Dr. Walter Wendler, who leads West Texas A&M University, told American Family Radio most colleges and universities “lean away” from traditional beliefs and reasoning, and “lean to” the other side of the political spectrum.
In other words, most college professors mock tradition and the family, and embrace atheism and communist revolution.
Dr. Wendler's observation is not news to generations of middle-class parents whose children returned home from college quoting Mao and Marx, and telling their parents capitalism ruins everything.
A survey of the 2023 graduating class at Harvard University found 65% of the graduates self-identify as progressive or very progressive, according to a New York Times column by David Brooks.
“Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students,” he wrote, “gives them the most prestigious launchpads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.”
Among those same Harvard students, Brooks also wrote, 82% of those self-identified progressives don’t know anyone who believes differently.
Wendler, who is open about his Christian faith at West Texas, has worked in higher education for most of his career. Before that career, he obtained a master’s degree in architecture from a famously liberal campus, the University of California-Berkely.
Talking about what he has witnessed over the years, Wendler urged the AFR audience to make sure children are well-grounded in their Christian faith before parents drop them off on the college campus.
"That has to start at home. Too many of us, as Christians, we expect the church to do that for us,” he observed. “And the church will help us. But our fundamental responsibility as parents is to ‘reproduce’ our beliefs in our children."
In the radio interview, Wendler also discussed what he called a disturbing trend in higher ed. More and more graduates are hitting the job market with a degree that failed to prepare them for landing a job.
"A lot of times that's another thing that drives cynicism,” he warned. “People are paying for the degrees, and then they get out and they find out that the degree has not prepared them for vocational work of any kind.”
