My paper provides a critical contribution about the contemporary condition of Universities. The starting point is provided by some twentieth-century readings of the status of European Universities (by Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Giorgio Colli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pierre Hadot), in order to thematize the progressive impoverishment of the university structure in the 20th century. Therefore the paper deals with the changes produced in the University by the pandemic phenomenon, tracing a continuity between the facts described by the mentioned authors and the most recent events.