As American colleges and universities spiral deeper into debt, corporatization, and social irrelevance, it is worth asking not just what ideas dominate the landscape—but what ideas have been buried, neglected, or deliberately forgotten. Among the most significant casualties in our intellectual amnesia is Georgist economics, a once-influential school of thought that offered a radical, yet practical, alternative to both capitalism’s excesses and socialism’s centralization. And in today’s extractive academic economy—what Devarian Baldwin calls the “UniverCity”—its insights are more relevant than ever.
The Ghost of Henry George
Henry George, a 19th-century American political economist, is best known for his seminal work Progress and Poverty (1879), in which he argued that while technological and economic progress increased wealth, it also deepened inequality—primarily because the gains were siphoned off by landowners and monopolists. His solution was deceptively simple: tax the unearned income from land and natural monopolies, and use that revenue to fund public goods and social services.
At one time, George’s ideas inspired political movements, policy debates, and even academic curricula. He was considered a serious rival to Karl Marx and a practical philosopher for American reformers, including the early labor movement. Cities like San Francisco saw brief experiments with land value taxation. But today, outside niche think tanks and the occasional urban planning circle, Georgism is a faint echo, barely audible in the halls of economic departments or public policy schools.
The University and the Land
If we look at contemporary higher education through a Georgist lens, what emerges is a sobering picture. Colleges and universities are not merely neutral grounds for the exchange of ideas—they are massive holders of land, beneficiaries of public subsidies, and agents of displacement. Institutions from NYU to the University of Chicago to Arizona State have used their nonprofit status and real estate portfolios to expand into communities, often gentrifying and pricing out working-class and BIPOC residents.
At the same time, these same institutions profit from a credentialing economy built on a foundation of student loan debt. Over 43 million Americans collectively owe more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans, an economy of indebtedness that props up tuition-driven institutional budgets while shackling generations of graduates. The very students who attend these universities, often in the hope of upward mobility, find themselves trapped in debt servitude—subsidizing administrative bloat, sports franchises, and real estate empires they will never own.
This is where Devarian Baldwin’s work becomes critical. In In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, Baldwin exposes how universities have become “anchor institutions,” deeply embedded in the urban fabric—not just through education, but through policing, property development, hospital systems, and labor exploitation. These institutions accumulate wealth not by producing new knowledge, but by extracting rents—social, economic, and literal—from their surroundings.
Baldwin and George, though a century apart, are speaking to the same fundamental economic injustice: wealth flowing upwards through property and privilege, at the expense of the many.
Why Georgism Was Forgotten
So why has Georgism disappeared from mainstream education? The answer lies partly in the success of those it sought to regulate. Landowners and financiers, who stood to lose the most from land value taxation, worked diligently to discredit George’s theories. Neoclassical economics, with its abstract models and marginal utility curves, became the dominant language—obscuring the real-world power dynamics of land and labor.
Universities, especially elite ones, adopted this neoclassical framework, increasingly aligning their interests with those of capital. Philanthropic foundations and corporate donors funded economic departments and think tanks that promoted market fundamentalism. Over time, Georgism—radical yet rooted in common sense—was pushed out of the curriculum.
This forgetting wasn’t accidental. It was ideological.
A Forgotten Game with a Forgotten Message
A striking example of Georgism’s cultural erasure lies in the very board game that has taught generations about capitalism: Monopoly. Originally created in the early 20th century by a woman named Elizabeth Magie, the game was first called The Landlord’s Game and was explicitly designed to illustrate Henry George’s ideas. Magie’s intent was pedagogical—she wanted players to see how land monopolies enriched a few while impoverishing others, and to promote George’s remedy of a single land tax.
But over time, the game was appropriated and rebranded by Parker Brothers and later Hasbro, stripped of its Georgist message and recast as a celebration of ruthless accumulation. What began as a cautionary tale about inequality became a glorification of it—a metaphor for how George’s ideas were not just buried but inverted.
In that sense, Monopoly is the perfect symbol for the American university: a system that once had the potential to democratize opportunity but now functions as a machine for privatizing wealth and socializing risk, leaving students and communities to pick up the tab.
What Higher Education Could Learn—and Teach
If the goal of higher education is to educate an informed, critical citizenry, then forgetting Georgist economics is not just an intellectual oversight—it’s a moral failure. Henry George offered a vision of society where value created by the community is returned to the community. In the age of student debt, university land grabs, and deepening inequality, this vision is urgently needed.
Imagine a higher education system where public revenue from land values funds debt-free college. Imagine a world where students no longer mortgage their futures for degrees whose value is increasingly uncertain. Imagine colleges not as engines of gentrification but as stewards of local wealth, investing in community-owned housing and cooperatives. Imagine students learning about economics not just as math problems, but as moral questions about justice, equity, and the public good.
Devarian Baldwin’s scholarship, much like George’s, invites us to interrogate power structures and imagine alternatives. It’s time for a revival of that imagination.
Relearning the Unlearned
Reclaiming Georgist economics in the academy would not be a return to some golden past, but a reckoning with the present. It would mean confronting the rentier logic at the heart of higher education—and the debt-based financing that sustains it—and reorienting our institutions toward justice and common prosperity.
In a moment when so much of American higher ed is collapsing under its own contradictions, perhaps what’s needed is not another billion-dollar endowment or ed-tech unicorn, but an idea long buried: that land—and learning—should belong to the people.
For the Higher Education Inquirer, this is part of an ongoing inquiry into the pasts we forget, the futures we imagine, and the power structures that shape both.
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