Popular and academic common senses turn to education as the great equalizer in American life, a seemingly obvious pathway to creating a more just world. Education, which means not only a degree, but the social relations created through affiliation with formal study, is cherished as the pathway to secure a more just society. Yet the educational apparatus is also one of the key arenas where calls for justice are corralled into limiting frameworks. Both drafts' attention to quantifying the number of people enslaved to directly benefit an institution, the number of years an institution was able to directly extract enslaved labor, and the number of college degrees or community grants that will recompense these harms, epitomize the drive to quantify and contain the harm of chattel slavery and its ongoing afterlives into specific numbers, specific debts that can be definitively repaid. This essay demonstrates how the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 embedded a framing of land as a commodity and investment so deeply into the historic formation of US higher education as a public good that the epistemology of property seems inseparable from US higher education. It traces how discourses of property and property rights came to structure popular and academic common senses about education and justice by looking at three key laws establishing and extending land-grant funding for US higher education. Vineeta Singh's primary focus is on how these laws are deployed to buttress the progress narrative at the core of popular and academic common sense about higher education as an inherently democratic and democratizing endeavor. Throughout she argues that the epistemology of property has been deeply embedded in every articulation of U.S. public higher education. It has stymied the imaginations of justice through education to narrow visions of corrective justice, understood as the rectification of specific, quantifiable harms. In order to make the case for redistributive justice, society must confront and uproot this epistemology of education as property.