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Conservative column too liberal with numbers

Stephen Kershnar’s column (Dec. 15) headlined, “Left has an advantage with higher learning” cited very specific statistics from numerous studies purporting to show the overwhelming preponderance of Democratic vs. Republican professors and administrators in higher education, especially in Ivy League schools and several institutions he refers to as their peers, a situation he clearly finds both alarming and distasteful.

While I do not share his concerns about the political affiliation of these or any other college faculty members, I am truly curious to know how the statistics for these studies were gathered. I doubt very much that it is legal to ask for this information in a job application or interview, or that most applicants would see any necessity to volunteer it.

I was also unaware that political party membership is a matter of public record. If it is, did the researchers for these studies actually comb through voter registration rolls to identify every Republican and Democratic employee of the many colleges cited in Kershnar’s column? I find this unlikely in the extreme, calling into question the veracity of the studies Kershnar cites and his resulting conclusion that American colleges are some kind of hotbed of liberal indoctrination of today’s youth.

I don’t know what the college experiences were like for any of this paper’s other readers, but I don’t recall any of my professors ever teaching their courses in a way that attempted to sway my political thinking. Perhaps that’s because I graduated from the University of Georgia, rather than any of the “elite” institutions whose purportedly liberal biases so alarm Kershnar.

Questions of universities’ political bias aside, I think the important point here is for readers to always question not only sources of information, but the legitimacy of research techniques for any studies cited in them. As a principal of mine once said in reference to a state mandate for reading teachers to use research-based techniques: “I can do research in my basement.” In other words, not all research — or conclusions — are equally valid.

Mary Rees is a Dunkirk resident.

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