Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
What kind of person is a university supposed to help you become?
In higher ed we spend a lot of time defending open inquiry, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity, and doing the practical work of protecting them. In this keynote, political theorist Steven Pittz asks the deeper question underneath all of it: what are those freedoms actually for?
His answer is an idea he calls "spiritual freedom," a category of liberty that sits alongside our civil, political, and economic freedoms but gets far less attention. Drawing on Nietzsche's archetype of the "free spirit," and thinkers from Locke and Mill to Tocqueville, Pittz argues that independence of mind isn't something we automatically have. It's rare, hard-won, and worth aspiring to. And the university, where the stakes are low and the timing is right, is the place built to cultivate it.
Along the way he takes on the cynicism of "criticism all the way down," makes the case that a liberal education is still the education of a free person, and explains why the professors students never forget are the ones genuinely working something out, not just packaging information and passing it along.
Recorded at the Heterodox Academy Mountain West Regional Conference at the University of Wyoming.
Steven Pittz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual. He is the author of Recovering the Liberal Spirit: Nietzsche, Individuality, and Spiritual Freedom.
Heterodox Academy is the nonpartisan community of faculty, staff, administrators, and students working to keep open inquiry alive inside their own institutions. Come see who's already in the room: heterodoxacademy.org
Chapters:
00:00 02:24 Martha McCaughy: Introduction
02:24 41:55 Steven Pritts: Spirit of Liberal Freedom
41:55 45:25 Q&A Session
45:25 46:53 Examples of Free Spirits Not Sentenced to Death
46:53 047:56 The Politics of Detachment
47:56 48:50 Question on Winning Back Public Trust
48:50 50:40 The Practicality of Higher Education and Spiritual Growth
Suggested tags/hashtags: #HeterodoxAcademy #OpenInquiry #HigherEd #AcademicFreedom #LiberalEducation #Nietzsche #ViewpointDiversity
What kind of person is a university supposed to help you become?
In higher ed we spend a lot of time defending open inquiry, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity, and doing the practical work of protecting them. In this keynote, political theorist Steven Pittz asks the deeper question underneath all of it: what are those freedoms actually for?
His answer is an idea he calls "spiritual freedom," a category of liberty that sits alongside our civil, political, and economic freedoms but gets far less attention. Drawing on Nietzsche's archetype of the "free spirit," and thinkers from Locke and Mill to Tocqueville, Pittz argues that independence of mind isn't something we automatically have. It's rare, hard-won, and worth aspiring to. And the university, where the stakes are low and the timing is right, is the place built to cultivate it.
Along the way he takes on the cynicism of "criticism all the way down," makes the case that a liberal education is still the education of a free person, and explains why the professors students never forget are the ones genuinely working something out, not just packaging information and passing it along.
Recorded at the Heterodox Academy Mountain West Regional Conference at the University of Wyoming.
Steven Pittz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual. He is the author of Recovering the Liberal Spirit: Nietzsche, Individuality, and Spiritual Freedom.
Heterodox Academy is the nonpartisan community of faculty, staff, administrators, and students working to keep open inquiry alive inside their own institutions. Come see who's already in the room: heterodoxacademy.org
Chapters:
00:00 02:24 Martha McCaughy: Introduction
02:24 41:55 Steven Pritts: Spirit of Liberal Freedom
41:55 45:25 Q&A Session
45:25 46:53 Examples of Free Spirits Not Sentenced to Death
46:53 047:56 The Politics of Detachment
47:56 48:50 Question on Winning Back Public Trust
48:50 50:40 The Practicality of Higher Education and Spiritual Growth
Suggested tags/hashtags: #HeterodoxAcademy #OpenInquiry #HigherEd #AcademicFreedom #LiberalEducation #Nietzsche #ViewpointDiversity
