Political attacks on higher education are escalating as we approach next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Members of the Trump Administration, state legislatures, and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation call universities “the enemy” to justify severe funding cuts, censorship, and restrictions on academic freedom.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Yet, higher education has shaped the American experiment from the beginning. Enlightenment ideas studied in 18th-century universities provided the rationale for independence from Great Britain in 1776. Founders of the republic viewed higher learning as essential to its success. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson used ideas learned during his own college education to write the Declaration of Independence and establish one of the most consequential political doctrines in modern history: all people are created equal and possess inherent rights to a government based on their consent.
Jefferson studied at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from 1760 to 1762 under his primary mentor, Dr. William Small, professor of natural philosophy. Small introduced students from the privileged social classes who attended William and Mary to Enlightenment thought. He taught students like Jefferson intellectually revolutionary theories of empirical science, natural rights, and popular government.
Small’s influence over Jefferson was extensive. His teachings, Jefferson said, “probably fixed the destinies of my life” and provided “my first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things in which we are placed.”
References to “the system of things” as Jefferson understood it dominate early passages of the Declaration. Jefferson rooted the Declaration in natural philosophy, or the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe without consideration of supernatural causes. This was Small’s specialty and the language of this academic orientation—such as “course of human events,” “powers of the earth,” and “Laws of Nature”—suffuses the document.
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Members of the Continental Congress of 1776 substantially revised Jefferson’s original draft. Some of these revisions indicate that members of congress, not only Jefferson, wanted the Declaration to reflect advanced education of the time. Benjamin Franklin made a momentous revision in this respect: he changed Jefferson’s original statement “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The word “sacred,” Franklin observed, suggested that those truths were matters of religious faith. The term “self-evident” invoked Isaac Newton.
In the language of Newtonian science, a “self-evident” truth needs no supernatural explanation. It is purely rational, empirically observable. Like Newton’s laws of the physical world, the final version of the Declaration posits a natural law of the political world: people will always seek new forms of government to protect their rights.
This decision to ground authority in reason, science, and secular humanism was profound at a time when European monarchs claimed that God had appointed them to the throne. In 1610, James I of England had declared that kings were “God’s lieutenants upon earth” and “even by God himself, they are called gods.” By the 18th century, French monarchs professed to be deities on earth with “absolute” power.
Although the Declaration mentioned that people “are endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable Rights,” such statements vastly diminished the role of God as a source of rights and government compared to standard proclamations from European monarchs of the day. Jefferson’s words implied that people are free to believe that a “Creator” of their chosen faith is the source of their rights. The Declaration thus subtly rejected any official state religion as an element of American independence.
The phrase “Nature’s God” was even more pointed in the Declaration. It classified “God” as a passive possession of “Nature.” The true agent of political events, in this formulation, is nature. The sole reference to God in the Declaration emphasizes empiricism over religiosity. Notably, Small was the only non-clergy member of the William and Mary faculty when he mentored Jefferson.
The Declaration’s references to John Locke’s political treatises, which Small also taught to Jefferson and other students at William and Mary, further underscored its rejection of supernatural authority. Jefferson declared rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” by imitating Locke’s argument that all men possess a right to “life, liberty, and estate [or property].”
In 1689, Locke examined natural rights in the second treatise of Two Treatises on Government, but his first treatise established the full meaning of those rights. Throughout that first treatise, Locke excoriated the divine right of kings. For him, rights of “life, liberty, and property” were incompatible with a divine right to rule.
When Jefferson extended those rights beyond property-holders, replacing “estate” with the “pursuit of Happiness,” he invited a much larger portion of humanity to reject supernatural justifications for government. That invitation reflected the philosophy that inspired him in college.
In other words, the meaning of the Declaration of Independence depends on Enlightenment ideas that university-educated classes in general, and Jefferson in particular, enthusiastically studied.
After the country’s founding, many framers of the new republic advocated for institutions of higher learning to educate citizens in their rights and responsibilities. Doing so, they argued, would promote equality over aristocracy, knowledge over religious superstition, and self-determination over servitude.
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Jefferson was immensely proud of his role in founding the University of Virginia—a publicly funded institution established to educate “the mass of citizens” in everything they needed for their individual wellbeing and responsible civic participation. Franklin did not attend college formally but he was instrumental in founding the College of Philadelphia, which later became the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his life, Franklin advocated educational opportunities for working classes as well as the upper class. As president, Washington proposed a publicly funded “national university” for the general diffusion of knowledge to promote unity in the new republic. These are only a few examples of the deep ties between higher education and the founding generation; approximately half of them attained some form of it—an impressively high level of advanced learning for the time.
Like the political ideals of Jefferson and other founders, however, the ideal of higher education remained out of reach for many Americans. He and many signers of the Declaration deemed Black people especially incapable of advanced study. For much of its existence, U.S. higher education has been badly segregated by race, class, sex and gender, religion, and more.
The personal prejudices of founders like Jefferson, however, do not diminish the power of the ideals that they forged from university study. Free Black people and enslaved Africans in the late 18th century recognized that the revolution was unfinished without equal access to civic institutions, particularly those of higher education. From the Jim Crow era to modern struggles for civil rights, historically disenfranchised communities (people of color, women, LGBTQ Americans, and more) have cited the Declaration in their petitions for desegregated higher education.
Universities have always been integral to American independence, from Jefferson’s words to later generations of Americans who pursued the full implications of those words. Defending institutions of higher education from increasingly authoritarian measures is an important way to safeguard not only academic freedom, but the legacy of 1776 as well.
Bradford Vivian is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State and author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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