“There is no drama like the drama of history,” wrote the great Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins (1938). During the last few years, we have lived a drama in the university that seems unlike few chapters in the history of American higher education. But history has a way of humbling all claims of exceptionalism. These 11 quotations, shared with colleagues at an MIT Faculty Seminar on “Academic Freedom: The Relationship Between Institutions and the State” on February 9, 2026, show that universities have seen versions of our current drama several times before. And they will see them again. I hope these quotations can provide at least some sense of context, purpose, and vision for the challenges that lie ahead.

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(1) “Scholars want to use the state and its support to work effectively toward their goals within the larger language area; they do not want to recognize the more circumscribed borders of the state as their own. … Governments … fear that scholarly and scientific associations extending beyond their borders might promote an indifference toward the state itself.”

Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Occasional Thoughts on German Universities in the German Sense” (1808), in The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook, ed. Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 51.

(2) “The state must always remain aware that it cannot and will not acquire on its own the scientific and scholarly knowledge it wants; in fact, that it is never anything but an impediment as soon as it meddles directly in the production of knowledge. … [The state] has to ensure that [faculty] have the freedom they need to be effective. Not only does the state threaten this freedom, but so do the [higher education] institutions themselves, especially soon after being founded, when they adopt a certain stance and try to keep other perspectives from emerging. The state must work to prevent the disadvantages that arise from such one-sidedness.”

Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Internal Structure of the University of Berlin and its Relationship to Other Organizations” (1809), in The Rise of the Research University, 109, 111.

(3) “The term ‘academic freedom’ has traditionally had two applications – to the freedom of the teacher and to that of the student, Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit. It need scarcely be pointed out that the freedom which is the subject of this report is that of the teacher. … An inviolable refuge from [the] tyranny [of public opinion] should be found in the university. It should be an intellectual experiment station, where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though still distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen until finally, perchance, it may become a part of the accepted intellectual food of the nation or of the world.”

American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” (1915).

(4) “There are three professions which are entitled to wear a gown: the judge, the priest, the scholar. … [The gown] signifies the inner sovereignty of those three interrelated professions: they should be the very last to allow themselves to act under duress and yield to pressure.”

Ernst Kantorowicz, The Fundamental Issue (1950).

(5) “[T]he dependence of a free society on free universities … means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university. It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor.”

Frankfurter and Harlan, JJ., concurring in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957).

(6) “[T]he Institute is vulnerable to disruption from within. … There is no cure for our internal vulnerability. As James Madison once said, ‘Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.’ A free and open atmosphere is essential in a university. To preserve this atmosphere, two complementary conditions are needed: protection of the right to dissent and protection of the right of the university to function. … Our institution, like other universities, is also vulnerable to external pressure. Much of our vulnerability results from our financial dependence upon the federal government. Since we are not now, and presumably never will become, an ivory-tower institution, we will always be vulnerable to outside pressure. The protection of MIT from such forces is the special responsibility of the Corporation. The Corporation’s record in this regard is one that commands respect and admiration. … but they will need strong support, especially from MIT alumni and friends.”

“Creative Renewal: Report of the MIT Commission on Education” (1970), 67-69.

(7) “[I]f I see a tremendous institution like this university which serves other values which are also valuable, and I see it possibly destroyed by my pursuing a particular moral line, then I have a moral conflict and have to make a choice. … And since I put such a high value on this oasis of an effort to preserve human reason and the free act of inquiry in a world that has never known many such institutions and never will have very many, then I would sacrifice all kinds of things in order to preserve it.”

Interview of a University of Chicago faculty member by Donald Light, Jr. (1970s), published in The Dynamics of University Protest, by Donald Light, Jr. and John Spiegel (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1977), 119.

(8) “The Catholic University of America cherishes academic freedom, but academic freedom is not an absolute. Academic freedom may be limited by the religious aims of the institution, as the committee notes, and by the peculiar norms of the discipline. The physicist is not free to ignore the data of the laboratory. A Catholic theologian is not free to disregard Church teachings, which constitute indispensable data for Catholic theology.”

Comments from Counsel for the Administration of the Catholic University of America in the AAUP case of Charles Curran (1989).

(9) “Our primary aim as a university is to contribute to [the] historic struggle [of the poor majority in El Salvador] … We are striving to do so as a university … [This] demands that we strive for the greatest independence and freedom … It is often said that the university should be impartial. We do not agree. The university should strive to be free and objective, but objectivity and freedom may demand taking sides.”

Ignacio Ellacuría, “The Challenge of the Poor Majority” (1989, trans. Philip Berryman), in Towards a Society that Serves Its People: The Intellectual Contribution of El Salvador’s Murdered Jesuits, ed. John Hassett and Hugh Lacey (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1991), 174-175.

(10) “Free expression is enhanced by the doctrine of academic freedom, which protects both intramural and extramural expression without institutional censorship or discipline. Academic freedom promotes scholarly rigor and the testing of ideas by protecting research, publication, and teaching from interference.”

MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom (2022).

(11) “[W]e need nothing less than a new conception of the role of the university in a free society under the First Amendment. … If the press is the unofficial fourth branch of the system, the university is the fifth … My highest hope would be to see our constitutional jurisprudence develop a robust principle of freedom of the university. … [T]he value and role of the university emanate from the bedrock of American society.”

Lee C. Bollinger, University: A Reckoning (New York: W.W. Norton, 2026), 8-9.

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