<p>Universities are embodied institution, containing the imaginaries of those who inhabit them in visceral and everyday ways. It has become increasingly common to imagine the university as an industrial or postindustrial firm, and faculty the precarious workers within that hostile capitalist enterprise. In contrast to the image of the ivory tower, this way of imagining the university emphasizes the degree to which academic life and activity does not take place in some neutral context, independent of the political and material conditions that make it possible. However, imagining the university as a knowledge factory often misses the living labor that makes knowledge possible. This paper suggests that different kinds of politics are opened when the university is instead imagined as a site of knowledge cultivation. Doing so highlights the non-capitalist relations that also constitute academic work and makes visible a potential politics centered around land, collective self-reliance, and anticolonial peasant solidarities. The article examines what happens when we tell the story of our embodied experience within the university by changing the metaphor from factory to field, and from production to cultivation.</p>