Academic freedom is an institutionally specific type of liberty. It gains its character from the rules of evidence and reasoning used by communities of scientists and scholars to determine the relative value of truth-claims. One of the finest virtues of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Statement on Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility is that it articulates this basic insight so clearly. AAC&U insists upon the responsibility of educational institutions to defend academic professionalism and to make its methods of thought available to students. In this article, the authors discuss their responses to the AAC&U Statement on Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility. According to David A. Hollinger, it is perhaps the AAC&U statement that can help more of the public understand the structure of cognitive authority by which institutions of higher learning properly operate. Moreover, Bruce Robbins admires both the spirit and the letter of the AAC&U statement. He further opines that "academic freedom" means circling the wagons. That means, in the larger struggle over the university to which the recent attacks belong, they may need to be more enterprising, even to go on the offensive. This will entail recognizing, threatening as the recognition may be in terms of self-defense, that the line between the academy's inside and outside has never been as tight and defensible as they sometimes pretend.