Undermining higher education’s claims to both intellectual and civic authority – and breaking down its walls of separation from society at large – is a continuous narrative developed during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s of an academia awash in scandals. This narrative builds on a long tradition of real internal scandals of collegiate life and of American anti-intellectualism. These “scandals” have included athletic departments’ overspending, overreach, and budgetary bloat; sexual politics, rape culture and faculty-student liaisons; political correctness, inhibition of free speech, and trigger warnings; and active and reverse discrimination. Changes in disciplinary approaches and curricula that are the necessary and natural result of intense research and innovation in the humanities deemphasize or actively challenge structures of dominance and hegemony that are narrated as “traditional values.” Such decentering of outmoded curricula and approaches in turn give rise to the decades-old accusations of a left-leaning and disloyal academia. Isolated incidents, individual pronouncements, and mistaken administrative actions have joined verifiable trends in government regulation and campus codes.