KINGSTON, Jamaica. We think of universities as places that spend money: on lecturers, laboratories and scholarships. The oldest and richest of them are better understood as landlords that happen to teach. Behind the lecture halls sit oil fields, container ports, farms on three continents, shopping centres and suburbs, accumulated over centuries and held on terms that would make most property investors envious.
What is thought to be the largest single university land holding on earth is not a campus at all. It is 2,109,190 acres of West Texas scrubland granted by the Texas Constitution of 1876 and completed in 1883. That is an area equal to roughly 78 per cent of Jamaica. In the 2025 fiscal year the oil, gas and leases on that land earned US$1.86 billion, about US$5.1 million a day, for a permanent fund that serves two university systems.
Across the Atlantic, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge were found in 2018 to hold some 126,000 acres between them. In Kingston, the University of the West Indies occupies 653 acres at Mona, by its own account. Yet, as its own principal said in 2024, that land is still not legally the university’s.
A Desert That Turned Into a Treasury
When Texas set aside two million acres for its university in the nineteenth century, the land was thought close to worthless. Oil was first struck on it in 1923, in Reagan County’s Big Lake field, and the scrub became one of the most productive royalty estates in the Permian Basin. Today the land is managed by University Lands, an office of the University of Texas System, which leases it to drillers and keeps a royalty share of production.
Its 2025 annual report shows the scale. Production on the land averaged about 450,250 barrels of oil equivalent a day across roughly 10,300 producing wells. Minerals brought in US$1.72 billion, of which oil alone was US$1.41 billion. Surface uses, including grazing, water sales, pipelines and renewable energy, added US$143 million. Wind and solar projects are now leased on more than 74,000 acres, and the office says it is studying data centres and gas fired power as the next generation of tenants.
The rule that makes this work is permanence. Under the Texas Constitution, mineral income and land sale proceeds go into the Permanent University Fund and may not be spent; only a distribution from investment returns flows out, two thirds to the University of Texas System and one third to Texas A&M. The fund reported a net position of US$40.3 billion in August 2025, not counting the land itself.
The Colleges That Outlasted the Monasteries
Oxford and Cambridge acquired land the way medieval institutions did: by royal charter, bequest and purchase, often from dissolved religious houses. Trinity College, Cambridge, founded by Henry VIII in 1546, was endowed with land on its foundation. In 1933 it bought the Trimley estate on the Suffolk coast as farmland, along with a small dock. The estate, now about 3,400 acres, is home to the Port of Felixstowe, Britain’s busiest container port, and much of the land beneath the port is still owned by the college. Trinity also founded the Cambridge Science Park in 1970 and says its endowment is now a portfolio of about £2.5 billion split between equities and British property.
A 2018 investigation by The Guardian put the land of Oxford’s colleges at 85,364 acres, larger than Malta. Merton led with 14,074 acres, followed by Christ Church with 10,664 and All Souls, a college with no undergraduates, with 9,273. All Souls was found to own more than 300 properties in the London borough of Brent. Oxford colleges’ property investments were valued at £1.52 billion, a figure that excludes most historic college sites.
The holdings have shrunk, not grown. The 1872 Return of Owners of Land recorded Oxford colleges with about 185,000 acres; by 1989 the figure was 127,690. Measured against the 2018 total, the colleges have shed more than half of their Victorian acreage, mostly by selling farms and buying commercial and urban property that earns more per acre.
Land Granted, Land Taken
In the United States the story of university land is bound up with the expansion of the frontier. The Morrill Act of 1862 gave states public land to fund colleges of agriculture and the mechanical arts. A two year investigation by High Country News, published in 2020, reconstructed about 10.7 million acres distributed under the act and traced them to land ceded by nearly 250 tribes, bands and communities through more than 160 cessions. The United States paid less than US$400,000 to extinguish Indigenous title to that land, and nothing at all for more than a quarter of the parcels. Sales raised US$17.7 million for 52 institutions by the early twentieth century, with unsold land valued at a further US$5.1 million.
