In the simplest terms, academic freedom means unfettered scholarly inquiry, a scholar's fundamental right of research, publication, and instruction free of institutional constraint. This indispensable principle of scholarship is the precious gift of independent intellectual judgment--an endowment of open inquiry, free investigation, speculation, imagination, reflexivity, interpretation, assessment, and informed opinion protected against inevitable accusations of political and religious heresy. It is the legitimizing concept of academic life and a right that exists within academic communities for the larger benefit of a free and open society consistent with the ethos of a progressive polity. Academic freedom exists only so long as the professoriat acts on its responsibilities as citizen-scholars consistent with democratic ideals. Such action may entail challenging conventional histories and developing alternative narratives for the enrichment of public memory, constructing situated languages of critique and envisioning new possibilities, critically intervening in public life, creating think-tanks, producing alternative media, and developing curricula to engage pressing social issues, but not at the expense, as Giroux and Giroux emphasize, of the scholar's artistic acuity, intellectual rigor, or theoretical skills, even while addressing a variety of audiences within and outside of academia. To proscribe such forms of engaged scholarship by declaring them inappropriately political or subversive is to misrepresent the purpose of academic freedom. To succumb to such misrepresentations is to abandon the sine qua non of the nation's democratic aspirations. In this most important and pragmatic sense, academic freedom is more than a privilege and nothing less than a responsibility of citizenship. (Contains 69 notes.)