Canadian Universities as Settler-Colonial Landowners: The University of New Brunswick’s and the University of Toronto’s Land Endowments

This article examines two Canadian universities, both given significant land grants as an initial endowment, and focuses on the histories of these land grants, as well as their land management. The two case studies are the University of New Brunswick, founded in 1785 as part of the Loyalist settling project, and the University of Toronto, which traces its origin to the all-Anglican King’s College, founded in 1827. The authors show that despite the generous granting of Indigenous land (already appropriated by the Crown), with the land grants meant to be monetized through leases or sales, neither university managed to turn the initial endowment into an ongoing revenue stream that would support financial self-sufficiency, the aim of colonial governments that were “cash poor but land rich.” Funding from provincial governments turned out to be essential to the operation of these “endowed” universities. They show that while both universities have periodically tried to turn their land grants into profitable investments, they did not truly realize their perceived potential as real estate investors until the later twentieth century when markets for land, as well as funding pressures, changed. Despite land revenues failing to meet the administrators’ expectations to fully support their institutions, land endowments were and continue to be crucial to these universities. They offered legitimacy to the new institutions in a settler society in which status and value were based on land ownership. Administrators also saw land endowments as stable sources of future income, independent of changing government priorities, and thus regularly returned to the question of how to produce more land revenues.