“The very possibility of civilized human discourse rests upon the willingness of people to consider that they may be mistaken.” Those words were spoken in June 1968 by the great historian Richard Hofstadter in his commencement address at Columbia, which had been convulsed that spring by violent arrests of students protesting the Vietnam War. Hofstadter defended the students’ freedom to “confront difficult and inflammatory things,” including “the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, and national loyalty.” Speaking to both the enraged left and the bewildered right, however, he insisted that the willingness to think and rethink in view of new evidence and experience is indispensable to any civilized society. This principle is today in urgent need of revival. For those of us who make our lives in universities, it should be self-evident because anyone with a will to learn knows that the best way to do so is with zeal leavened by humility. It should be self-evident, but alas it often is not. The imperative to acknowledge our own fallibility has a long lineage. In the West it stretches back to Judaism, suffused with a dialectical spirit of self-questioning. In ancient Greece Plato subjected all claims to inconvenient questions from his teacher, Socrates, who confessed (as translated by Benjamin Jowett), “I neither know nor think I know.” Early Christianity decried the sin of pride as a mark of reprobation. Self-doubt is an uncomfortable condition that, for many people, cannot match the appeal of ideology in politics or dogma in religion. Yet it is a necessary precondition for curiosity, tolerance, and any form of open thought. This was a central insight of the Enlightenment, from which some two centuries ago there arose a new kind of educational institution committed to what my Columbia colleague Stuart Firestein, a distinguished neuroscientist, describes as “knowledgeable ignorance” — the recognition of how little one knows and that everything one thinks one knows is provisional pending further investigation. It was on that basis, in Berlin in 1810, that the modern university was founded as a site of free inquiry and teaching in which the pursuit of truth proceeds in a spirit of skepticism toward received certitudes and brooks no interference from prelates, princes, or any authority external to the university itself. The functional principle of this new institution — academic freedom — was slow to take hold in the United States. Through most of the nineteenth century America’s universities, such as they were, remained under denominational constraint if not control. In 1878, for example, the president of Vanderbilt University, a Methodist bishop, fired its professor of geology for teaching evolution in defiance of “the plan of redemption.” Soon the clergy were supplanted by men of wealth who had no problem with Darwin, at least not in the dubious form of Social Darwinism, whose doctrine of “survival of the fittest” flattered the thriving rich and justified the fate of the unworthy poor. But when it came to other unwelcome ideas, wealthy meddlers were ready to step in to exercise what Thorstein Veblen called “pecuniary surveillance” over “the permissible limits of learning.” At the University of Wisconsin, in 1894, two leading faculty were dismissed for “teaching socialism.” It wouldn’t be difficult to assemble an anthology of similar interventions first by men of the cloth and then by titans of industry. In retrospect all these efforts look like rearguard actions by a regime in retreat. In 1869, speaking at his inauguration as president of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot (a chemist descended from Puritan clergy) declared that “the winnowing breeze of freedom” had begun to “blow through all its chambers.” Arguably the most ventilated of America’s universities had been established four years earlier in upstate New York by the engineer and entrepreneur Ezra Cornell, who envisioned a new kind of university in which “any person can find instruction in any study.” Soon several new institutions — including Johns Hopkins in 1876 and the University of Chicago in 1890 — were founded on the premise that no subject or point of view should be ruled a priori out of bounds. Still, the fight over academic freedom continued into the twentieth century. In 1900, the Stanford sociologist Edward Ross gave a public lecture opposing the use of Asian immigrant labor by the railroads. Jane Stanford, the widow of the railroad tycoon who had founded the university and now its sole trustee, became enraged and Ross was fired. In 1915 a group of eminent scholars led by the Columbia philosopher John Dewey established an advocacy organization — the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) — whose “Declaration of Principles” defined and defended academic freedom as its cardinal value. Two years later, the Columbia trustees, unimpressed, prevailed upon the university president to dismiss several members of the history department for holding a view — opposition to America’s entry into World War I — that was obnoxious to their own. With tacit consent from most faculty, he complied. Attempts at suppression continued during the “Red Scares” that followed both World War I and World War II, but by and large the forces of reaction grew weaker as the faculty’s role in institutional governance, bolstered by the protections of tenure, grew stronger. The shared premise of the new universities — as well as older ones that were attempting to renew themselves — was that the only route to knowledge is through restless discontent with received certitudes. To this end, using language both descriptive and aspirational, the AAUP defined the modern university as “an intellectual experiment station.” At its best, that is what it became and what it continues to be. 
From the start, however, even the most progressive academic leaders knew that universities could sustain their “searching function” (Hofstadter’s phrase) only if they won support, or at least forbearance, from the public. As a legal matter, private institutions were answerable only to themselves. As early as 1819, the principle of self-governance had been affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court when
The Universities and Humility
