Alexis de Tocqueville thought Americans the least philosophical citizens in the Western world but nevertheless a people of great certainties. Although they appealed only to the individual efforts of their own understanding, they did so with sublime confidence. The American practice" of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone" led them to" readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of understanding"(1956, 144). Whether in religion or politics, they found their assurances within themselves. The business of their science was to discover truth and put it into practice. Their plain and direct way of speaking assumed that language could tell it like it is. Their predilection for engineering rested on the certainty that two and two were always four, and that all things were commensurable. In 1831, perhaps only a prescient Frenchman like Tocqueville would have dared to deconstruct American certainties.

In such a society both knowledge and opinion were held in an equilibrium of contradictions: knowledge one did not have was viewed with suspicion, but knowledge one did have was truth. Opinion one did not believe was just another person's view, but opinion that was one's own was rule. Universities would, of course, be revered or reviled, depending on whether they confirmed one's knowledge and conviction or denied them. Academic freedom, the special condition that was to permit colleges and universities the free expression of ideas without threat of punitive action, carries within its traditions these same contradictions. For some, academic freedom is justified because faculty have truths to tell, and the truth and its prophets must be protected. For others, academic freedom is the condition necessary for the revision of truth by skeptics and dissenters from the accepted wisdom. Academic freedom then exists precisely because the truth is not cer-