Much of that land is still producing income. The investigation found more than 500,000 acres held in trust for at least 12 universities, earning over US$5.4 million in 2019. Montana State University held about 63,000 acres and the University of Idaho more than 33,000. The Association of Public and Land Grant Universities responded that the history “intersects with that of Native Americans and the taking of their lands” and that its members were focused on “building a better future for everyone.” A 2026 article in the Washington University Law Review argues that the 10.7 million acre figure is, if anything, too low, because it leaves out more than four million acres of other land grants to colleges made before and after the Morrill Act.
Private universities took a different route. Stanford was endowed in 1885 by the railway magnate Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, with land the founding grant says may never be sold. The university still holds 8,180 acres and earns from the Stanford Research Park and Stanford Shopping Center through long leases rather than sales. Columbia University was handed a former botanic garden in Midtown Manhattan by the New York legislature in 1814, leased it to John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1928 and sold it, by then the ground beneath Rockefeller Center, for US$400 million in 1985. The university says the sale effectively doubled its unrestricted endowment.
The Endowment Goes Shopping
Modern endowments do not wait for land to be granted. They buy it. Between 2008 and 2016, according to reports by the research group GRAIN and the Brazilian human rights network Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos, Harvard’s endowment put more than US$1 billion into farmland across the United States, Brazil, Eastern Europe, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. By 2016, the groups said, three Harvard structures had assembled more than 40 rural properties in Brazil covering about 405,000 hectares, roughly one million acres, much of it in the Cerrado savannah.
The bet went badly. Harvard wrote down its natural resources portfolio by about US$1.1 billion in 2017 and has since been selling, including its Australian farms in 2020. The campaign groups allege that the Brazilian purchases were tied to disputes with traditional communities and to forest clearance. Harvard’s endowment has described itself as a long term investor committed to being “a good steward of the land”, it has not publicly accepted the groups’ allegations, and their figures, assembled from tax filings and court documents, have not been confirmed acre by acre by the university. In 2020 Harvard spun its natural resources team out into an independent firm.
The capital behind such deals is immense. The 2025 NACUBO and Commonfund survey of 657 American institutions counted US$944.3 billion in endowment assets. Harvard led at US$55.7 billion, followed by Yale at US$44.1 billion and Stanford at US$40.8 billion.
Why There Is No Honest Top 100
Anyone trying to rank the world’s university landlords meets a wall. Universities publish endowment values, not acreage. In Britain, each Oxford college is a separate public authority; when the researcher Guy Shrubsole asked all of them in 2016 what they owned, several of the richest refused or did not reply. In the United States, Morrill Act land is often held by the state on a university’s behalf, so it does not appear on the university’s books. Harvard’s farmland, the campaign groups found, was held through layers of offshore and onshore companies. Mineral rights and surface rights are counted differently, and a single acre may carry several leases.
The table below is therefore a list of documented holdings, each with its basis, not a complete ranking. Some figures are years old and some come from investigators rather than the institutions themselves. They are labelled accordingly.
