Knowledge institutions play a critical role in maintaining constitutional and democratic guardrails, encouraging the pursuit of reliable knowledge, providing the public with accurate information, and fostering informed debate about office-holders, candidates and public policies. For this reason, authoritarian leaders often attack knowledge institutions (alongside other common targets like political opponents, and independent government bodies) in efforts to consolidate power, suppress dissenting voices, and control public narratives. Among the key, often-targeted knowledge institutions are a free truth-seeking press and independent universities.

Knowledge institutions are public and private entities that have a central purpose of pursuing knowledge—creating, disseminating, and preserving it. They include universities, libraries, museums, the press, government offices charged with collecting and reporting data, and independent research institutes. As organized entities with continuity over time, they pass on to new generations their cultures of knowledge-seeking and verification. Knowledge institutions and their active members seek to apply standards of a wide range of intellectual disciplines, differing across fields and institutions. They aspire to apply these standards autonomously, not to reach results tailored to satisfy government or business preferences, but with independence according to the professional norms of their field and institution.

As institutions, they offer protection to knowledge-related values that go beyond those secured by individual freedoms of expression. They do so for several reasons, described at length in my earlier work. First, such institutions help define, in ways no individual can, the best disciplinary tools and practices oriented to discovering or verifying knowledge. Second, institutions transmit cultures of knowledge-seeking across generations—again, in ways that individuals by themselves cannot. Third, institutions provide “focal points” for organizing around the protection of those individual freedoms so essential to the free inquiry on which searches for better truths are founded. Fourth, institutions have legal and financial resources that can be deployed to help protect the knowledge-seeking efforts of their members. Finally, institutions, on the whole, have stronger functional and normative claims than individuals do to act with authority as intermediaries in an ocean of information and misinformation.

In recent years, however, the authority of the press and universities as knowledge institutions has increasingly come under scrutiny—and not just from rising populists. Critics are asking questions such as: Are these institutions genuinely devoted to producing and disseminating knowledge, or are they primarily focused on protecting and aggrandizing their own reputations or economic interests? Is the press overly fixated on sensationalism and short-term news coverage at the expense of deeper and more substantive reporting? Are universities too preoccupied with maintaining “politically correct” stances to be trusted to perform their knowledge-seeking roles and to maintain a free and open campus environment for all students? Can these knowledge institutions truly claim independence from the powerful forces that control so much of society? Are the ethical norms they espouse admirable or despicable? Are their ethical norms sufficiently adhered to in practice to warrant their continued recognition as guiding principles of the press and universities?

This essay sketches some tentative responses to these questions. It considers how the press and universities are similar as knowledge institutions and how they differ. It explores the nature of journalistic and academic topics and judgments, their independence in the pursuit of knowledge, the time frames of their work, and their ethics. It aims to draw attention to how these two institutions use overlapping but not identical tools to develop shared knowledge and test knowledge claims, and how sustaining the independent competencies necessary towards this goal is challenged by rising polarization and mistrust and by diminishing public and private financial support. I close with some reflections on the relationships among knowledge institutions and why the interdependent infrastructure of knowledge institutions matters so much to constitutional democracy.

Constitutional democracies are not necessarily self-sustaining. They must safeguard the independence and integrity of elections, government structures, and knowledge institutions, including universities and the free press. Doing so requires honest assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, adequate funding for their central tasks, and appropriate degrees of institutional autonomy to preserve the reliability of their knowledge functions.

Professional Judgment in Pursuit of Genuine Knowledge

Constitutional democracies depend on knowledge to sustain their governments. Whether conceptualized as the need for competence, expertise, or effectiveness, governments depend on the development of shared conceptions of reliable knowledge. Knowledge institutions, including academia and the press, play key roles in the development of this shared knowledge.

Ideally, both the institutional press and higher education institutions seek to protect the exercise of professional judgment by those who do knowledge work within them. For the press, the core knowledge work is done by journalists (including reporters and editors). For academia, the core knowledge work is done by individual faculty members, sometimes alone, sometimes working with others, and subject to the more indirect and less collaborative constraints of peer review and evaluation.

