And that in the branch of the school of law, which is to treat on the subject of civil polity, these shall be used as the text and documents of the school. When we acknowledge it as such, we assume that government now is and will forever remain the kind of government which, in the judgment of a majority of citizens, it ought to be. This situation, if it exists at a single moment, may change in the next, but the powers of that government in the area of education will not automatically diminish. The principles of a free society therefore demand that political governments at both the state and national levels shall retreat from their positions of control over institutions of higher learning. Only the divorce of government from academic responsibility will prevent institutions of higher learning from becoming completely politicized and their inmates reduced to cogs in a totalitarianized political machine.
Education is, largely, the business of stimulating rigorous intellectual discipline.
But it must limit itself to intellectual discipline and should not impose the discipline of any political party, of any religious group, or even of any national state unless it is plainly advertised as such and is therefore known to be serving necessarily as a part of the indoctrinating apparatus of that party, group, or state. At the time of the original publication, Dr. Dozer was Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 2 Jefferson's Works, Vol. 459461, Washington, 1907.