Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch, and in today's episode, we're asking the question, are colleges done with brainwashing? This is prompted by an article I read recently in the Wall Street Journal about a curriculum flowchart that is now being utilized at Texas Tech University. One at which, at least reformers of higher education hope will become a standard moving forward. Here's kind of the story. Texas Tech's university's chancellor, Brandon Creighton, new to his role, issued a memo recently with a flowchart helping professors determine whether particular sources and material belong in their classroom. The flowchart starts with a simple question. Is this material necessary and relevant to the subject you're teaching? If the answer is no, you don't use it. If the answer is yes, there are other questions you have to answer to decide whether or not ultimately, you can use it. Now, what's prompting this flowchart is the belief that colleges have increasingly become incubators of far left ideology. And more than that, they've stopped teaching teaching students how to think, and instead are teaching them to think. And that's troubling on a lot of levels, particularly as parents. my oldest son is looking at colleges, making a choice as a high school senior. So I can tell you my concern is that I don't want to send him to a place that has a secret agenda to brainwash him to their particular worldview. I don't mind him being exposed to critical ideas or to be challenged to think well or to defend what he thinks. But professors are increasingly using their platform and their classroom control to push their own ideology so that an engineering class becomes about woke ideology, a mathematics class becomes about the professor's political worldview. And so what Texas Tech is doing is trying to make math about math, engineering about engineering. And for that reason, I am very excited about the future of this tool being implemented in higher education. It makes me think of something Jesus said. You know, there's a scene in the Gospel of Matthew where some people want to get Jesus in trouble. So they say to him, jesus, should we pay taxes to Caesar? They're wanting him to drive a wedge between his teaching and the teaching of the larger culture. And Jesus just hits them with this gem. He says, hey, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to give to God what is God's. His point is like, look, government exists for a reason, and you should pay your taxes for those reasons, but government does not deserve your allegiance. Here's how I think that verse applies to Texas Tech and the conversation about colleges. Colleges need to exist in the lane they are supposed to exist in. Their job is to teach young people how to think. Their job is to prepare young people to be good citizens and productive employees or entrepreneurs in the larger world. They teach skills, they teach disciplines. They teach, philosophy. They do not brainwash kids. Parents don't send their kids to college so that they come out with the worldview of some professor imposing their political ideology on their child. That isn't why teenagers go to college. It isn't why they Colleges exist. And I can't help but feel as a pastor that what colleges are trying to do is become all encompassing institutions that not only prepare you for a career, not only teach you a skill, but also shape you morally, shape you ideologically. And when colleges try to do that, they're stepping out of their lane. Look, going and getting a PhD in Sociology is equips you to teach sociology. It does not make you a moral philosopher. It does not make you a thought leader. And when that sociology professor seeks to become that, he or she is stepping beyond the bounds of what they're supposed to do. Now look, I think churches need to do a better job of speaking up about how the gospel impacts how we think about the issues of the world. And perhaps, maybe if churches were doing a better job of that, we wouldn't be worried about students being brainwashed because we would have taught them how to think. But we'll get to that issue in a different episode. For now, I'm simply hopeful that colleges will be comfortable being colleges, that parents will be parents, churches will be churches, and that we can all move forward knowing what we're supposed to be doing and what we're not supposed to be doing. Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up, Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. And while you're here, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get further content or even download the CCC app, where you'll find even more resources to help you grow in your faith and relationship with Jesus Christ.

Have an article you’d like Zach to discuss? Email us at wakeup@ccchapel.com!