This conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of US public higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, and considers how these conditions continue to shape the present. The federal government's accumulation of Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century helped provide the material base for land-grant legislation, and although conquest of the frontier was eventually metaphorized in higher education discourse, public institutions remain both dependent on and vulnerable to the imperatives of accumulation that were established during colonization, as is evident in contemporary privatization efforts. I argue that if efforts to resist privatization fail to address how colonialism has historically shaped US public goods, then these efforts risk re-naturalizing the imperative of capital accumulation and relations of conquest.