From the locked away pages
Jan 16 2002
From the locked away pages of The Chronicle of
Higher Education:
The media charlatan is at it again. To say that the methodologies of such a poll are dubious is perhaps one of the most polite understatements I've seen in a while. One polls 151 liberal arts and social science professors then compares the results of carefully selected piece-parts from Gallup polls to conclude "that our universities are less intellectually free than they were even in the McCarthy era." Apparently, we can all safely assume that political inclination does not vary much among disciplines, and that responses from the professors of Business and Economics would have yielded a similar "leftist tilt." Personally, It puzzles me why the ~researchers~ chose to include any faculty. The results to the question about whether "black Americans alive today receive reparations for slavery" could have been skewed even more dramatically if they had included only black non-faculty staff earning an income of less than $15,000 per year. Then Horowitz could have replayed his usual spiel about indoctrination of the innocents by the evil Commie professors. The fact that a variety of Gallop poll results are used as a comparison, and also as the baseline neutral, including that lovely October Gallop poll where 70% of respondents favored funding for an anti-missile defense system, takes the study from entertainingly silly to embarrassingly idiotic. It should be of little surprise that the survey itself is also questionable.
If you aren't familiar with David Horowitz, you can catch some more of his gems over at frontpagemag.com. If I were asked to put together a skit describing who he is, I would take the set of Saturday Night Live's Church Lady, replace Dana Carvey with a once Stalinist, now Balding Jewish fellow and have Noam Chomsky play the part of the mythical Satan. Then I would have intelligent people come in and present logical arguments only to receive the one inevitable response, "Could it be…..SATAN!?"
DAVID HOROWITZ, the former campus radical and now conservative commentator,
has released a survey that he says reveals Ivy League professors to be far out
of step with the American public. Mr. Horowitz acknowledged that the survey
doesn't reflect the entire faculty -- only professors in the humanities and
social sciences were surveyed -- but said his main goal was to raise awareness.
The media charlatan is at it again. To say that the methodologies of such a poll are dubious is perhaps one of the most polite understatements I've seen in a while. One polls 151 liberal arts and social science professors then compares the results of carefully selected piece-parts from Gallup polls to conclude "that our universities are less intellectually free than they were even in the McCarthy era." Apparently, we can all safely assume that political inclination does not vary much among disciplines, and that responses from the professors of Business and Economics would have yielded a similar "leftist tilt." Personally, It puzzles me why the ~researchers~ chose to include any faculty. The results to the question about whether "black Americans alive today receive reparations for slavery" could have been skewed even more dramatically if they had included only black non-faculty staff earning an income of less than $15,000 per year. Then Horowitz could have replayed his usual spiel about indoctrination of the innocents by the evil Commie professors. The fact that a variety of Gallop poll results are used as a comparison, and also as the baseline neutral, including that lovely October Gallop poll where 70% of respondents favored funding for an anti-missile defense system, takes the study from entertainingly silly to embarrassingly idiotic. It should be of little surprise that the survey itself is also questionable.
If you aren't familiar with David Horowitz, you can catch some more of his gems over at frontpagemag.com. If I were asked to put together a skit describing who he is, I would take the set of Saturday Night Live's Church Lady, replace Dana Carvey with a once Stalinist, now Balding Jewish fellow and have Noam Chomsky play the part of the mythical Satan. Then I would have intelligent people come in and present logical arguments only to receive the one inevitable response, "Could it be…..SATAN!?"