Hate the compact? Start building a better case for academic freedom

This author has published part of this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education but makes no mention of that. Regardless, he is contradictory on "compromise" and Danielle Allen. And incorrect about the status of medieval universities. Their ties to both Church and State are unmistakable. It is historically and logically impossible to sustain his argument for academic freedom from sacerdotium. Moreover, he cannot sustain any analogies connecting medieval institutions to an undefined and unexplained "constitutional principle." This fails on all grounds. The trail of US dates including the Dartmouth case, the Morrill Landgrant Act of 1862 (later renewed), Hatch Act, GI Bill, and Martin Trow have no bearing on his assertions about "academic freedom" and "compacts" that are not compacts in fact. Why goes he ignore the established published history on American higher education? Most, astoundingly, the professor of law with a College of Law completely neglect the roles of the public university versus private universities. And, yes, the history of the struggle for academic freedom however defined whose modern history begins at the turn of the 20th century.

graff's comments leave me more than a little baffled. I am not sure what contradictions he (my pronoun assumption) finds regarding compromise and Danielle Allen. I take Sitze as saying that Allen does not recognize that the profferred Compact is cynically exploiting the fragility of academic freedom and instead takes the offer as an good-faith, first-approximation proposal toward revision of the Higher Education Act. (In my own reading of Allen's essay I couldn't decide whether she was being rhetorically generous or astonishingly naive.) About medieval universities Sitze does not deny ties between them and Church and State; rather, he acknowledges there is a paradox in their maintaining fundamental autonomy while defending themselves against encroachment by adapting concepts drawn from sacerdotium and regnum. This is for sure too schematic, but it is not simply untrue (on the relationship to the Church, I recommend William Courtenay, and on the relation to both Church and State, in Paris at least, Olga Weijers). Does graff think there is no relationship *at all* of medieval academic freedom to modern? If not in detailed fact, at least in principle? When there are people trying to entirely overthrow developed practices of academic freedom, and when academics find they have simply taken it for granted and therefore lost the thread, it is useful not just to review the immediately relevant history but also remoter examples. Just as when trying to found a new nation in liberty it is not irrelevant in formulating the character of the new to look back to, say, Greek or Roman or medieval-city or Native American practices and principles.

Final comment. I challenge both Sitze and his defender to learn something about the actual, documented history of higher education anywhere in the world. Sitze's defender repeats his contradictions. There was NO recognizable "principle" of "academic freedom" in any medieval institution. Neither are aware that the modern battle which only accelerates begin when the Stanford family commanded the firing of a progressive economist who supported workers' rights to organize. This was during to the capital P Progressive Era. "Progressive" has a history. Even more fundamentally, medieval and all further higher education were foundationally vocational--at first to train clerics and clerks for church and state. The meanings of vocationalism changed over time. Few associated with the historically conservative liberal arts know relevant history. The respondent's final sentence sums it all up. There were no universities in Greece or Rome. Most were illiterate. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle composed orally and collectively (the notion of the "seminar") and dictated to white slaves who were the scribes of their era. There is a substantial published literature on all of this. Why do they ignore it? I will ask anyone who comments on my comments to show the professional and cultural respect of capitalizing Graff. AND never presuming masculine identity. It is 2025.