In this essay I will respond both personally and runically, generally and in detail, to a few of the main claims and some of the specific analysis contained in the late Bill Readings's book, The University in Ruins. It is a work I greatly admire for its ambition, acumen, and abundance of salutary provocation. It is designed to challenge everyone, including those on the political Left like myself who are often seen as clinging pathetically, incoherently, sentimentally, or hypocritically to the hope that Western Marxism can realize at least some of its grand objectives through the aging if not antiquated instrument of class struggle—a struggle partly fuelled and directed by a cadre of organic intellectuals, many of whom will do significant portions of their work from `within' universities but in the interests of a collective revolutionary subject.