UC Santa Cruz

What does it mean to take the dispossession of Indigenous land as central to the history of American higher education? This dissertation examines the history and context of the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act to pose a theorization of the land-grant college system as a critical site of settler-colonial dispossession. Looking at the problem and process of the material basis of disciplinary formation and institution building, this inquiry is organized along three lines of flight. First, how does the land-grant university produce institutional history that crops out its dispossessive conditions of possibility? I examine the university archives of Pennsylvania State University and Michigan State University alongside genres of commemoration and memorialization to position the production of forgetting as a key feature of the settler-colonial university. Secondly, how have Indigenous modes of agriculture been delegitimized and displaced through the disciplinary formation of scientific agriculture? I pose a history of the disciplinary formation of scientific agriculture that emphasizes the university’s capacity to coopt and absorb working-class and farmer-led reform efforts. Finally, how can the Morrill Act be usefully read as defense legislation masquerading as educational legislation? I read the charge of the Morrill Act to teach “military tactics” as an instance of the conscription of poor white farmers into the labor of settlement, luring them with the promise of upward class mobility. At stake here are the ways that the promise of science was imbricated with a “technocratic abolitionist imaginary” aiming to replace enslaved labor with scientific and technological innovation and naturalize the settler colonial project. These questions touch on the forms that post emancipation racial capitalism took—namely, efforts to locate a technical solution to a larger cluster of political and ethical problems. This dissertation offers an interdisciplinary frame through which to engage the material, social, and epistemological impacts of colonial forgetting. Methodologically, it combines theoretical work in the politics of knowledge with primary archival research in university, agriculture, and policy history. I work inside the space between commonsense narratives of the university and materialist analysis of the university as a location of and technology toward capital accumulation and settler colonial expansion.