What lies beneath the campus
Foundations of Land
If the university had a basement, this is where we would find it. Not a storage room full of old projectors or cardboard boxes, but the deeper ground the literal earth beneath the institution. The place where stories of territory, displacement, and entitlement settle like sediment. When we kneel down and touch the ground beneath the campus, something shifts. The familiar world of academic life quiets, and a deeper history begins to speak. Here, we start to notice the campus as an inheritance. Not only of ideas, but of land. Not only of progress, but of dispossession. Universities often describe themselves as places of enlightenment and advancement, yet many were built through land seizures, resource extraction, or agreements that benefited institutions while harming the Indigenous Nations whose lands they occupy. These foundations do not appear on glossy brochures. They remain underground, silent but present. This page is not here to accuse. It is here to invite questions that run deeper than the manicured lawns: Who lived on this land long before the institution existed? What agreements were made? What promises were broken? How did universities come to benefit from land they did not own? And what does responsibility look like in the present, when the past cannot be undone? When we sit with these questions, the campus begins to look different. A dining hall becomes a marker of profit. A research building becomes a monument to a history never told. A residential village reveals itself as a real estate venture made possible by someone else’s loss. Perhaps the true foundations of the university are not its buildings, policies, or reputations. Perhaps they are the stories beneath the soil stories that continue to shape the institution even when unacknowledged. This is where our exploration begins: In the quiet ground that remembers what the institution has tried to forget.
What We (Don’t) Remember
While universities celebrate ideals of enlightenment and inclusion, the readings this week revealed how deeply higher education remains rooted in histories of exclusion and colonial dispossession. Stein (2022) shows how institutions like UBC, celebrated for progress and inclusion, stand on colonial foundations that remain largely unacknowledged. Her example of Wesbrook Village, a profitable real-estate project on unceded Musqueam territory, exposes how universities continue to benefit from stolen land while performing reconciliation through symbolic gestures such as signage or acknowledgments. This resonates with what I observe at smaller degree-granting institutions, where diversity is proudly highlighted but the deeper structures of privilege and ownership remain unquestioned. In many private institutions, international students are welcomed and celebrated, yet the colonial mindset still operates quietly beneath the surface. These schools often promote a Canadian degree as a symbol of prestige and superiority, using it as a marketing tool that reinforces rather than challenges the very hierarchies they claim to transcend. Stein’s idea of developing stamina for discomfort challenges me as both an instructor and a leader because it reminds me that real decolonization is not about feeling good or adding symbolic gestures of inclusion, but about facing the hard truths that unsettle us. It also makes me realize that universities, including the ones I work in, can easily reproduce the same systems of privilege they claim to challenge when their success still depends on global markets and colonial patterns of power. Looking through simple power criteria such as who decides, who benefits, and who is left out makes these structures easier to see and harder to ignore.
Harvey (2023) makes these realities concrete by tracing how Canadian universities such as Toronto and Manitoba were financed through Indigenous land grants that turned dispossession into endowments. Her research forces me to see universities not only as cultural but also as economic institutions, landowners, and investors in colonial expansion. Reading this alongside Stein, I realized how property and reputation have long worked together to sustain power. At UBC and at my own institution, the language of progress still depends on ownership and growth. This made me question what accountability would mean in practice. Could universities share land revenues with Indigenous communities, co-design curricula with Elders, or reimagine ownership models altogether? Harvey’s evidence also made me see the limits of land acknowledgments. Without material return or shared governance, acknowledgment risks becoming another routine statement that soothes conscience more than it changes practice. Her work grounds abstract conversations about reconciliation in the material history that continues to shape higher education today.
Táíwò (2022) helped me think about responsibility in a more productive way. His distinction between guilt and liability reframes how we can approach reparations. As an immigrant educator who benefits from living and working on Indigenous land, I cannot claim innocence, but I also do not want to be paralyzed by guilt. Liability means taking part in repair through teaching, research, and curriculum work that fosters awareness and action. It also means encouraging students to see education not just as a personal achievement but as part of a broader social responsibility. Fanshel (2023) added another perspective by showing how whiteness is literally built into university architecture. Her analysis of UC Berkeley’s Hilgard Hall made me think about how space itself teaches. The idea of transforming colonial buildings into places of accountability and dialogue reminded me that change is not only intellectual but also physical. It begins in classrooms, meeting rooms, and hallways where power and privilege are often silently reproduced.
These readings made me see the university as a living structure that carries both harm and hope. They helped me recognize that my work as an educator and administrator is part of a larger story that includes land, history, and responsibility. If the university has been a site of exclusion, it can also become a place of repair, but only if those within it are willing to face its truths honestly. I am left wondering what meaningful change could look like in my own context. Perhaps it begins by creating space for uncomfortable conversations, questioning the policies and traditions we take for granted, and listening more deeply to those whose knowledge has been ignored. More than anything, I want to remember what we so often forget and to keep recognizing the privileges we have come to see as rights, the ones we no longer notice yet continue to benefit from.
References
Fanshel, R. Z. (2023). “To rescue for human society the native values of rural life”: Race, space, and whiteness in the University of California, Berkeley’s agricultural complex. Whiteness and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2023.2213234
Harvey, C. (2023). University land grabs: Indigenous dispossession and the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba. Canadian Historical Review, 104(4), 467–493.
Stein, S. (2022). Unsettling the university: Confronting the colonial foundations of U.S. higher education (pp. 11–30). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Táíwò, O. O. (2021). Reconsidering reparations (pp. 104–124). Oxford University Press.