Universities are dualistic institutions and have always been an ideological battlefield. On the one hand, universities are places of knowledge creation and dissemination, which are crucial for a democratic society. On the other hand, the creation of new knowledge is important not only for liberatory practices. Universities can be captured to crack down on dissent or to subsume their knowledge production into convenient ideologies. Due to their abilities for “innovation,” universities, with the rise of knowledge economies and neoliberal modernization, have recently been captured by global capitalist production and competition. Neoliberalization changes universities’ governing and institutional structures, which are now infiltrated by various authoritarian practices. However, authoritarianism is not only emerging because of neoliberal accumulation regimes; neoliberal rationalities might reinforce already existing authoritarianisms. After discussing academic authoritarian neoliberalism in liberal democracies, I proceed with the history of Russian universities, which have long been marked by centralized and hierarchical governance in an authoritarian state. However, contrary to previous research that equates contemporary academic authoritarianism with a return to “Soviet command policies,” I argue that this is a misleading comparison since universities are now captured to serve another type of economy: the nationalistic competition of neoliberal capitalism.