Why it's crucial that parents examine college faculties

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SHOCKING IMBALANCE ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, I want to take you to a new study out of the National Association of Scholars. This study found that 39 percent of top-tier liberal arts colleges in the United States don’t have any Republicans on their faculties. This study also found that the Democrat to Republican ratio was 10.4:1 among 8,688 Ph.D.-holding professors. The ratio is 12.7:1 when you take away the two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis. The report states that the 51 institutions they accounted for in the study are among the top 66 ranked colleges in the U.S. News and World Report.

DR. REEDER: Let me go ahead and tell everyone: This is not a partisan program whereby we are arguing for more Republicans to be elected and selected for the faculties of top-tier colleges — that’s not what this is. We’re trying to look at this from a world and life view.

LOOK TO THE RESURGENCE OF INTEREST IN COMMUNISM

And can I just ask everyone to navigate back to the previous program at the end of last week, an analysis as to why the Communist Manifesto, as modified and implemented by Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, etc., has proven to be destitute, has proven to actually produce gulags, prisons, famines, etc.

However, now, it’s cool again. The reason it’s cool again with the students is because of the teachers of our students in the colleges. Who are the teachers? Well, in the days of the ‘60s, that eventually promoted the step-child of the Communist Manifesto, socialism, and made cool all the communist dictators such as Castro and Chez Guevara and others.

They were declared to be cool and that was the way to go because of the abolition of private property, get rid of capitalism, etc. All of that proved to be destructive, as you saw what happened in East Germany, and the Soviet Union, what we see happening in places like Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

Therefore, Marx and those statues were torn down but all of those promoters of the Communist Manifesto went into what, today, is the cultural elite that are shaping the minds of young people. They’re in the media, they’re in the entertainment world and they are in the academy. They teach in the universities, which is where the students are getting this view of Marx and Marxism and the Communist Manifesto and it’s all being taught without the historical realities of what it actually has produced wherever it has gone.

WHO IS TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN?

Please, folks, listen to what I’m about to say. We do this program in order to communicate a Gospel-based Christian world and life view. Why do we do that? Because the way that you view life will determine the way you live life and the way you view life is directly related to your teachers.

Here’s what Jesus said: When all is said and done, the pupil will be like the teacher. Here’s what David said in Psalm 1: “Do not walk in the counsel, the teaching, of the ungodly. Do not stand in the path of sinners and do not sit in the seat of the scorner.”

You need to understand who you choose to teach, what you listen to and how you listen to it is of direct importance and, parents, who you choose to teach your child. When you decide to send your child to a university, do you ever take a look at who makes up the faculty of that university? Do you know who’s going to be teaching your child? All of those teachers have a world and life view.

WHY DO WE NEED TO BE WARY OF AN IMBALANCE?

Now, this analysis that was just done that you referred to, Tom, points out that, in the top-tier — now, we’re not talking about offshoot, private, elite colleges, we’re talking about top-tier universities where most of our cultural shapers are being shaped — you are almost 11 times more likely to have a registered Democrat. Why are they registered Democrats?

I was just listening to an interview of Hillary Clinton. It has recently been counted by one social scientist that she has given 42 reasons why she lost the election. One of them was this. Here was the question that was asked of her: “Did you lose because you are too much of a capitalist?” In other words, “Would you have been elected if you had been more of a socialist than you actually were?”

Her answer was basically yes. She said, even in a place like an Iowa primary, if you don’t distance yourself from capitalism, you can’t be elected. The primary is what? That is a party election.

EVEN CLINTON ADMITS THE DEMOCRATS HAVE SKEWED TO REJECT CAPITALISM

What she is saying is, within the Democratic party, we have arrived at a place that, if you are a capitalist, you are not going to win the primary. And, by the way, I was too much of a capitalist to win the election but, when you get to the primary, you’ve got to distance yourself from capitalism.

Well, where you do you go to? You go to socialism, which is leading you to where? Communism. And what is the basic premise of communism? The abolition of private property and, to abolish private property, you’ve got to take private property which means the state controls the property and the state controls the economy.

Even the most communistic state doesn’t have true communism and that’s China. China has a market economy with a communist government. They found out that the communist economic system just doesn’t work and so they’ve tried to amalgamate it, but that’s not what’s being taught in our universities.

In our universities, this redistribution of wealth mantra is to seize property, seize wealth with the power of taxation, the power of the government and redistribute it. That’s what’s being taught in the college. And, many times, we as parents thoughtlessly send our children off thinking we’re sending them to the universities of the ‘40s, the ‘50s, the ‘60s and, in reality, we’re sending them to the universities that the children of the ‘60s now teach in.

PARENTS, RESEARCH YOUR CHILD’S SCHOOL AND TEACHERS

TOM LAMPRECHT: Parents also might want to consider what the major will be of their child. The report noted that STEM subjects like chemistry, economics, mathematics and physics have a lower Democrat to Republican ratio than social sciences and humanities.

For example, the report could not find a single Republican with an exclusive appointment to fields like gender studies, Africana studies and peace studies. This is out of the top 66 ranked colleges in the United States.

DR. REEDER: Let’s also make the analysis that, in the survey, in the military academies, it’s almost even, with Democrat identification a little bit higher. You pull out the military academies, now you go from 11 times to 13 times higher.

If your child goes to school and walks into a classroom, it is almost 14 times more likely that there’s going to be someone who embraces, at best, a socialist agenda and, likely, the very principles that undergirded the Communist Manifesto that was written by Karl Marx and funded by Engels.

DON’T FORGET YOUR CHURCH TEACHERS MATTER, TOO

Folks, what we’re trying to tell you is this: Ideas matter. Let me put it this way, you respond to things about the way you feel about things. The way you feel about things is conditioned by the way you think about things and the way you think about things is directly related to your teachers.

Therefore, please choose your teachers well. Get under sound preaching every Lord’s Day, get in a good discipleship group with a good teacher, read the right things and go to the right conferences.

And make sure your children are being taught by teachers who will shape their world and life view according to the principles and precepts of God’s Word with utter reliance upon the power of the Spirit of God with their eyes fixed on Jesus, Who came to save them from their sins and Who is coming again to bring us to a new heavens and a new earth and, until we get there, will teach us how to take every thought captive unto the obedience of Jesus Christ.

COMING UP TUESDAY: LOCAL GOVERNMENTS MAKE SHOCKING DECISIONS

TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, on Tuesday’s edition of Today in Perspective, I want to take you to a story and, if you thought sanctuary cities was a bad idea, I think you’re going to think this next story is really a bad idea.

HARRY REEDER: Tom, it is interesting to me how either disconnected people are, disinterested people are or apathetic they are in the matter of local government and I mean, directly, city government. Let’s take a look at a premier city in our nation and an unbelievable decision that’s about to be enacted unless the state government puts some type of a restraint on this. It is almost unthinkable.

Dr. Harry L. Reeder III is the Senior Pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham.

This podcast was transcribed by Jessica Havin, editorial assistant for Yellowhammer News, who has transcribed some of the top podcasts in the country and whose work has been featured in a New York Times Bestseller.