Monday, May 01, 2006
News flash: professors volunteer to say George W. Bush is a "failure"
In the manufacturing of "news," there are few exercises more mockable than the surveying of college professors to see what they think of a Republican president. What's next? A survey of Wall Street analysts to see what they think of Eliot Spitzer? We're not holding our breath. But if there were such a survey, what are the chances that the Associated Press would run a story on it?
67 percent of the 744 professors responding to the survey conducted by Siena College's Research Institute said they doubted Bush "has a realistic chance of improving his rating" during his remaining time in office.
The results of the survey were made public Monday by the Albany-area research institute....
Of those professors responding to the survey, which was sent in February to history and political science departments at 2,800 colleges and universities, 58 percent said that if the Bush presidency were to end now, it would rate a failure while 24 percent said it would rate "below average." Two percent said it would rate as "great" while another 5 percent said "near great." Eleven percent said the Bush presidency would rate "average."
Suffice it to say that only 744 professors responded to a survey sent to 2,800 colleges and universities. If we assume, say, 10 professors of history and politics reasonably qualified to respond to such a survey at each such college or university, these results are the self-selected opinions of approximately 2.7% of those who might have responded. How can we possibly know that this is a reasonable method for sampling any population, even professors? Siena College Research Institute describes its study as an "expert opinion poll." "Expert" apparently modifies "opinion," but not poll. It is beyond me that even the Associated Press thinks that this is news.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon May 01, 03:53:00 PM:
Georges Bush is not a failure, the failure was the american people....
By 
Cassandra, at
Mon May 01, 04:46:00 PM:
Obviously we should be paying more attention to important polls like this... like the Gallup poll that shows Americans still think the economy is getting worse, all facts to the contrary.
By , at
Tue May 02, 06:28:00 PM:
This brings up an interesting question - since university professors are mostly liberal, why don't more conservatives go into teaching? It's the same thing I was asking last year, when all the judges were liberal.
