Choreographic practice still competes for the same level of value as language-based study in higher education and therefore choreographic practice and pedagogy can be a means through which to address issues of precarity for dance and dance studies in the university economy today. This article addresses this problem by sharing a UK-based extra-curricular choreographic research project exploring academic labour in a university library. The project uses a practice research framework to explore the idea of embodied ideological critique as a critical choreographic lens to view the library as a site of labour for knowledge. The method of site-specific choreography is used to replicate activities observed in the library and explore what activities at the site suggest about what the academy implicitly values as knowledge. The article advocates for ways to engage students to explore and question the changing landscape of higher education in terms of the historical, social and political values of knowledge in the academy and how this changing landscape impacts on dance in university contexts. Post-project reflections further advocate for the potential for small acts of resistance to increasing pressures of austerity, neoliberalism and corporatisation on university activities with choreographic pedagogy.