BYU was the first major university to accept James Talmage's assertions that the earth was probably hundreds of millions of year old and that life have been in parade upon it for much of that time frame. He proposed that a full 40 years before the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee. Neither think tanks at Stanford or Cal had accepted the Darwinian hypothesis of adaptation and survival of the fittest yet.

While many Mormons feel uncomfortable with the Theory of Evolution as postulated by Darwin, few knowledgeable ones and probably no professor at BYU would ever argue that the earth is less than 4.55 billion years old. I think the academic freedom issue probably revolves around the right to choose. It is at liberal universities a womans right to chose to murder a baby, but the dark ages if she choses a husband over an uncommitted jerk.