Herscher’s Under the Campus, the Land named one of 2025’s Best Books by American Society of Landscape Architects

Professor Andrew Herscher‘s book, Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2025), was named one of the 10 Best Books of the year by The Dirt, the official blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Under the Campus, the Land centers on the University of Michigan, one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most renowned public universities in the United States. Revealing how Anishinaabe people granted land that was integral to the university’s founding, growth, and prestige, the book illuminates the Anishinaabe people’s intention to support an institution where Native and settler youth could be educated together, as well as the betrayal of this intention by generations of university administrators and struggles of generations of Native students to remind the university of its responsibility to them and their kin. 

In recent years, many universities have begun to adopt land acknowledgements in response to their hidden or forgotten Indigenous and colonial histories. Though becoming widespread, these acknowledgements do not contend with the complexity of these histories or extend them into the present. Rewriting the history of one university, Under the Campus, the Land offers a reckoning with the Indigenous and colonial contexts from which universities emerged across the U.S., as well as an opening to the reparative work those contexts demand.

According to The Dirt, “This excellent book provides a model for how other universities and institutions can create truer histories and begin to undo past harms to Indigenous peoples.”