For the press, a classic concept of the editorial process embraces the active involvement of editors as internal checks throughout the entire news production cycle. In serious press organs, the relationship between editors and reporters (and other kinds of journalists) is collaborative. It often begins with the selection of which stories to pursue, continues with discussions about when stories are sufficiently established by the facts, and ends with editing of the final article. Editors can be an integral part of the process of reporting a story at many junctures, reflecting a degree of joint venturing between reporters and editors as allies in the development and production of news stories.

The growth of new outlets for reporting through social media sites and blogs may pose a challenge to the continued viability of the model of editors who act as internal intermediaries checking what journalists write and reinforcing disciplinary norms of good investigative journalism. Yet, the idea of internal checks remains an important aspect of contemporary journalism. The most respected newer journalism sites, such as ProPublica, as well as “legacy” organs, continue to rely on editors to protect the integrity of their journalistic process, though empirical work on the extent of this practice remains to be done.

In academia, such partnerships between editors and researchers in developing scholarly works are less common than in journalism. Editors of scholarly journals or books may sometimes—but need not—play a role similar to news editors in deciding what themes or subjects authors should pursue. Some invited scholarly collections or journal symposia, for example, are framed by the scholarly editors’ careful guidance on what topics different chapters should seek to cover. But many scholarly books are conceived entirely by their authors and are submitted to a publisher only after they are complete or well set on course. The checks of peer review are thus both less sustained and more independent than those of an editor in a journalistic institution working with reporters.

In contrast to journalism's collaborative editorial process, academia relies on peer review in assessing quality both in granting tenure and, for journals, in deciding whether to accept articles for publication. Although the specific practices vary across disciplines, peer review is a key part of academia's decisional processes. The review process for publication in a peer-reviewed journal may be quite substantive and contribute materially to improving the published work. (Publication in peer-reviewed journals is important in many academic fields; a possible exception, however, is the field of law in the United States, where prestigious reviews are often edited by students, not peer-reviewed.) Publication-specific peer review is part of the academic process of knowledge production; it operates in a more arms-length manner than the process of editors checking journalists’ work.

While a faculty mentor may feel some sense of engagement with junior faculty, it would be unusual for that relationship to be seen by either party as the kind of alliance journalists often share with an editor. Faculty members may be able to obtain additional peer feedback and critique from workshopping their papers or sending them out for critical comment from colleagues, which can be an important and helpful part of the scholarly process. But the relationship is not that between an editor and a reporter. Other faculty members offering feedback (rather than as part of a peer review process) do not operate as gatekeepers to the publication of academic work in the same way a traditional news editor could be a gatekeeper to journalists’ work. However, some scholars do work in very large collaborative groups on work having many coauthors; this surely provides opportunities for review and checking, although it also raises predictable temptations for individual contributors to focus only on the aspects of the work to which they directly contributed, rather than on the entire project.

The comparisons between how the institutions of academia and journalism create knowledge raise a number of questions warranting further consideration. For example, does the insulation of much academic work, as compared to the ongoing (theoretical) relationship of reporters and editors, have any implications for their knowledge-producing roles? Or, is what matters the overall cluster of opportunities for checking and incentives for accurate work? Are there more such opportunities for checking and incentives for accuracy in academia, given its longer time frame for production and extended period during which critiques, modifications, and even retractions can occur? Or are there more such opportunities in journalism, where a wider readership may be quick to point out flaws or questions? Alternatively, is what matters more the commitment of participants to truth-seeking modes of work? How significant is the presence of legal and practical protections for the independence of the overall process—in journalism, for reporting and editing, in academia, for researching, writing, teaching, and publishing of scholarship?

Both news media and academic journals have suffered embarrassing and very public failures of their truth-checking processes in recent years. Academia has sought to develop measures to prevent systemic problems in reliability. The declining numbers of journalists and immense financial pressures faced by news organizations of all sizes may inhibit devoting more resources to improving accuracy, yet some journalists, academics, and organizations engage in regular critiques of what they see as flawed journalism. Ideological commitments may impair, or be seen to impair, an institution’s willingness to adhere to truth-seeking practices, including open inquiry.

