Educated or indoctrinated?

The Manhattan Institute recently released a report analyzing the faculty composition at 10 of the 15 top-ranked schools in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Public Affairs Programs. According to the telling report, “Among tenure-track faculty, left-leaning faculty outnumber their right-leaning peers … by about 9-to-1. Among limited-term faculty, the leftward tilt is … about 6-to-1.”

For decades, the halls of elite academia have been filled with professors whose life lessons include little when it comes to producing goods, services, profits, and wealth. Instead, they constantly conform to the left-leaning groupthink necessary to secure their tenure. This leftist perspective—unchallenged and insulated from the rigors of practical results—has percolated through most public and private colleges, with each academic generation spreading its dogma to the next.

And this conditioning has clearly spread to the mainstream media. On election night, the pundits at CNN ran the exit poll numbers on states and counties and ranked them by “non-college education.” Then, as soon as results showed Vice President Kamala Harris enjoying most of her wins in counties with the more college-exposed, the pundits—collegians all—switched the labels to “educated versus non-educated voters.”

Their cringeworthy conclusion is that the “non-educated” majority of voters prevailed over the “educated” minority. Somehow, their loop of closed reasoning conflates education with intelligence. These “educated” analysts implied that the millions of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and entrepreneurs along with the highly qualified tradesmen and business owners who voted for Donald Trump and a Republican majority in Congress deserve to be categorized as “non-educated.” It’s no wonder the smug, self-assured media has lost the public trust.

On college campuses, young minds are exposed to a panoply of theories and ideologies rarely found outside the classroom. The latest election results prove that when such so-called progressive theories and ideologies are foisted upon the real world, people who work for a living have little use for them. Instead of calling their kids “college-educated,” it would be more accurate to say they’ve been “college-exposed.”

The Associated Press reports that the more years college students are exposed, the more likely they will vote liberal. Cocooned in crying rooms and safe spaces and studying a curriculum that embraces the 1619 Project with a hyperfocus on gender identity and victimhood, the college-exposed become more left-leaning.

Most disturbing is that students are taught that anyone who disagrees isn’t simply wrong but is irredeemably racist, sexist, bigoted, and ignorant. Exposure to college currently leaves students closed to dissenting perspectives and ill-equipped to apply critical analysis. Today’s students are unable to support their views with reason and facts. Instead, they display suspicion, condescension, and even hostility to those who haven’t been similarly conditioned.

Ironically, the liberalism that is entrancing too many of today’s college students runs contrary to the classic definition of a liberal arts education. Unlike the merely college-exposed, a true liberal arts graduate demonstrates the ability to critically analyze data and think independently. The one-sided exposure to progressive ideologies evident at most colleges today constitutes an expensive academic fraud, which holds little value in the real world.

For our society to progress, we must rely on leadership from those mentally disciplined enough to sort through multiple proposals from multiple perspectives. We need liberal arts graduates who have been imbued with the knowledge of what’s worked before and to recognize when history has been revised and when the failed ideas of the past have merely been repackaged as Marxist critical race theory, merit-rejecting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or virtue-victimizing intersectionality.

Thankfully, for the college-bound and the families supporting their education, there is a mentally and spiritually healthy alternative: smaller faith-based colleges, where open-minded faculty are flocking and where they’ll find a true liberal arts education.

A true liberal arts education steeps students in the distilled wisdom of thousands of years of Western civilization. They are imparted with the critical thinking skills to honestly research a topic from a breadth of sources, to accept the worthwhile and reject the unsound.

A true and valid liberal arts education is offered under the mantle of understanding the unchanging relationship between God and mankind. That it is the unchanging nature of man to be easily duped, and that we are apt to repeat mistakes outside a framework of moral guidance. That there is indeed nothing new under the sun, and it is our obligation as humans to achieve as best we can within the truth of a universe created by a loving and all-powerful God.

Just as small businesses drive innovation and improvement over corporate monoliths, so will smaller, faith-based colleges and universities restore the integrity of true education in our nation’s higher learning establishment. It is our divine mission to improve our nation’s prospects for faith, family, and liberty.