Like other institutions across the western world, universities are involved in a time of reckoning about colonialism and racial justice. In Canada, part of this process involves decisions that touch on rethinking symbols or mascots, reconsidering how resources are allocated and revisiting what knowledge matters.

Today in The Conversation Canada, Caitlin Harvey of the University of Cambridge writes about how “an emphasis on campus iconography, or even on the campus itself, skirts a deeper history of universities and empire.”

Her research examines how “most public universities founded in the 19th century — especially in what is now Canada, the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, but also in South Africa and Australia — were large-scale landowners.”

These lands were divided into plots and parcels distant from the universities themselves. She explains how using land rents to fund universities followed a longstanding pattern established by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The pattern of university landholding, she writes, “deserves further exploration — not only for what it might reveal about universities, but for its potential as a window into the operation of empire, colonialism and Indigenous dispossession.”

Also today:

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• Why Canada’s Supreme Court isn’t likely to go rogue like its U.S. counterpart
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