The last 18 months have revealed how far corporate and political capture of the higher-ed system can go. Boards of trustees that in previous decades had a secular investment in the university’s strengths and a respect for academic leadership are now filled with eager partisans in the culture wars. College presidents who might have been expected to stand up for faculty and for the idea of higher education have remained on the sidelines when they should have been mounting a robust defense of intellectual integrity and academic freedom. Only a few, like Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth, have been willing to say that we must be “steadfast in opposition to extortion,” and that the threat to higher education is a threat to civil society itself. The corporatization of higher-ed leadership is not the result of recent culture wars; it is the inevitable result of increased prioritization of various higher-ed profit centers: tech incubators, real estate speculation, online degrees, public-private partnerships, and endowment managerialism. It is a mistake to expect those who have taken for granted that colleges should not only be run like businesses, but for the benefit of business owners, will ever defend education’s public mission.