On Knowledge and Capital: Accumulation, Expansion, and the Adaptation of the Land-Grant University

Abstract

This dissertation examines the land-grant university as a site of accumulation, tracing how processes of land, labor, capital, and legitimacy have been historically structured to sustain institutional expansion. Departing from the dominant "crisis consensus" narrative in critical university studies, which frames higher education as perpetually in decline, this study foregrounds the material and structural logics through which these universities persist and grow. Drawing on vignettes of three institutions—Utah State University, Virginia Tech, and the University of California system—each chapter highlights a distinct dimension of accumulation: the territorial foundations of the land-grant system, the historical continuity of military-industrial and state-linked expansion, and contemporary financialization through investment portfolios and real estate deals. Chapter 1 situates the land-grant university within settler-colonial dispossession, demonstrating how land converted into institutional capital under the 1862 Morrill Act shaped curricula, infrastructure, and long-term institutional missions. Chapter 2 examines how universities narrate their own histories, revealing how discourses of democracy, access, and innovation mask persistent mechanisms of accumulation, including labor stratification, material enclosures, and the absorption of critique. Chapter 3 analyzes contemporary financialization, showing how endowments, partnerships, and investment strategies function as extensions of the university's capacity to accumulate resources and legitimacy. Across all three chapters the dissertation emphasizes that accumulation is both economic and epistemological; it organizes knowledge, structures hierarchies, and incorporates dissent into institutional maintenance. By treating accumulation as constitutive rather than incidental, the dissertation reframes the land-grant university not as a neutral site of knowledge or a corrupted public good, but as an institution historically and contemporarily oriented toward growth. This approach clarifies persistent contradictions in higher education: between its supposed public mission and privatization actions, between access and exclusion, and between critique and co-optation. This offers a lens for understanding how universities operate as active economic and political actors. In conclusion, the dissertation positions this critique "in and not of" the university by attending to institutional structures and contradictions, yet engaged with its possibilities, highlighting the processes through which the institution simultaneously enables intellectual work and reproduces systemic hierarchies.