| # | Institution | Acres | How acquired | Basis of figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas Permanent University Fund | 2,109,190 | State constitutional grant, 1876 to 1883 | UTIMCO, 2025 |
| 2 | Harvard endowment, Brazil farmland (2016; since partly sold) | ~1,000,000 | Purchases 2008 to 2016 | GRAIN and Rede Social, 2020 (campaign group estimate) |
| 3 | Oxford colleges (combined) | 85,364 | Medieval charters, bequests, purchases | The Guardian, 2018 |
| 4 | Montana State University | ~63,000 | Morrill Act grant, unsold | High Country News, 2020 |
| 5 | Cambridge colleges (combined) | ~40,600 | Charters, bequests, purchases | Derived from The Guardian, 2018 |
| 6 | University of Idaho | 33,000+ | Morrill Act grant, unsold | High Country News, 2020 |
| 7 | St John’s College, Cambridge | 14,700 | Historic endowment | The Cambridge Student, 2015 |
| 8 | Merton College, Oxford | 14,074 | Historic endowment | The Guardian, 2018 |
| 9 | Trinity College, Cambridge | 13,335 | Royal foundation, 1546; Trimley, 1930s | The Cambridge Student, 2015 |
| 10 | Christ Church, Oxford | 10,664 | Historic endowment | The Guardian, 2018 |
| 11 | Stanford University | 8,180 | Founding grant, 1885 | Stanford University |
| 12 | UWI Mona, Jamaica | 653 | Colonial transfer, 1947; not yet vested | UWI; UWI Mona principal, 2024 |
Myth Check
“You can walk from Oxford to Cambridge without leaving college land.” False. The story is old and widely repeated, but the colleges’ holdings are scattered across England in separate farms and urban plots. Researchers who have mapped them describe it as an urban legend.
“Harvard owns a million hectares of Brazil.” Also wrong, though it is a near miss. The campaign groups’ estimate is about 405,000 hectares in Brazil, which is roughly one million acres. Their separate estimate for Harvard’s farmland worldwide was close to one million hectares. The two figures are easily confused. Hectares and acres differ by a factor of almost two and a half, and the confusion more than doubles Harvard’s Brazilian footprint.
The Caribbean Campus Map
In the Caribbean the pattern runs the other way. Universities here were mostly given land by colonial or national governments, and have more often lost acreage than gained it. The Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, which became the St Augustine campus of UWI, held 860 acres by 1960 at Mount Hope, River Estate and Santa Cruz. River Estate went to housing, much of Mount Hope became the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, and the field station was trimmed for the Uriah Butler Highway. The state promised 200 acres at Orange Grove in compensation in the late 1980s; by 2015 the university’s three farms totalled 305 acres.
Newer campuses show the same dependence on the state. Grenada granted UWI just over 88 acres in 2012. The Five Islands campus in Antigua opened in 2019 in a secondary school complex given to the Antiguan government by China. The region’s best known private university, St George’s in Grenada, says its True Blue campus covers about 42 acres, but its value lies in tuition rather than land: in 2014 private equity investors bought a substantial stake in a deal reported at about US$750 million.
Mona: Sugar, Water, War and a Missing Title
The Mona campus carries every layer of Jamaica’s land history. It sits on the old Mona and Papine sugar estates, whose cut stone aqueduct, dating from the mid 1700s, still crosses the grounds. By the end of the nineteenth century both estates were in one owner’s hands. In the early twentieth century they were bought by Kingston’s water authorities for the Hope River water rights they controlled; the University of the West Indies dates the purchase to the 1920s, while the archaeology database DAACS records Mona as sold to the Kingston General Commissioners by 1914.
Because the estate was government property, the colonial authorities chose it in 1940 for Gibraltar Camp. The Public Works Department spent £375,000 on 112 wooden barracks, roads, a hospital and a police station, fenced 252 acres, and received 1,104 evacuees from Gibraltar that October, with 393 more the next month. Jewish refugees and, later, German and Italian internees followed. At the end of December 1947 the camp and some 650 acres of the combined estates were handed to the new University College of the West Indies, which welcomed 33 medical students in October 1948.
Nearly eight decades later the paperwork has not caught up. Asked in April 2024 whether UWI would build high rise housing on its College Commons staff estate, the Mona principal, Professor Densil Williams, said: “Remember the land is not ours … This is still government property, so it is not being vested in UWI as yet. So, we have to get that part through first and then we can come up with a bigger plan.” Officials have described the same land in other ways. In 2019 the area’s Member of Parliament, Fayval Williams, said the Mona Commons land “belongs to the university.” In 2017 a People’s National Party councillor, Venesha Phillips, argued that UWI had only secured a lease on that area in September 2014.
