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A new study of more than twenty thousand full-time faculty at American four-year colleges and universities reveals a professoriate that tilts left, but not at the expense of ideological diversity.
In the study, 55.8% of faculty surveyed described themselves as “liberal” or “far left,” as opposed to 44.3% who called themselves “middle of the road,” “conservative,” or “far right.”
These results are almost identical to those collected the last time this survey was conducted, three years ago. Other findings changed dramatically, however:
- 66.1% said they had a professional responsibility to “help students develop personal values,” an increase of 15.3 points since the previous study.
- 70.2% said the same of helping students to “develop moral character,” a 13.1 point gain.
- 75.2% said they work to “enhance students’ knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups,” a 17.6 point rise.
- 55.5% said they consider it “very important” or “essential” to foster “a commitment to community service” in their students, a 19.1 increase.
The entire editorial staff of the Oregon Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon student newspaper, went on strike yesterday morning.
The background to the strike is somewhat convoluted, but it has its origins in a power struggle between the paper’s student staff and its board of directors, a body that includes students, faculty, and others. In recent weeks, the board has moved to hire a non-student “publisher” to oversee the paper’s operations, and the process of filling the position has left the staff believing that their editorial independence has been compromised.
At a board meeting on Tuesday night, the Emerald staff demanded that the board rescind a job offer made to a candidate for publisher last month, that it open up a national search to fill the position, that it bar anyone who serves as publisher from being simultaneously employed by the university, and that it establish the publisher and the paper’s editor as “equals in the organization,” rather than granting the publisher supervisory power as the board had planned.
After the meeting, board chair Jeanne Long sent editor-in-chief Ashley Chase an email declaring that the board would not “be bullied and blackmailed,” and that an acceptance of the demands “would essentially dissolve the structure of the corporation.” At six o’clock the next morning the staff published what it said was “the last edition of the Emerald we will publish until the board meets the four demands,” and declared itself on strike.
The university’s student government, which provides a portion of the paper’s funding, has released a statement in support of the staffers’ demands, and the Emerald website reports that the board and staff will be meeting on Thursday morning in an attempt to resolve the dispute.
Update: The striking staff of the Emerald has a blog up. As they note, the newspaper’s board has published a non-student edition of the Emerald this morning, with editorial content drawn almost exclusively from the AP wire. We’ll be following this story as it develops, both here and on our twitter feed.
March 6 update: The Emerald staff has ended their strike, and is going into mediation with the board.
For the last four years a growing movement of Harvard medical students has been working to expose and limit pharmaceutical companies’ influence on their university.
So they were perturbed, to say the least, when they discovered a representative of the giant drug company Pfizer photographing students participating in an on-campus demonstration on the issue last fall.
Pfizer admits that the photographer was one of their employees, but refuses to release the man’s name, and contends, as the New York Times paraphrased their statement, that he “photographed the students for personal use.”
At least 149 Harvard medical school faculty are on the Pfizer payroll in one way or another, and the company finances two research projects and a continuing medical education program on campus. In addition, Pfizer made donations of $350,000 to the medical school last year.
The pharmaceutical industry is already the subject of a Senate investigation of their influence on American medical schools, and yesterday Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley sent Pfizer a letter saying he was “greatly disturbed” by the the incident, which, he said, “raise[s] concerns that Pfizer is attempting to intimidate young scholars from professing their independent views on issues that they think are critical to science, medicine, and the health and welfare of American taxpayers.”
Grassley asked Pfizer to provide him with an accounting of all payments the company made to Harvard medical faculty since the beginning of 2007, and of all corporate “communications [including photos] regarding Harvard medical students demonstrating and/or agitating against pharmaceutical influence in medicine” since the beginning of 2008.
He gave them a one-week deadline to respond, and a Pfizer representative said on Tuesday that it would “fully cooperate with Senator Grassley’s request for information.”
I wrote a brief response on Wednesday to the article “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors” by Ellen Greenberger et al, promising more soon. Then the NYU occupation hit, and I didn’t get back to it as quickly as I’d hoped. But the article, which appeared in the November 2008 issue of The Journal of Youth and Adolescence, is riding a wave of media attention, and there’s a lot more that needs saying about it.
The crucial problem with the article is in its methodology. It’s not at all clear that it measures what it claims to be measuring, and it presents its findings in such a way as to seriously mislead the casual reader as to what the students it surveyed actually said. I’ll dig into those issues in an upcoming post.
For now, though, I’d like to point out one narrow fact: Greenberger’s findings are based on an extremely unrepresentative sample of American college students.
As many academics do, Greenberger and her colleagues found their research subjects by advertising among students on their home campus — they put up flyers asking students to participate in a study, and gave a questionnaire to the students who responded. In this case, the home campus was University of California at Irvine, a highly-competitive university whose entering students have an average high school GPA of 3.95.
For this particular study, the researchers posted flyers in the UC Irvine Social Sciences Human Subjects Laboratory, and posted a notice at the lab’s website.
As they report in their article, these postings brought in 466 student participants. Of those students, 364, or 78.1%, were women, and 269, or 57.7%, were of Asian or Pacific Islander descent. Nearly all were social science majors.
The sample, then, was unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, and unrepresentative in ways that the authors acknowledge may have influenced the study’s results — they note, for instance, that students of Asian descent returned higher scores on measures of what they call “Academic Entitlement” than non-Asians, and that students who were not born in the US returned higher scores than those who were.
So this was a study of social science majors at an extremely selective, extremely competitive research university. It was a sample that was demographically unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. And yet its findings have been eagerly reported as evidence of what American students, as a group, believe.
All of this is significant to our interpretation of the study, but it’s just a lead-up to my favorite tidbit about the way the sample was assembled. More on that in my next post.
(If you’d like to be notified about that post when it goes up, feel free to start following our twitter feed.)
Note: I’ve put up a second response to the Greenberger article, addressing the skewed demographics of the sample it relied upon, here.
A journal article by Ellen Greenberger et al, “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” got a big writeup in the New York Times this morning, and it’s been making a pretty serious splash online as a result.
In a nutshell, the article explores what it refers to as the “sense of entitlement” that many professors believe students today exhibit. It reports the findings of a study in which students at one California university were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with fifteen statements regarding their “expectations of special consideration and accommodation by teachers,” and examines some of the factors that may underly such expectations.
I read the study this afternoon, and I’ll have more to say about it tomorrow, but for tonight I just want to highlight one aspect of how it’s been reported. Here’s a passage from the Times article that summed up what many journalists took away from the study:
A third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
Pretty startling, I’ll admit. But it’s a serious misrepresentation of the original article’s findings. Here’s why.
As I noted above, the folks who conducted the study asked students to respond to fifteen statements designed to determine their level of “Academic Entitlement.” Two of those fifteen statements were these:
If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B.
If I have completed most of the reading for a course, I deserve a B in that course.
For each statement, students were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, slightly agreed, slightly disagreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed. The study’s authors aggregated all of the “strongly agree, agree, and slightly agree” responses into a percentage, and that’s the percentage the Times used as the basis for the passage quoted above.
Let’s set aside for the moment whether the phrase “If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B” means the same thing as “I expect B’s just for attending lectures.” I’m not certain that it does, but let that go for right now. The more important point is that the Times reporter, following the lead of the study’s authors, interpreted even slight agreement with the first statement as identical to the second.
There are other problems with the study, but this is a big one.
studentactivism.net 
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