This article addresses the thorny question of military discipline vs. academic freedom, demonstrating that the military academy is the perfect proving ground if you want to test the value of academic freedom. The authors, who are also Air Force officers, embarked on a two-year quest to determine what place academic freedom has at a military academy. They found two answers that were compelling. One says that academic freedom has the same place at a military academy as it does at any other school awarding bachelor's degrees. The other answer contends that academic freedom has no place at a military academy. The authors believe that academic freedom is a necessary and exclusive right of the professoriate. However, they also believe that the key to peaceful cohabitation lies in delineating not what military academies owe their faculties, but what they owe their students. They examine the limits of military discipline, particularly the claim that military academies prepare graduates for a single employer for a single mission. The authors state that while that claim is factual as far as it goes, military academy graduates will not always live in a military world, and schools assume responsibility to prepare graduates for lifelong learning. The authors argue that preparing officers to think critically, accurately, and independently requires a certain kind of reflective space to challenge the status quo, space to make honest mistakes, and space to learn from one's errors. Academic freedom provides that space.