When I started putting together this essay, my home institution, York University, a university founded some fifty years ago with a mission to provide humanities and social sciences–focused education to the diverse immigrant population of the Greater Toronto area, considered purchasing a software package ominously called “SciVal.” SciVal is an online tool that has – like all good “brands” – a tag line: it supposedly “unlock[s] the promise of your research” (http://info.scival. com) by aggregating data on citations, publications, and so on from the citation database Scopus, also owned by Elsevier, and displays those compilations in simple yet colourful charts, graphs, and tables in order to assist university management in “keep[ing] an eye on their peers” for hiring and budget decisions (Reisenleitner). Elsevier also owns a large share of the journal market in health sciences, and its parent company, Reed Elsevier, made headlines in 2007/08 because of its (now severed) links to the international arms trade (Allen). Together with the Thomson-Reuters Corporation (an “information company” that owns the Web of Science citation index, on which the bibliometric performance indicators of the Time Higher Education Survey university rankings [THES] are based), Elsevier arguably now not only dominates the global public perception of the quality and standing of individual universities (which would be problematic enough), but it is also part of a complex of for-profit organisations that have contributed significantly to the successful establishment of an imaginary of parameters that are considered decisive in the constitution of academic knowledge and its production. I find the term imaginary useful in this context because it underlines that we are not simply dealing with a metaphor or representation of what it means to produce knowledge in a tertiary educational setting under the conditions of global, disorganized capitalism in the twenty-first century. An imaginary constitutes (or, in the case of institutions with long histories such as universities and the disciplines practiced in this setting, reconstitutes) lived experience, material practices, social relations, and public discourse, and generates the taken-for-granted,