A colonial history of the higher education present: rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest

ABSTRACT

This conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of US public higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, and considers how these conditions continue to shape the present. The federal government’s accumulation of Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century helped provide the material base for land-grant legislation, and although conquest of the frontier was eventually metaphorized in higher education discourse, public institutions remain both dependent on and vulnerable to the imperatives of accumulation that were established during colonization, as is evident in contemporary privatization efforts. I argue that if efforts to resist privatization fail to address how colonialism has historically shaped US public goods, then these efforts risk re-naturalizing the imperative of capital accumulation and relations of conquest.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonization
• financialization
• higher education
• land-grants
• privatization

Acknowledgments

Earlier drafts of this paper were greatly enhanced through the feedback of Amy Metcalfe, Kristi Carey, Erich Pitcher, the editor and anonymous reviewers of Critical Studies in Education and, most of all, Dallas Hunt. All remaining shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. At this time, the US was also turning to an extra-continental colonial frontier that led to territorial acquisitions in Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Alaska, the Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014).

2. With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded its northern territories, which were inhabited by Indigenous as well as mestizo peoples (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). According to Barker (2015), the treaty was meant to ensure the US ‘would protect tribal land grants [in lands that were formerly Mexico]’, but ‘US citizens displaced and outright murdered tribal peoples to gain holds of their lands and coerce survivors into servitude’ (p. 263).

3. For instance, at the end of the Civil War, many demobilized troops went West to battle Indigenous nations on a new front (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). In 1887, the General Allotment Act affected the ‘virtual obliteration of tribal rights’ (Barker, 2015, p. 256), reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds and breaking up remaining lands so as to make its collective uses nearly impossible. It was also around this time that the first Indian boarding schools were founded with the stated intention to ‘Kill the Indian and save the man’ (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). Although there is not adequate space to trace all post-1862 efforts to dispossess and eliminate Indigenous peoples, Indigenous struggles against conquest continue to this day.

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Notes on contributors

Sharon Stein

Sharon Stein is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education Administration at Idaho State University. Her research examines the complexities, tensions and contradictions of divergent imaginaries of justice in the context of higher education and the educational challenges of pluralizing possible futures.