To the administration, yes. Not to the students (except perhaps morally).
The University decides what you are required to learn to get the credential, the wider society determines what the credential is worth, and influences the institution to produce more or fewer graduates of the various specializations.
The students get to pick which institution they go to and which credential they will try to get, and then they must learn the material that is required. The computer science department is not trying to get students to "vote", in fact their interests generally align with having fewer, but more promising, students.
The institution, to the degree that it desires revenue, generally desires more graduates, because each pays tuition, but as highly qualified graduates as possible, so as not to tarnish the brand.
I agree, elite schools (like MIT) have traditionally grounded their curricula upon a basis set of essential principles like "great books". At MIT, those were calculus through diff eq, physics, and engineering basics like statics and dynamics.
However, since around 1990, I suspect high school AP courses routinely overlap with said principle courses. So dropping MIT's four course intro to EECS probably became unavoidable after so many freshmen with AP course credits expressed frustration that taking those four EECS courses ("the MIT way") duplicated courses they'd already taken for credit in high school.
That is probably true. I think this is always a problem for elite schools, because you will always get the really motivated students who started a subject early and had a genuine interest in it, and these kids will never need what you are teaching in the introductory courses. The SICP approach was deep enough that anyone could find something to learn in it, if the teachers were willing to let the students run ahead at their own pace.
They also could have taken it as an inspiration to really make those courses advanced introductions to basic topics again (starting from counting, for example), and show that the AP course still had to leave out one or two interesting things, and how wide each of those fields really is.
The University decides what you are required to learn to get the credential, the wider society determines what the credential is worth, and influences the institution to produce more or fewer graduates of the various specializations.
The students get to pick which institution they go to and which credential they will try to get, and then they must learn the material that is required. The computer science department is not trying to get students to "vote", in fact their interests generally align with having fewer, but more promising, students.
The institution, to the degree that it desires revenue, generally desires more graduates, because each pays tuition, but as highly qualified graduates as possible, so as not to tarnish the brand.