At the end of the 19th century, without the benefit of federal support, a group of entrepreneurial leaders built universities—institutions that combined the best of Oxford’s and Cambridge’s system of college-based learning for undergraduates, and Bismarckian Germany’s research universities. The resulting amalgam of teaching and faculty-directed research had no equal in the world. American universities not only produced some of the best scholarship of the era, but also forged traditions of fearless speech and institutional independence that today offer guides for the fights to come. American universities must continue to aspire to these ideals; doing so will require being steadfast in their commitment to academic freedom, creative in their approach to funding and growth, and combative in their legal postures toward an overweening state.