These are human institutions, and failures at some levels are to be expected. These failures should be critiqued when they result from deviations from truth-seeking norms and corrected going forward. My point, for now, is that each type of institution employs distinctive mechanisms designed to sort good, accurate reporting from bad, unreliable reporting or good, reliable scholarship from bad, unreliable scholarship. Each knowledge institution has internal mechanisms designed both to reinforce the goal of accuracy at the outset and to provide checks when that goal is not met. At a time when both institutions face serious threats, attention to these mechanisms is of particular importance.

Independence and the Ideal of Objectivity in the Application of Professional Judgment

Biased precommitments are antithetical to the aspirations for objectivity, impartiality, or fairness associated with good scholarship and good journalistic reporting. Even opinion journalism, which may be quite partisan or advocacy-oriented, should rely on a reasonable factual basis. The search for genuine knowledge must be conducted independently of commercial or governmental interests in predetermined answers.

For most reputable journalists and academics, their perceived and actual independence—including from powerful influences of friends, family, business, or government—is an important element of professional self-understanding. Press and academic institutions deploy various methods, some overlapping, some distinctive, to protect that independence.

Some academics enjoy “tenure,” that is, a guarantee of their position absent extraordinary justification for removal. Tenure is believed to contribute to the desired independence of thinking, research, writing, and teaching. Yet increasingly, teaching loads at colleges and universities are filled by nontenure track faculty, many of whom are part-time workers with relatively little job security or bargaining power. Many journalists likewise work without any institutional guarantees of tenure or even long-term contracts in an increasingly shrinking part of the economy. Even without tenure protections, though, other factors may help sustain commitments to journalistic independence. These include working as part of a team, collaborating with an editor, and operating in a journalistic culture that values independence and accuracy of reporting.

Job tenure is not the only source of independence. Ethical norms in academia also insist on intellectual independence and integrity. The first principle in the American Association of University Professors’s (AAUP) Statement of Professional Ethics provides that professors’ “primary responsibility . . . is to seek and to state the truth as they see it . . . [and] practice intellectual honesty,” while not allowing “subsidiary interests” to “seriously hamper or compromise their freedom of inquiry.” The ethos of objectivity or impartiality in professional judgment remains an important aspect of both academia and professional journalism, and it may be as dependent on institutional cultures as it is on structural protections of job security. Institutional cultures in academia and journalism nurture norms about what it means to value accuracy, knowledge, and independent judgment.

The New York Times’ Ethical Journalism Handbook, for example, discusses several situations of apparent conflicts of interest that might threaten “the impartiality and neutrality of The Times and the integrity of its report.” It prohibits accepting “free or discounted lodging and transportation except where special circumstances give little or no choice” and includes a sample letter to return gifts, along with a policy forbidding acceptance of all but “trinkets of minor value.” The Times also forbids accepting “anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or as an inducement to alter or forgo unfavorable coverage.”

Similarly motivated rules appear elsewhere in news organs and associations. The Guardian’s Editorial Code of Practice and Guidance requires news staff to disclose financial interests that might “create the impression of a conflict of interest,” prohibits journalists from holding public office, and substantially limits the receipt of “freebies.” The Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists likewise provides for the avoidance of conflicts of interests by journalists and asserts that the “right of the public to truth is the first duty of the journalist.” (The contrast here with the alleged conduct of the tabloid National Enquirer in paying to “kill” a news story and keep it from the public is obvious. )

Some traditional news media have reflected their concern for independence by separating the reporting divisions from the business divisions—a separation that has come under strain in recent years as the economic challenges for legacy news media have increased. For example, The New York Times forbids consultation between the news and business division, except when advertising needs are “directly related to the business of the news department;” the Times also limits and regulates (rather than prohibits) information exchange between the news and advertising departments. Such consultations can play a critical role in helping news media navigate great economic challenges and maintain enough financial viability to be able to report independently on the news. Yet if a particular story is shown to have been “pulled” or held back because of political or economic influence, it reflects badly on the press organ’s reputation.

