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.

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.

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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........

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