Is Zogby Interactive even a scientific poll? Their results were absolutely terrible in both the 2004 and 2006 election seasons, IIRC.
I own a fabulous bit of ephemera. It is a pamphlet produced in the Thirties. "The Red Hand of the Professor". Or something like that. I'll have to dig it out.
Could conservatives be any more excited about using the power of government to fix social ills?
If leftist proselytizing in colleges is such a problem, how did Bush almost get elected? I don't think academia has been trending further left than it was 10 or 20 years ago. I guess red-blooded American college students are just toooooo smart for those commie perfessers.
From my own experience in evangelical Baptist churches, the propaganda against secular college education is insane. They tell you that all your professors are godless atheists controlled by Satan, and that you must guard your heart against everything they say. As an instructor, it helps that I know the Bible a lot better than most of my students. When I've needed to, I'll happily take a particularly angry student aside and ask, if they're having trouble reading secular literature, why they chose to attend a secular college. They will find many professors far more hostile to religion than I am, and it will get worse for them. Are they thinking about transferring?
I am happy to have religious students in my class, and I count on them to speak openly about their own doctrines, but, when the question is put to them, it turns out very few of them can spit back anything except vague, hostile sentiments about sinners. "Yes, I know you are against sin, but what do you believe about God?" They don't know. If their religious services have become anything like the ones at my parents' church, they're not being taught anything about theology or even their religious texts; they just know what groups they're supposed to fear and hate.
5: This is worrisome to me. I'm somewhat isolated from this by being in a discipline where it really doesn't come up. But from where I sit, I see a lot of propaganda against (secular) education and educational institutions, and precious little of this `dangerous academic bias'.
Just a cotton-pickin' minute. The site says that 91% of conservatives worry about professorial bias, and 3% of liberals. And so does 58% of the sample.
If everyone in the sample is either liberal or conservative, that means the sample is 5:3 conservative. Doesn't it? I call provisional shenanigans, until someone disproves my arithmetic.
Assuming I'm right, look, here's why: It's an opt-in online poll conducted over a couple of days. Anyone think the conservative were more motivated to opt-in?
It's an opt-in online poll? Okay then, it's bullshit. Who cares what the composition of it was.
Oops! Didn't see that it was opt-in. Nevermind!
7: It says 91% of very conservative adults worry about bias.
Ah, fair enough, Drewtok. They're not giving us enough information to figure out the breakdown of the sample.
And the methodological statement didn't sound like, say, a Lou Dobbs poll...
What percentage of adults are worried about bias in the polls about bias in academics?
And the methodological statement didn't sound like, say, a Lou Dobbs poll...
No; they solicited a sample of their sample. But people still had to opt in. So I'm still guessing then that people are more likely to opt into polls they feel strongly about than those they don't.
Can't you see what you're doing to America, neil?
You sign up to take Zogby Interactive polls and sometimes they invite you to one. You can't solicit the particular poll, but the entire body of respondents is people who signed up to be polled. This is where you sign up.
Oh, and they don't tell you what the poll is about until you've already started.
So as I piece it together, you need to sign up, then you may or may not be picked for the "panel." The panel is alleged to represent the adult population of the U.S. (Along what axes, we don't know. Racial? Educational? Geographical? Ideological?) Then for a given poll, they take a presumably random sample of the panel to invite. Then you have to decide that sometime in the next four days you're willing to take the time to respond.
If that's so, I see two fishy steps -- the initial signing up, which demonstrates a civic or discursive involvement well beyond that of voting, which is already beyond the norm. Then the choosing to respond to the poll, which says that you'd rather be doing that than e.g. commenting on Unfogged.
The proof would be in the pudding, I guess -- do these methods do a good job of predicting anything?
19: Okay, that makes it more nearly honest. But presumably, once you've said you'll respond, you can decide at that point whether you'll finish your response or not.
It's astonishing not that so many people believe that the bias exists, but that so many people believe that it's a problem.
How exactly would they like this problem to be solved?
This depresses me. Let's watch some cute marsupial antics.
They ask all the tedious age, racial, educational, geographical, ideological, military, "are you a NASCAR fan" questions in each and every poll (probably because they don't want to assume that email addresses are read by only one person).
