A Republican Conception of Academic Freedom

10 Dec 2025

GRiPh Lunch Lecture

University of Groningen

While there is large agreement in international law and scholarship that states and academic institutions should protect the academic freedom of their members to perform research, teach, learn and communicate research results, there are surprisingly few philosophical attempts to explain the grounds of this purported duty. Most existing attempts reuse arguments from debates about freedom of expression and point to the epistemic benefits of academic freedom. However, such attempts have difficulty explaining many of the conventionally agreed-upon components of academic freedom (such as freedom in teaching and academic self-governance) and struggle to explain why academic freedom cannot be just subsumed under rights to freedom of expression that all citizens enjoy. I will present a first idea for an argument that instead justifies academic freedom by reference to the distinctive role that academic institutions play in a contestatory democracy. According to this argument, it is not primarily the generation of truths but the existence of adversarial epistemic bases of power that generates specifically democratic benefits. This argument also yields a clearer understanding of the obligations of academic integrity, and the limits of the distinctive privileges of academic institutions.