Letters

From the July 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

John Janora
Calcium, NY

The Impact of Academic Bias

I greatly appreciated Cathy Young’s decision to use data to examine the presence and impact of liberal bias on university campuses (“The Impact of Academic Bias,” April). I would like to clarify and expand on a few of Young’s points using data from the same Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) cited in her column.

Young states “no one has tried tracking changes in student political beliefs over the college years.” Each year, hundreds of colleges and universities use the results of the HERI’s College Student Survey (CSS) to track changes in students’ political beliefs during their college years. The CSS is administered to seniors by universities and asks many of the same political questions that were asked of the same students three or four years earlier when they took the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s Freshman Survey. As mentioned by Young, these questions ask students to state their stances on numerous political issues and also ask students to describe their political ideology. Not surprisingly, during their college careers, students at public universities become, as a whole, more liberal in their ideology and stances on political issues. The increases in the number of seniors who describe themselves as liberals come almost entirely from those students who described their political ideology as “middle of the road” as freshmen. The number of seniors who describe themselves as conservative or far right is almost identical to the number of freshmen who do the same.

Is this shift in political ideology during the college years a result of overtly liberal cultures on university campuses? The results of the 2006 CSS suggest this is not the case. When asked to describe the political climate on their campus, nearly half of all seniors chose the midpoint of an ideology scale ranging from liberal to conservative. The number of seniors who would describe their campus climate as leaning liberal was only slightly higher than the number who indicated conservative. Bear in mind that these were the results from public four-year campuses. The inclusion of two-year and private four-year campuses would very likely have moved these numbers in the conservative direction.

Blake Fry
River Falls, WI

Who Owns Your Body Parts?

Kerry Howley’s article about the use of body parts from corpses seems to decry the fact that donors are not rewarded financially while labs, doctors, and hospitals are (“Who Owns Your Body Parts?” March). I have a question: What can I own after I die? I have agreed to have my body parts used to help others should I die in an auto accident, without compensation of any kind. If a person does that for all events leading to his demise, has he not agreed to forgo payment?

I do not find it objectionable that the medical community is finding prosperity in dealing with body parts. After all, discoveries of ways to use them created the demand in the first place.

George Amberg
Bend, OR