PoliTech Is at It Again, Releases New Video

PoliTech, a Texas Tech organization known for a 2014 viral video showing college students’ limited knowledge about American government and politics, has posted a second video.

“Politically Challenged: Texas Tech Edition” has been viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube, and has elicited much criticism from various quarters. In the new video, the premise is the same, but the location is different. This time, PoliTech members visited George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., 30 minutes away from Washington, D.C., to ask students questions about their knowledge of past and present political figures.

The results in Fairfax were shockingly similar to those in Lubbock, said Raul Cevallos, president of PoliTech.

“To be honest, we were expecting the responses in Virginia to be about the same, but we were surprised it was that bad considering the university we visited is so close to D.C. and the fact that it’s an election year,” Cevallos said.

Most of the students interviewed on camera could not put a name to pictures of prominent political figures such as Joe Biden and Ronald Reagan, but immediately recognized a picture of celebrity Kim Kardashian. One participant stated, “Don’t know, don’t really care about politics,” after failing to recognize the current vice president of the United States.

Courtney Plunk, the interviewer in the first Politically Challenged video, said visiting George Mason University was an important step for PoliTech.

“The new video opens the door to different audiences,” Plunk said. “It was filmed in a different state, so that shows that we are acknowledging the fact that maybe some students don’t know as much as they think they do about politics.”

The video filmed at George Mason University was sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Cevallos said the video echoes the results of recent studies conducted by ACTA.

According to the ACTA, only 18 percent of 1,100 liberal-arts colleges and universities surveyed require students to take even one course in American history or government before they graduate.

Although Cevallos thinks the average college student is not as well-informed as he or she should be, he pointed to a trend he finds even more alarming.

“The whole point we are trying to make is, it’s not just the education to blame,” Cevallos said. “It’s also the media and the distraction from the real world that it provides.”

About Breann Robinson

Senior journalism major and Investigative Reporter for the Hub@TTU. Really good at making friends, really bad at math.