If I wrote a post every time the Chronicle of Higher Education breathlessly endorsed shoddy anti-student “research” I’d never have time to do anything else, but the most recent example is too ridiculous to pass up.

The front page of the Chronicle’s website currently carries a headline reading “College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics.” Click through to the article in question, and you find the same headline repeated with a qualifier: “Study Finds.”

But the “study” in question, an annual survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found no such thing. In fact, the Chronicle‘s eleven-word headline misrepresents the survey’s findings in three different ways:

First, the survey didn’t find that college makes students more liberal. What it found was that people who graduated from college were more liberal than people who didn’t, which any statistician will tell you isn’t remotely the same thing.

Second, the survey didn’t address the issue of whether college makes students smarter about civics. It examined the “civic knowledge” of various demographic groups, but didn’t make any effort to track what individual students learned in college.

Third, the survey’s definition of “civic knowledge” encompasses issues that bear little relationship to civics as that term is commonly understood — or as it’s used in the Chronicle piece. The survey’s subjects range from Sputnik to the moral philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, with lengthy digressions into military history and economic theory.

The ISI, which the Chronicle calls “an independent group with a tradition-minded view of issues,” is in reality a right-wing think tank. Its first president was William F. Buckley, its current president is a former Reagan administration domestic policy advisor, and its website prominently features a Glenn Beck video clip. The group publishes a version of the same tendentious survey every year — why the Chronicle is treating it as news is beyond me.