In every poll, political or not, they ask you a first-page political survey (Did you vote last time? For who? Do you approve of Bush?) before they get into anything more. Sometimes there's not anything more, sometimes it's about weird stuff like astrology or a particular issue, as in this case. Then, at the end, demographics.
Oh, I don't think that's all that surprising. That's about labeling -- "bias" is bad. If you said, do you think that professors have political opinions? and do you think that's a problem? you might get a different answer.
Funny you'd suggest that remedy, Ned. I escaped to this.
My guess is that readers of Unfogged are more likely than other people to enjoy describing their opinions to some computer.
When I was teaching, somebody who had never been to one of my classes (and who had never even met me) accused me of politically indoctrinating my students -- the sole basis basis for the accusation being the fact that I am largely liberal, and was a professor.
Never mind that it was a class in mathematics...
Now that I think about it, math does have a well-known liberal bias.
Dogs and cats, yawn. I like using Youtube to see how animals I've never seen before act.
Oh my God, could kittens be any more adorable?
Here's a trite observation: what does it say about the conviction of evangelicals (for instance) of the rightness of their beliefs that they're so frantic to insulate their children from contrary opinions?
I gave a high school commencement address the basic theme of which was American colleges as instruments of Satan. I believe a "den of serpents" metaphor was prominantly featured. It was pretty awesome; I wish I'd saved the text.
Even if the poll's a piece of total crap, it's still going to get trotted out in the NYT and WaPo and become an Issue in the Elections. Just watch.
What I love about these kinds of discussions is how often I get people from the internet commenting or emailing to the effect of "you are what's wrong with academia today! I can only begin to imagine the horror that is your classroom!" As if I were exactly the same in a classroom setting about moldy literature than I am in an internet conversation about body image.
People are stupid.
Fucking hell, am I glad the small amount of university teaching I've done was at a British university.
This seems pertinent: Love on Campus
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/love-deresiewicz.html
"The alcoholic, embittered, writer-manqué English professor who neglects his family and seduces his students is a figure of creative sterility, and he is creatively sterile because he loves only himself. Hence his vanity, pomposity, and selfishness; his self-pity, passivity, and resentment. Hence his ambition and failure. And thence his lechery, for sleeping with his students is a sign not of virility but of impotence: he can only hit the easy targets; he feeds on his students' vitality; he can't succeed in growing up."
OUCH. (Via Volokh Conspiracy)
30: See, I'd shoot that tortoise. How dare it hassle cats.
I love cats, but that tortoise rules.
31 - Because part of their ideology is that the secular world is inherently corrupting? That's why there's a long tradition of fundamentalist detachment from secular politics, one I hope we return to real soon now.
Wow. Nobody expects the rfts pwn!
I thought my wombat link would be what made rfts say "Woooo!". Oh well, keep trying.
Oh, good lord, I completely missed the wombat link. Quality wombat action! In the afterlife, there is going to be a wombat park where the wombats like to go to hang out and have play dates with other wombats, and they will always be excited to see me and squabble over who gets to hug me around the leg first. Just so you know.
Maybe I'm just fooling myself, but I'm sure at least one of my cats would have fucked that tortoise up rather than running away.
PK says "omg, the wombat is so cute! It's ay-dorable! But it's not as cute as a mouse. Right?"
That boy needs a chinchilla. If there were ever a wombat-sized mouse in the world, it's a chinchilla.
Okay, if y'all are diggin' the wombat, you should get Wombat goes Walkabout. About a wombat that digs alot and thinks alot. Trust me on this one. (Those of you with kids, anyway.)
20: I happened to take that poll -- I signed up to get Zogby polls a while back, and have taken maybe 6 or 7? They do take basic demographic information with every poll (including "how often do you shop at Wal-Mart" and "do you consider yourself a NASCAR fan", but not "how often do you conduct animal sacrifices" or "do you consider yourself a heroin fan").
Whoops, failed to read the rest of the comments before responding. I'm banned.
rfts you should make sure to wear long pants in the afterlife. Wombats have powerful claws, for burrowing.
I find these videos interesting because wombats, for example, look like groundhogs, so I thought they would behave like groundhogs. But they seem to behave more like dogs or pigs.
That wombat looked morbidly obese to me.
It may have been taking anabolic steroids, as you can tell from the background music.