If we want to combat contemporary "neoliberal" attacks on universities, we should start by refusing the way that their pseudo-rationalities already determine so many aspects of the intellectual and institutional regimes that we consider under threat. This paper sketches an analysis of those aspects of the internal practices of academia that reinforce the interests at the origin of the attack on public education, and that make it possible, and indeed expected, for universities' leaders to oversee the betrayal of their institutions' very raison d'être. How have the physical and intellectual geographies of academic professionalism prepared the ground for "neoliberal" reforms? How do the varied dispensations of modern higher education work against the ideal of open, democratic universities? How would university education, especially in the humanities, still exacerbate the privatisation and enclosure of knowledge in our societies, even if it remained public and accessible to everybody?