Academia faces similar concerns about conflicts, although it handles them differently. In the last decades of the 20th century, commercial and governmental collaborations in university-based research increased substantially, creating heightened opportunities for conflicts of interest. Universities have developed policies and structures to help manage these new relationships, including technology transfer offices and offices of sponsored programs. These programs can involve policies that, in contrast to general academic norms of openness, permit researchers to withhold their findings, for example, to allow time for patenting. In some fields, individual faculty members may develop separate consulting businesses related to research work patented by the university, which complicates their roles as members of the academic community. In these respects, scholars may be much more financially involved with outside influences than are journalists.

Universities and press organizations increasingly adopt conflict of interest policies designed to prevent—or at least disclose—influences that might undermine the independence of professional judgment. At some news media companies, policies limit involvement between journalists and the subjects they are writing about, and editors may reassign reporters if involvements create the appearance of partiality. In academia, the scholar herself may be the primary judge of whether her work presents conflicts of interest. And in some fields of research, such as anthropology, the role of participant observation as a research method is relatively well-established. While news media may tightly control what other entities their reporters can work for (for example, prohibiting freelance work for competitors ), academics—especially in the sciences—frequently collaborate with faculty at other institutions. Competition among journalistic media is the norm; academia can be very competitive, but there are also major areas of collaborative work. Scholarly journals increasingly require a statement either disclaiming or disclosing potential conflicts of interest, and many universities have policies requiring disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. Disclosure is no panacea, but it is a recognition of the importance of upholding ethical norms of independent judgment.

Both journalists and academics may be influenced in their choice of research or writing topic by incentives from outside and within their institutions. In academia, the interests of leading journals, or the availability of grants, may influence scholars’ topics of inquiry. Some academics may choose topics regarded as easier to publish on, in the interest of obtaining tenure or other academic benefits. Grants are more likely to be available for novel findings (at least in some scientific fields), which may influence the incentives of the researcher—discouraging replication studies, for example, despite their importance for the continued verification of initial results. In law, there are “popular” topics in which student editors (who play an important role in the U.S. scholarly legal literature) or even academic editors are deemed more likely to have an interest.

In the press, the increased conjoining of business with reporting concerns reflects the reality that the press (whether traditional legacy press or new blogs or websites that want to be viewed as impartial news sources) must attract sufficient audience share to sustain themselves. Publishers care, as they usually have, about net revenue; reporters care about how many followers they have on Twitter or Facebook. Thus, financial and popular incentives may influence reporters in what kinds of topics they pursue, as may the ideological commitments of their employer. (This raises the question of whether stronger norms of impartiality and independence exist in what is reported in a story than in the selection of what topics to pursue or report on. )

While the ideal of independence is important, it is unsurprising that neither academic research nor news reporting, as human institutions in a world of finite resources and attention, are conducted based only on the abstract importance of the subject or the internal interests of the researcher. For the press, the combined, related pressures of current popular interest, the role of clickbait and unseen algorithms, and financial sustainability (which may favor what those who are advantaged in society are interested in) may play a larger day-to-day role on topic choice than in parts of academia. For academics, the rise of untenured faculty in the U.S. may threaten both the time and the independence faculty have for research. Yet journalists and academics retain considerable freedom on what topics to write on. The aspiration for independence of judgment in what is reported or what is written remains an important distinguishing feature of both. A major challenge for years to come is how to sustain both forms of independence as they face pressures from economic change, political controversies, and unusually virulent attacks.

Time, Resources, and the Nature of Knowledge Development

The different time scales of journalism and academia influence the kind of topics and the depth of coverage that academic and journalistic work produce. Universities—major ones, at least—will provide a depth of knowledge-related resources in libraries, access to scholarly databases, scientific equipment, and the collective presence of scholarly experts in many fields. Press organizations are likely to be quite differently and perhaps more thinly resourced, but journalists may be able to more readily gain access to information from current officeholders than academics.

