In this moment, the campus left’s obsession with the far-right forecloses on the facts—that most American universities have already been taken over by neoliberal forces, neither conservative nor left, that see higher learning as a cash cow and the majority of their students and faculty as dispensable in their quest for profits. But the persistence of the left, in insisting that the real problem is that Nazis are threatening to take over campuses, ignores the simple fact that many public institutions like CSU have such enormously depleted student populations that the right won’t even bother with them.

This is a classic con of neoliberalism: it substitutes individual stories and sagas for larger, systemic considerations of the issues at hand. In the case of Radical Academic Discourse, we have only a lot of posturing, and matters are repeatedly framed in terms of “X Professor Who Said Y Faces Retaliation.”

What if we foregrounded movements, not the cult of personality and celebrity? What if we held on to abstract concepts? What if, instead of ceding our ground to Nazis by way of a belief that they threaten control of our bodies and minds, we start thinking about how to open up the university so that it shares its resources—forcibly gathered through land grabs and intellectual property theft from previous centuries—with surrounding neighborhoods? What if, instead of constantly trying to explain stray tweets, we sought to engage in long and complicated conversations about long and complicated matters like genocide as a founding national principle?

If academic institutions are to no longer be like a City on a Hill—or Hogwarts under siege—and if academic discourse is to integrate more fully into a vibrant public life and culture, academics will have to do better than simply casting themselves as heroes of their own sagas. R.A.D. indeed.