Parents, Politicians Don't Decide College Curriculums. Trust Universities To Do Their Jobs

Grant Cornwell, president of Rollins College (FL), writes: America’s great contribution to the world history of politics and civil society has been its grounding in the ideal of freedom. In America we celebrate as inalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we deplore authoritarianism, and we generally recoil at being told by the government what to think, do, or say. In a recent op-ed, David Warren, former president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, reminded us of the Supreme Court decision in a 1957 opinion on Sweezy v. New Hampshire, wherein Justice Felix Frankfurter identified what he saw as the four freedoms essential to a university: “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”