The Traditional University and the Free Speech University

Marc O. DeGirolami*

The American university has hit hard times, but on one thing there is general agreement: Free speech is at the heart of its mission. The conventional wisdom about free speech as the central purpose of the university, one that crosses many other perspectival divides, is so commonly accepted as to seem platitudinous. Even the Supreme Court affirms it.

But it is wrong. In its origins and for much of its history, the university’s core purpose was never free speech, but its academic function: to shape students and teachers through constrained conversation and the controlled discovery and transmission of truth and knowledge. For 800 of the 900 years of the university’s existence, academic expression in the university was never conceived as controlled or especially influenced by any external norms of public expression. In the traditional university, free speech, if that is the right term (it is not), was as much a constraint as a freedom—that quantum of liberty necessary for the academic task, and no more. Universities fulfilled their function when they prevented people from speaking freely. That changed in the twentieth century. The culture of the university became highly permeable to constitutional free speech law. Even the commonplaces of the First Amendment from that era—the “free trade in ideas” and the forums for democratic deliberation or autonomous identity formation—penetrated the university. This Essay explores the contrast between the traditional university and the contemporary university as forums of free speech. The object of the traditional university was to pursue, sustain, and transmit what this Essay, following Robert Nisbet, calls “the academic dogma,” the conviction that truth and knowledge were precious, even sacred. In the contemporary university, by contrast, free speech has become a supreme end, both a necessary element of academic freedom and the manifestation of its fulfillment. The breakdown of the academic dogma helps to explain the decline of the traditional university and the rise of the free speech university.

The core point of this Essay is not that the traditional university is good, though I believe it to be good. It is that the traditional university was a specific kind of institution, with a unique function, supported by distinctive cultural assumptions. One may believe that this institution, this function, and these assumptions are archaic and should be replaced. If I resist this view, I can still see its coherence and respect its honesty. What is not coherent or honest, however, is to think that the traditional university and the free speech university are the same thing.

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© 2026 Marc O. DeGirolami. Individuals and nonprofit institutions may reproduce and distribute copies of this Essay in any format at or below cost, for educational purposes, so long as each copy identifies the author, provides a citation to the Notre Dame Law Review, and includes this provision in the copyright notice.

* St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law. Thanks to J. Joel Alicea, Joseph Blocher, Fr. William Dailey, Richard Garnett, Elizabeth Kirk, Adam MacLeod, Michael Madison, Mark Movsesian, Jeffrey Pojanowski, Mark Rienzi, Steven Smith, Kevin Walsh, and the conference participants and students at Notre Dame Law Review’s Symposium on “Constructing the Whole First Amendment: Examining the Role of Text, Doctrine, and History.”