...by the blogging burst, it's a cold, rainy, shitty day, and I am sitting in front of my gas log with all my creatures, variously reading the NYT and WaPo, a book on which I am writing a review for a journal, and various amounts of bloggy goodness. In all of this reading, I think I have found my sentence of the day, from Michael Bérubé's excellent essay on academic freedom:
My colleagues in the Department of Statistics call this kind of thing “Cherry-Picking 101.” But even if the numbers were good, what, in the end, would those numbers tell you? When you know someone’s party registration, what do you know about him or her as a psychologist or a plant botanist or an electrical engineer? An anthropology department stocked with registered Democrats can still be a contentious, unruly, even dysfunctional department, as can an economics department stocked with registered Republicans. And I can assure you that even in English, with all our registered Democrats, no faculty-meeting debate—about the direction of the graduate program, about the finalists for a new assistant professorship, about a new initiative from the dean’s office—gets resolved when someone stands up and says, “people, people—why are we arguing about the staffing of undergraduate courses and the desirability of hiring a medievalist? Surely we can all find common ground in hating George Bush.”
Still, conservatives insist that they are outnumbered 10 or 11 or 30 to 1. Apparently, a comprehensive study of over 55,000 faculty members’ self-descriptions, revealing that liberals outnumber conservatives by a ratio of 2.67 to 1 (48 to 18 percent) at over four hundred institutions, is just not good enough. No, they have to go and look up the party registrations of eighteen hundred faculty members in liberal fields at twenty-one institutions, because the data are tastier when the data are cooked.
That gives me the sillies. Almost as good as Mancur Olsen's "torture the data until it confesses."
Posted by binky at January 29, 2006 11:37 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Blogorama