Having developed a mild-to-moderate case of misanthropy from my own political exploits in college, I was admittedly disinclined to take the Twittersphere’s word for it that a “new study shows” that the higher-education system does not push students to the left. When one of the study’s architects, Professor Logan Strother of Purdue University, even went so far as to suggest that it disproved the assumption of “many conservative pundits and politicians” that “college education ‘indoctrinates’ students into liberal or leftist ideologies,” I felt compelled to at least give it a read. But upon closer examination, my initial suspicions were confirmed: The methodology and findings of Professor Strother’s study should do very little to assuage the fears of conservative critics of higher education.
The study aimed to measure the effect that roommates had on each others’ political development and the effect of the university in general on students’ views. This was done by asking freshmen to classify themselves as “far right,” “conservative,” “middle-of-the-road,” “liberal,” or “far left” once early in the fall semester and then again in the spring semester. Results showed slight shifts away from “liberal” and toward “middle-of-the-road” and “conservative” self-identification. The researchers then performed a two-tailed t-test that found the rightward shift to be statistically significant, leading them to the following conclusion:
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