In this collection of essays, Stephen J. Nelson examines the many challenges facing American higher education today through a bracing dialogue with its past. Placing urgent contemporary issues like institutional self-definition, curricular design, ideological conflict, and academic freedom in their deep historical perspective over nearly four centuries, he argues passionately that the essential task for the university is to preserve its fundamental values of open inquiry, free speech, and communal discourse as a model for and expression of American democratic values. Nelson's vision of America's colleges and universities as unique custodians and interpreters of our core values of individualism, equality, and the common good—our creed of "e pluribus unum"—sounds a clarion call for faculty, administrators, and trustees alike to embrace the moral dimensions of their vocations and to call their institutions to accountability in these times of distraction and drift.