a cost. Peter Eisenman’s Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the university had cheap cladding slapped on during its construction from 1989 to 1996, and over time it began to rot and peel away. Repairs and renovations on the $35 million building cost $20 million, and the university borrowed $19.25 million to help pay for them. The university now has $1.1 billion in debt — close to 20 percent more than it had in 2004 — largely because of its construction boom. During the same time, enrollment has increased by nearly 30 percent. The spending is predicated on the idea that new buildings can help turn provincial universities into outré, worldly ‘‘academical villages.’’ It’s a financial gamble — one that many public institutions find themselves driven to make. And it also threatens something more abstract but no less fundamental: that the university will turn into a luxury brand, its image unmoored from its educational mission — a campus that could be anywhere and nowhere.