Adam Sitze

This book offers a history and theory of academic freedom that responds to the epistemic dimensions of America’s democratic decline. Its premise is that the twentieth-century concept of the secular university—its self-definition as a marketplace of ideas—risks redundancy under conditions when the internet already largely serves that same purpose. Sitze argues that academic freedom instead should be justified by revisiting two of the American academe’s understudied origins: the judiciary and the priesthood. This, he suggests, will reconnect academic freedom’s most basic justification—to protect the pursuit of truth—with a renewed appreciation of two forms of obligation: the pursuit of justice and pursuit of the good. This “morally perfectionist” combination of academic freedom and academic obligation, he concludes, provides us with the justification we need to begin addressing and reversing America’s democratic decline.