A Landlord Without a Deed
The uncertainty matters because Mona is already being run as property. In 2014 UWI broke ground on student halls built, financed and operated by 138 Student Living, a private company, on land leased from the university, with the buildings to pass back to UWI free of cost at the end of the concession. The company now runs three of Mona’s eleven halls, with 1,464 rooms, and is listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange, where its audited 2025 accounts show revenue of J$1.40 billion and total assets of J$8.96 billion.
The College Commons estate covers about 60 acres with 104 staff houses, 44 of which had stood vacant and run down. A J$78 million renovation began in 2024; because staff who live in university housing give up a housing allowance worth 40 per cent of base pay, the university expected payroll savings of about J$100 million a year. Nearby, Mona Commons, an informal settlement of about 1,000 people on roughly ten acres, has grown for decades on unsubdivided land where nobody holds a title.
Professor Williams took office in 2023 with a campus carrying an accumulated deficit of about J$9 billion and pledged to earn more from its physical assets. Since then the campus has issued a J$3 billion, 15 year bond to refinance costly US dollar debt, and has announced a US$30 million capital plan for Mona and a 50 bed hospital in western Jamaica.
What This Means for Jamaica
For the wider property market, Mona is the most important institutional landholding in Kingston, and almost nobody thinks of it as a property question. Its 653 acres lie in the Papine and Hope Pastures area, in one of the most sought after residential belts on the island. How that land is used will shape student housing, staff housing, traffic, the future of Mona Commons and the supply of rental flats in the surrounding neighbourhoods.
The global record offers two models. Texas and Stanford show that land held permanently and leased rather than sold can fund an institution for generations. Oxford’s shrinking acreage and Columbia’s Rockefeller Center sale show that selling can sometimes be the better trade. Critics answer that both models depend on clear title, published accounts and public scrutiny, and that the American land grant history shows what happens when the origins of an endowment are ignored. Supporters of commercial use argue that a cash strapped regional university cannot leave hundreds of acres idle while its students lack beds.
None of those choices can be made cleanly at Mona until the Government of Jamaica and the university settle who owns what. Vesting would let UWI borrow against its land and plan for decades. Keeping the land in state hands would preserve public control over one of Kingston’s largest green spaces. Either way, the residents of Mona Commons, who have built homes there for decades, are waiting on the same answer.
Land Outlives Lectures
The universities that endure tend to be the ones that understood land early. Trinity bought a farm and found a port. Texas was given a desert and found oil. The University of the West Indies was given a refugee camp on a sugar estate and built the English speaking Caribbean’s first university on it. What it has not yet been given is the deed.
A university can teach for a century on borrowed ground. It can only plan for the next century on land it knows it owns.
Method: Land figures come from University Lands’ Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report and UTIMCO’s 2025 Permanent University Fund disclosures; The Guardian’s 2018 investigation as reported by Cherwell; the Who Owns England project (2016); High Country News, “Land Grab Universities” (2020); reports by GRAIN and Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (2018 and 2020); the 2025 NACUBO and Commonfund Study of Endowments; Stanford, Columbia, Trinity College and University of Cambridge publications; UWI Mona, UWI St Augustine and UTech publications; JSE filings of 138 Student Living Jamaica; and reporting by The Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer, including a 2005 history of Gibraltar Camp citing Suzanne Francis Brown’s Mona Past and Present. Jamaica’s land area is taken as 10,991 square kilometres (2,715,931 acres). Hectares are converted at 2.471 acres. The Cambridge colleges figure is derived by subtracting the Oxford total from the combined Oxbridge figure and is an estimate. Harvard’s Brazilian acreage is an estimate by campaign groups based on tax filings and court records. Morrill Act figures are those of High Country News. Holdings are given for the year shown and may have changed.
Dean Jones is Director of Jamaica Homes Ltd and a Realtor.
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