George on Academic Freedom

Robert George defends academic freedom against those who ask, "Doesn’t the defense of academic freedom collapse into the self-stultifying denial of the possibility of truth? Doesn’t it make freedom, rather than truth, the ultimate academic value?"  George invokes the Second Vatican Council in countering that we must "respect freedom even where truth is known securely" because:

[F]reedom—freedom to inquire, freedom to assent or withhold assent as one’s best judgment dictates—is a condition of the personal appropriation of the truth by the human subject—the human person—for the sake of whom—for the flourishing of whom, for the liberation of whom—knowledge of truth is intrinsically valuable. And it is intrinsically valuable not in some free floating or abstract sense, but precisely as an aspect of the well-being and fulfillment of human beings—rational creatures whose flourishing consists in part in intellectual inquiry, understanding, and judgment and in the practice of the virtues which make possible excellence in the intellectual question.

Rob