I Deradicalization? Leftist academics in the Anglo-American world,1 if we are to believe some commentators, have won. Observers on the Right, such as Roger Kimball (1991), warn against the rise of ‘tenured radicals’ within the American academy whose goal is ‘nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study’ (p. xi). David Horowitz (1998) (author of a recent book on the 100 most dangerous US professors) argues that, despite appearances, the Left is not in retreat, but has seized control of the academy through a calculated 20-year assault designed ‘to politicize the curriculum and infuse it with left wing agendas’ (p. 34). Those Marxist scholars who lament their exclusion from current scholarship will be heartened to learn from Horowitz that ‘discredited Marxism still provides the paradigm for every current radical ideology from feminism to queer theory’ (p. 33). American politicians have begun to propose controls on such radicals, while websites (eg, uclaprofs. com) urge students and alumni to monitor left-leaning professors. Some scholars on the left, meanwhile, worry that that the Left has become a victim of its own success. Eric Lott (2006) lambasts ‘boomer liberals’, such as Todd Gitlin, Russell Jacoby and Martha Nussbaum, who have, he claims, seized the political limelight and distorted leftist politics.2 For Petras (2001), many left intellectuals have become instruments of bourgeois hegemony. He excoriates many leftist academics for legitimizing hegemony through an uncritical use of hegemonic concepts and categories, such as ‘globalization’ or the ‘information revolution’ (cf. Baeten, 2002). Once radical researchers now crave the symbols of bourgeois prestige (the Chairs, prizes, grants and so on), and tailor their radicalism in order to secure a successful career, allowing nostalgia for a distant radical past to become a substitute for serious analysis, for example, or embracing a form of ‘cocktail leftism’, where conventional research and teaching during work time is separated from after-hours radical chitchat. Put more bluntly, ‘it is . . . chic to be radical. But it usually Progress reports