Through an ethnographic case study of campus politics at a Parisian university, this paper shows that neoliberal university reforms in France failed to create neoliberal subjectivities. Instead, the reforms provoked conflicts between direct and representative democracy, traditions which had organized post-1960s French university culture. These conflicts suggest that we can decenter neoliberalism and instead examine the confluence of multiple modes of academic production, along with the antagonistic emergence of non-neoliberal subjectivities.