LIAS Lecture: "Taboo as Vocation: Three Theses on Academic Freedom"

This lecture presents three theses on the history and theory of academic freedom. It begins with the fact that concepts of academic freedom, from the medieval studium generale onward, have formed through a series of structured interrelations between the university, the state, and the church. Its first thesis is that this “triadic principle” may be understood as a general condition for the formation of academic freedom claims.

Testing this thesis on Max Weber’s 1917/1919 vocation lectures, the lecture then asks what it means that Weber develops his influential accounts of the callings of the scholar and the politician by distinguishing both from the priestly calling. This leads to the lecture’s second thesis, which is that a fully secular or profane iteration of the triadic principle authorizes an understanding of politics and knowledge in which nothing is sacred, and a theory of academic freedom which is defined by the scholar’s freedom from any and all taboos. 

After presenting historical challenges to this theory of academic freedom, the lecture turns to its final thesis, which is that today the problem of the taboo has returned as a central question for academic freedom. Contemporary illiberal movements have redefined older liberal conceptions of free speech in the context of new information technologies, turning the defiant and rebellious overthrow of taboos into a political vocation. The result is the emergence of a permission structure that normalizes and legitimizes novel forms of sadism and cruelty. Under these conditions, the question of whether academic freedom can and should be understood as the scholar’s freedom from taboos becomes inseparable from its corollary: whether academics who maintain taboos can and should still be understood as loyal to the scholarly vocation and deserving of the protections of academic freedom. 

The lecture concludes by confronting this dilemma, asking how academic freedom might be reconceived once the relations between taboo, the sacred, and academic responsibility are brought back into view.

Adam Sitze, Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass. His work bridges legal theory, political theology, intellectual history, and the institutional conditions of critique. He is the author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as essays on sovereignty, law, and the political frameworks of the modern university. Sitze is widely regarded for his ability to connect theoretical insight with contemporary institutional challenges in higher education.

27 April 2026, 6 p.m.
Campus Lecture Hall 4