Starting from Latour’s description of how ‘learning to be affected’ relies on made set-up’s we engaged with students in an exercise of mapping the university campus, largely abandoned during the pandemic, and of articulating its study-forces. The focus was on how made set-ups stage ‘collections’ and ‘collectives’ and embody forces that enable worlds to become talkative and to be loaded in words and senses. In our contribution we also report on our own made set-up with students, on the articulations, and on the way in which the university actually could become an idea again. Not as a mental image or (idealistic) representation, but as a questioning imperative which, as Isabelle Stengers indicates, forces one to think. Hence, our mappings and articulations of ‘on campus life’ offered no justifications why the university campus should indeed matter, they rather contributed to ‘intensify’ the idea, to give it the power to transform our relations to the reasons that advise us not to take the matter i.e. the campus into account.