Daily or even weekly journalists report on sudden, unexpected events and look for “scoops”—that is, important newsworthy developments that have not been discovered or reported by others. This task is becoming more challenging given the widespread public sharing of breaking news on social media, including reporting by noninstitutional reporters. Professional journalists who develop networks of reliable information providers are still able to produce such scoops, especially in areas in which information is tightly controlled and not accessible to casual observers. Daily reporters, moreover, regularly work against very tight deadlines. Even feature reporters for newspapers and magazines may be working on deadlines related to the topicality of their subjects. Investigative journalists may work on a time frame of months pursuing a story in depth—but if they are associated with news media, typically not years, as many academics may spend on a single book or article.

Academics face different time pressures than do members of news media. As noted above, writing even a single good article for publication in an academic journal can take months or even years; academic books can take even longer. Moreover, most faculty in the United States also have teaching responsibilities; devoting time to good teaching means that most faculty usually cannot devote their work life exclusively to research. Untenured academics who are hoping for tenure face definite time pressures to produce published scholarship before tenure consideration; in systems with regular review of all faculty, pressures to show regular research publications continue throughout an academic career. Junior faculty and those outside the United States with competitively ranked systems based on regular review of faculty publications have serious incentives to frequently produce scholarship that is placed in well-rated journals.

It continues to be the case that academic life allows more time for reading and reflection than most journalism positions do. Yet commentators have expressed concerns about the prioritizing of quantity over quality in articles in academia. Professors in highly competitive fields are facing increased pressure to produce more papers in shorter time periods, although this is not the same type of time pressure as journalists who work under daily deadlines. Academic time scales allow—or, in some cases, require — more time for deep research, reflection, and multiple drafts in ways that journalism often does not. This gives rise to an expectation of fewer errors in academic work than in daily journalism. Nonetheless, although the time pressures differ, they exist in both fields.

The analytical tasks that can be expected of academic work and journalism also differ, though there are areas of overlap. Some areas of academic inquiry, such as in the physical sciences, are simply beyond the capacities of those who do not have a quality lab to work in. Some areas of academic inquiry are not sufficiently contemporary, or take too long to research, to be possible (or of interest) for journalists.

The press is better situated than academia to quickly produce daily or weekly reporting and in-depth investigations that are published close in time to the events being investigated. Unlike academics, press outlets typically do not have processes that can delay, sometimes by many months, even being able to start interviewing sources. Yet the search for the popular (or sensational) does not always correspond with what is important to public well-being; commercial incentives may be at war with reporting that informs citizens about events relating to government policy. The topicality that news media see—reporting on current developments in government in regulation, in politics, and in events and trends affecting people’s daily lives—is wide, but under these pressures, still limited.

In contrast, the choice of topics for academic research in universities is quite broad and not constrained by subjects of current topical interest. Classicists pore over ancient texts in languages no longer spoken; archeologists explore understandings of peoples and societies’ lives from the past; historians pursue improved understandings of different periods of history of different peoples and countries around the world; physicists seek to improve understanding of the smallest particles in the universe and the largest distances between objects in the universe; biologists and chemists work to improve understandings of processes of physical change. Scholars can pursue research into more lasting forms of knowledge than journalists, deepening or challenging existing understandings in philosophy, history, literature, and art, or testing the continued validity of scientific beliefs or mathematical propositions and developing new ones. Sometimes these avenues of research yield interesting perspectives on current topics, but often they do not, yet they contribute to the development of valuable human knowledge by engaging with the world and existing understandings in an epistemically open and (hopefully) rigorous way.

In areas of overlapping interests, which may arise in fields of social sciences, scholars may be better—in part because they have more time—at developing and testing theoretical explanations for phenomena, periodizing large amounts of historical data, and more generally identifying patterns across time and societies. Journalism, on the other hand, is superior to most academic work in its currency, which can provide raw material for historians and other academics by offering a daily diffusion of new information on contemporary life, government, elections, candidates for and incumbents in public office, emerging problems, conflicts, and trends. Journalism also continues to provide a forum for curated public discussion through letters to the editor and opinion pieces, a feature not so available with respect to academic work. Occasionally, journalism has also risen to provide astonishingly deep levels of research requiring immense collaboration in the acquisition and presentation of data, as exemplified by The New York Times’ daily charts on the COVID pandemic.

