Academia, Acadème, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.

The word comes from the akademeia, just outside ancient Athens, where the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning. The sacred space, dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, had formerly been an olive grove, hence the expression "the groves of Academe."

By extension Academia has come to connote the cultural accumulation of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations and its practitioners and transmitters. In the 17th century, British and French religious scholars popularized the term to describe certain types of institutions of higher learning. The British adopted the form academy, while the French adopted the forms acadème and académie.

An academic is a person who works as a researcher (and usually teacher) at a university, college, or similar institution in post-secondary (tertiary) education. He or she is nearly always an advanced degree holder. In the United States, the term academic is approximately synonymous with that of the job title professor although in recent decades a growing number of institutions are also including academic or professional librarians in the category of "academic staff." In the United Kingdom, various titles are used, typically fellow, lecturer, reader, and professor (see also academic rank), though the loose term don is often popularly substituted. The term scholar is sometimes used with equivalent meaning to that of "academic" and describes in general those who attain mastery in a research discipline. It has wider application, with it also being used to describe those whose occupation was researched prior to organized higher education.

Academic administrators such as university presidents are not typically included in this use of the term academic, although many administrators hold advanced degrees and pursue scholarly research and writing while also tending to their administrative duties.

Some sociologists have divided, but not limited, academia according to four basic historical types: ancient academia, early academia, academic societies, and the modern university. There are at least two models of academia: a European model developed since ancient times, as well as an American model developed by Benjamin Franklin in the mid-18th century and Thomas Jefferson in the early 19th century.