The American academia from which I recently retired is not an overwhelmingly authoritarian institution. Sure, the administration may police speech here and there. And certainly the system sorts people very early by ideology; during my career, those who disliked the consensus political positions, or who couldn't conceal their disagreement for years on end, didn't tend to make it out of grad school. But the purges are relatively gentle, and the institutions do not, by and large, feature internment facilities or beatings or executions.
Nevertheless, many professors I worked with deeply admire authoritarianism. Nothing better illustrates this point than the reception of the late literary theorist Frederic Jameson, who Jacobin dubbed "the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States, if not the world," and The Nation called "an intellectual titan and one of the torchbearers of Marxist thought through the tenebrous night of neoliberalism." For the mighty critic Terry Eagleton, "Jameson was the finest theorist of all."
