Truth Needs Choiceworthiness

Academic truth‑seeking is not value‑neutral: institutions and professors must exercise judgement about which questions merit sustained study because resources, reputational capital, and civic ends require selecting some inquiries over others. That choiceworthiness—whether a field or question is collectively worth pursuing—should be an explicit norm alongside standard epistemic norms of evidence and argument. — This reframing changes academic‑freedom debates: it shifts the argument from whether professors may ask anything to how universities should balance truth, institutional priorities, and civic flourishing when setting curricula and research priorities.