My aim in this paper is to extend the general critique of academic capitalism to the changes in the nature of academic work time it is bringing about. I will argue that university teaching and research requires an open-ended structure of time free from externally imposed routines and deadlines. I call this structure of time ‘thought-time’ to emphasise its intrinsic connection to the way in which ideas develop in the mind and objectified in social life. Thought-time is incompatible with the structure of what I will call ‘money-time’. Money time is the structure of time required by capitalist markets. Its structure is determined by the generic goal of productivity – maximum output for minimum input of resources, labour, and time. Hence money-time structures human activity by forces without regard to the content and goal of the activity considered in itself – the precisely measured sequences, routines, and deadlines are calibrated to ensure the production of as much money-value profit as possible, and not the free development and elaboration of ideas in the open-ended processes characteristic of thought-time. This temporal restructuring of academic labour has especially pernicious effects in those areas of academic research, especially the humanities and social sciences, which are not amenable to the creation of commodifiable research. Hence, the progressive subordination of thought-time to money-time is a serious challenge to the future health of these disciplines.