The time constraints and substantive work of journalists and academics share some characteristics but also differ in important ways. Do journalists chase stories that have little long-term value but appeal to currently popular obsessions? Do academics pursue topics of interest only to a small number of other academics, or, alternatively, write in “safe” or “politically correct” well-ploughed veins? Yes, all of these occur, as well as more egregious errors.

Yet, both academics and journalists regularly produce highly valuable reports, discoveries, and analyses, which may inform the public of major problems with government or business (often being concealed by those who benefit from them) or offer the kind of medical discoveries that have extended life spans dramatically. History suggests that only free and open fields of inquiry—that will inevitably include some low-value or mistaken research and reporting—will produce these and other such valuable results. Increased awareness of these benefits, increased attention to the resources needed to sustain knowledge institutions, and constructive critique to help institutions improve their own work will benefit both knowledge institutions and the constitutional democracies to which they are so important.

Ethical Constraints Supported by Professional or Related Organizations

Books about universities tout these organizations’ importance to advances in science, cross-cultural knowledge, competitiveness (in business and more generally), amelioration of poverty, and government policy or public administration. Some also emphasize their contributions to democracy more generally and to social equality. Books about the press tout its importance to civic knowledge, communication among readers, “watchdogging” those in positions of (private or public) power, and holding them to account. Yet these books do not as often claim that the press facilitates effective government or business competitiveness, even though some of the origins of the European press in newsletters concerning commercially valuable information plainly existed to serve business interests and even though there is a long linkage between the press and government functions (and a link between local "news deserts" and corruption). Notably, writers do not call on the press to develop innovations that enable better business practice or governance, while they do assign this task to universities. The ethos of the press as independent and as reporting on rather than “making” the news would resist such instrumentalization. Consequently, a quite different ethos animates academia and journalism.

Despite this and other differences, both journalism and academia have commitments to pursuing genuine knowledge, and both have developed ethical principles, which may be reinforced by standards of conduct adopted by specific institutions (that is, specific newspapers or universities). The ethical standards of both entities include an emphasis on transparency, accuracy, and truth-seeking. I have discussed the ethical, truth-seeking, and information-verification norms of the press in earlier writing. Below I discuss academic ethics.

The AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics asserts, as a basic obligation of faculty: “Their primary responsibility to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it. . . . They accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending and transmitting knowledge. They practice intellectual honesty.” In succeeding paragraphs, the statement addresses obligations to students, colleagues, the institution, and their community.

Discrete disciplinary associations of faculty across universities often reflect on the ethics of scholarship in their fields. For example, the publishing arm of the American Institute of Physics sets technical precepts for authors, including the expectation that “results of research should be recorded and maintained in a form that allows analysis and review, both by collaborators before publication and by other scientists for a reasonable period after publication.” The Institute also establishes norms, including that “fabrication of data is an egregious departure from the expected norms of scientific conduct, as is the selective reporting of data with the intent to mislead or deceive, as well as the theft of data or research results from others.” Similarly, in the humanities, the American Historical Association says that while historians have much they disagree on, they all agree on some precepts: “All historians believe in honoring the integrity of the historical record. They do not fabricate evidence. Forgery and fraud violate the most basic foundations on which historians construct their interpretations of the past.”

