The university, an eldritch progeny of medieval Christianity and conglomerate capitalism, can feel like a gristmill to graduate students and junior scholars. We must produce acceptable articles and monographs after years of research. We must compete for a few good jobs, and we do this by teaching extra classes, submitting essays for publication, presenting papers at conferences. But we must also be beyond this world, needing neither food nor money, subsisting solely on ideas and conversation and self-promotion. he authors of these essays, all of us at the beginning of our careers as scholars, are not fooled by a system that masks its cold corporatist heart with the vestments of the liberal arts. We know that the university intends to make of our bodies machines that produce ideas and disseminate them; machines that round off the rough edges of our students and prepare them to be good, centrist, white-collar workers; machines that perpetuate the idea of the university. We know that we are disposable within the structure of the academy. Nevertheless, we are clear-eyed as we try to make a living in the knowledge industry. We believe, earnestly, that critique and research and thought experiments and the slow study of minutiae are worth fighting for.