As we re-imagine the role and value of the university, we need to pose new questions about knowledge and institutionality at a moment of intersecting crises. This essay presents a case study of a university in Western Canada, one shaped by the impacts of intensive extraction from human and more-than-human beings and now facing the challenge of reinventing itself in response to acute political, environmental and economic pressures. Approaching fossil fuel industries within a wider context of settler-occupying states' investments in 'natural' resources, I explore tensions between the university's racial, colonial, patriarchal and capitalist formation, its current investments, and its capacity for institutional transformation. Andre Keet's application of Catherine Malabou's philosophy to develop Decentered Critical University Studies (DCUS) is linked to some theoretical frameworks developed by Indigenous Feminist and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars to support an analytical distinction between extractive forms of knowledge that I call 'plastic' and the 'plasticity' inherent in relational ways of knowing human and more-than-human beings. An examination of the role of nonprofit research institutes at the University informs my conclusion that academic integrity is less a function of whether a university is public or private than of the relationships it institutes between human and more-than-human beings in place.