Some ethical norms differ between journalists and academics. Journalists typically name their sources, and they generally contend that the sources a reporter relies on for a story should only be kept confidential in special circumstances. In contrast, social scientists who do survey research are expected to take measures to maintain the confidentiality of their survey respondents. For both reporters and academics, the obligation to protect the confidentiality of a source once a promise of confidentiality has been given may raise conflicting moral and legal obligations. On occasion, journalists have gone to jail rather than comply with a subpoena and reveal an anonymous source without the source’s consent. Some condemn those journalists for obstructing justice, while others hail them as heroes. Most U.S. states provide some protection for journalists from forced disclosure of confidential sources. Although similar protection for academics is less well-established, they have sought it on similar grounds and on occasion been successful. As many state journalist-shield laws recognize, sometimes confidentiality assurances are the only way to verify and get an important story of government or private malfeasance out to the public.

The aggressive critique that follows public disclosure of departures from ethical standards suggests the continued relevance of these norms in both journalism and academia. There are too many such departures. But they attract controversy and critique—through which norms of honest, truth-oriented work can be upheld.

Knowledge Institutions’ Interdependence and Constitutional Democracy

The shared aspiration of journalism and academia to honesty and to “extending . . . knowledge” is reflected in their intellectual interdependence. In earlier work, I have provided examples of how the press, universities, and government offices that collect and provide data draw from one another’s work and are, in a sense, parts of an interdependent epistemic infrastructure; the press may play an important role in circulating new ideas from academia. However, the interdependence of knowledge institutions goes beyond these kinds of instances of direct utilization by one kind of institution of the work of another. Historically, increases in education and literacy helped promote press readership. More generally, knowledge institutions can play a role of supporting overarching values that benefit society and government in constitutional democracies—of “truth, science, morality and arts in general,” as the Continental Congress proclaimed about the role of the press in 1774, and the ideals of disciplined truth-seeking searches for better knowledge.

These overarching values include a commitment to rationality in decision-making. This commitment, in turn, requires that people have skills of critical inquiry and understanding, including skills in evaluating evidence that bears on important public questions. These values also include the importance of public knowledge of government—not just knowledge of what the institutions are but understanding of how government actually works—appreciating the need for tradeoffs in desired ends, for example, or developing an ability to distinguish abuses of power from ordinary disagreements. For these tasks, President Washington and many other U.S. presidents thought a national university was required. The national universities that exist today, created through more decentralized mechanisms, continue to be urged to consider whether they are providing the education that participants in our constitutional democracy need.

From the earliest days, the press has been viewed as playing a central role in serving as a watchdog that could criticize government officials, providing a forum for letters and opinions from a range of readers, and promoting public knowledge of government. A postal subsidy for newspapers was provided in the 1792 Act establishing the postal service. Even earlier, in September 1789, the very first Congress mandated the secretary of state to receive all enacted laws and to assure their publication in “at least three public newspapers.”

Finally, these knowledge institutions and others together help promote the idea that the truth, or truths, or better understandings of the world, are worth pursuing. Without the idea that there is knowledge—that at any given time, there are better (more accurate) and worse (less accurate) understandings of facts and trends, physical and social processes and causes; and that study, reason, and consideration of evidence can help arrive at ever better understandings—it is almost impossible to find a shared epistemic space for democratic self-governance. There are also necessarily uncertainties in the real pursuit of knowledge, which both universities and journalists can help us understand. But trying to have a democracy without some shared basis for establishing what is, at least contingently, accepted as usable knowledge is almost impossible to imagine.

Whether the press or universities will retain their current institutional and economic forms is a serious question. The press, in particular, has undergone a dramatic economic and professional shift over the last two decades; governments in recent years have "disinvested" in public universities; and public trust in both news media and universities has declined markedly. But the functions these institutions serve—of attempting honestly and accurately to report on daily events and attempting honestly and accurately to understand the human and natural world in all its manifestations—are essential to good societies. In helping to hold governments accountable, they are of particular importance to constitutional democracies, where decisions by an informed citizenry are at the theoretical foundation of the legitimacy of the state.

Acknowledgments

With deep thanks to Lincoln Caplan, RonNell Andersen Jones, Martha Minow and Sonja West for their helpful comments, and to Peter Morgan and Dino Hadziahmetovic, Harvard JDs 2024, and Jenna Bao and Joyce Yun, Harvard JDs expected 2026, for their able research assistance. Remaining errors are the responsibility only of the author.