Herbert W. Armstrong raised up three liberal arts colleges. He said, “The future welfare and even the existence of civilization is dependent on the educational system” (Plain Truth, December 1965, emphasis mine throughout). If the existence of civilization is at stake, we all need to be deeply concerned about our educational system.

Harvard University began as a ministers’ college. Yet today, Harvard would not be recognized by its own founders! An Esquire magazine article from September 1981 by Timothy Foote titled “The Trouble With Harvard” had this to say of more recent Harvard students:

Many students drift through Harvard with a nagging sense of failure and anxiety. “There is so much freedom here,” says Kiyo Morimoto, “that studies become extracurricular. And you can’t get through if your studies are extracurricular.” … [A] former Radcliffe student … [said] “You didn’t have to go to class because nobody took attendance. And you could get unlimited extensions on papers during the term.”

The article stated:

Morimoto is worried about Harvard’s objections to using authority, all up and down the line: It’s not insisting that students get papers in on time, not insisting on formal meetings between students and advisers, students and tutors, even between students and faculty. “Harvard is deeply ambiguous about authority,” he says, “about being firm and clear and unambiguous. Today all authority is seen as negative.”

But there is some hidden authority at Harvard that needs to be examined.

President Larry Summers was forced to step down from his job at Harvard about two years ago because he made a politically incorrect statement, though many people agreed with what he said. However, he offended an ultra-liberal group of faculty members who would have fired him had he not resigned.

Newsweek magazine wrote an article March 6, 2006, saying it was concerned about the direction Harvard and all colleges and universities were going. But the issue was quickly out of the news and nothing was done—as usual.

So the faculty—at least a segment of it—won’t give Harvard’s president the authority to rule the university. It’s all about who is in charge. Harvard University has the largest endowment of any university in the country at $34.9 billion. That’s almost as much as Bill Gates’s charitable foundation has. How much does that money and power influence the nation?

In 2005 there was a study where 72 percent of college professors admitted to being liberal. Glenn Beck recently made a statement on cnn where he said, “Most of our colleges and universities are only working to spread the political views of some of their professors.” That’s a very condemning statement, yet it rings true in light of the resignation of Larry Summers. He was forced to resign from his job when even most of the students didn’t want to see him go! Now that is some kind of authority. You wouldn’t call that a democracy, would you? You could call it tyranny by a small group of the faculty. And where is it leading us in our education today? Do we really care? With a $34.9 billion endowment you have a hefty influence on the national psyche. That makes it extremely important.

Here’s what was written in Time magazine by Nicholas Lemann at the time Summers stepped down: “One of Summers’ star faculty hires, psychologist Steven Pinker, told the Harvard Crimson just before the resignation announcement that he feared Summers was going to become ‘like every other college president—just a caretaker, a fundraiser, and a mouther of platitudes.’”

This is one of the top educators today making this condemning statement about education and the government in education. That, to me, is very frightening. Are presidents just caretakers, fundraisers, and mouthers of platitudes? Do they just say what they’re told to say? They are certainly not allowed to lead.

If the president had real authority, the public and our political government could hold him accountable. But who can control a shadowy, tyrannical segment of the faculty? It seems that nobody has the power to stop this shamefully destructive force in education!

Let’s not forget that the existence of civilization is at stake.

What is the problem with all these changes that we see in education? For 6,000 years, man has virtually destroyed every part of this creation he was intended to beautify and maintain. For 6,000 years, man has experimented with what is right and wrong. He has educated himself in this knowledge. And the result? Notice what Mr. Armstrong wrote in the August-September 1970 issue of the Plain Truth:

Humanity has produced also a vast mountain of evils. His fund of knowledge is a mixture of good and evil—true and false—he has produced a civilization full of empty lives, discontent, unhappiness, pain and suffering, crime, immorality, broken homes and family life, corruption, injustice, unfairness, violence, pollution, war and death. Yet man refuses to believe the results of his own experiment.

The fruits of our educational experiment are out there for everybody to see, and the experiment has failed! Why? Because there’s a missing dimension in that experiment.

There are a lot of college students today—many more educated people today than ever before. Here is what we wrote in our booklet Education With Vision: “All of this knowledge. All of these unhappy, miserable, violent conditions. Why the paradox?

“For decades now, many of the most educated scientists have insisted that the solution to all of the problems of society could be found if only we were given sufficient knowledge.”

Then they could just solve all the problems, they thought. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

The booklet continues, “It seems the great educators and politicians of the day still cling to such faulty logic. It is time for the great minds of this day to face facts. World evils are increasing as fast as knowledge. Why the paradox? Can the increase in knowledge and the skyrocketing evils possibly be connected?”

The knowledge we have today is not curing our evils, or preventing new ones. Something is wrong with our knowledge and education. And do you know what it is? This world’s educators have just closed their eyes to the great Creator God who gave us a Book telling us how to live—the foundation of all knowledge. We do have to figure out certain things ourselves, but the Bible is the foundation of knowledge!

Education today doesn’t teach us how to solve our problems, and they will not permit the Bible into the classroom. We’ve allowed that to happen, and now we’re paying the price. The day of reckoning is really facing us now, since our number-one problem is that of human survival.

Experimenting in education is deadly. Now, when we’re more educated than ever before, we face the most dangerous times ever!

Harvard began its history with the heaviest emphasis on God and the Bible. Today, that institution scorns and totally rejects the Bible as God’s inspired Word. There is an awesome and revealing lesson in this history. Are these educators humble enough to learn from their own history?

The founders of Harvard also taught that there is an evil spirit being who fights to get control of what we teach our people. That too is biblical (2 Corinthians 4:4). If these founders were resurrected today, they would believe there is a deadly hidden authority behind even the small group of faculty directors.

The original Harvard faculty would have seen all their “freedom” today as the most horrifying kind of bondage. They would have seen precise design behind this “higher education.”

Where is education taking us today? Request our free booklet Education With Vision for the answer.

Surveys have shown that 95 percent of our students believe in God when they enter college as freshmen. When they graduate four years later, 95 percent of them are agnostics or atheists.

That is the power of education—right or wrong. Those are alarming statistics.

How could that happen? The New Testament states that “their eyes they have closed” (Matthew 13:15). Colleges and universities will allow many wild theories to be taught, but they reject Bible instruction—even though many of them began as religious institutions. They have closed their eyes and minds.

Is that “higher education” or the worst kind of ignorance? How can closing your eyes be called education? Isn’t education supposed to open your eyes? (Request our booklet The Proof of the Bible. All of our literature is free.)

As Harvard goes, so goes American education—and the nation itself.