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The university both provides a platform for critical intellectual life and, particularly during its neoliberalization, sets severe barriers to it. The latter involve increasing administrative entanglement with corporate and state forces of authoritarian control, disciplinary drives to narrow professionalism and reductive epistemologies, attacks on tenure and university governance, and cutbacks in university budgets. How can those with intellectual aspirations negotiate such departmental, professional, trustee and state pressures? What preparations and role models are conducive to help carve out such space in the academy? What critical role can intellectuals play today in and beyond the academy? What intellectual personae from the recent past are helpful here? The seminar will be divided into two parts. Part I will explore a group of academics who created intellectual space in the United States during a period resistant to it in the 1960s. Texts by Charles Taylor, Sheldon Wolin, Donna Haraway, Herbert Marcuse, Cornel West, Althusser, and me may be consulted. Part II moves into the contemporary era. Texts by Foucault, Theweleit, Latour, Haraway (again), and Moten may be reviewed, along with new explorations of relations between adjunct faculty and intellectual life. Readings for Part II thus remain in flux. But intersections between new fascist drives, climate change, racism, professional retreatism, and pandemics may be explored. Seminar assignments include a class presentation, two short papers, and regular participation in discussion.