I submitted this article to the Cornell Daily Sun a couple weeks ago and they
rejected it (even though they have in my time here accepted more important
articles such as the men at Cornell not to date, giving the gift of oral
sex, or why a columnist shouldn't listen to "Hotel California"), but I
still wanted to share it with someone...since I think it's better than
any of that stuff.
If you don't know, Facebook is just a highly popular MySpace-like
social networking site originally intended just for college students
that debuted my freshman year. The "Minifeed Debacle" refers to a
"service" Facebook offered allowing people to see every miniscule
change their friends made to their profile...people are protesting
this as hard as they protest anything else...
In the epoch preceding the Great Facebook Minifeed Debacle of 2006
(namely, August) I sought to understand more thoroughly the politics of
Cornell students. Many have argued that Cornell's professorate
(especially in the humanities) is overwhelmingly liberal, but fewer have
analyzed whether the same trend holds for students as well. How then
could I test the political persuasions of Cornell students, especially by
major? Why, by using everyone's favorite social website, Facebook.
I know what you're immediately thinking. It is possible that this
analysis will be skewed if there is a certain political persuasion
underrepresented on Facebook...for instance, if people belonging to one
political group tend to be harder workers, they may be less likely to
have profiles. Others may not mention their political affiliation, or
may say their political affiliation is "Other" even if they have very
distinctive political views. Furthermore, there are the ridiculous
entries for "people" such as "God the Almighty" and "Cornell Squirrel",
who sometimes have political affiliations (although they seem to have
disappeared lately), or people may not be truthful about their major for
whatever reason. I chose not to omit these bizarre entries because it
would greatly increase the time spent on this frankly non-academic
project to look through over a thousand biology majors in an attempt to
find fake entries. Nonetheless, since many (most?) Facebookers do list
both their major and their political affiliation, I still think analyzing
students' Facebook-declared political views by major will be somewhat
suggestive in determining the most liberal and conservative majors, since
people will probably self-select what major they want to enter in part
based on their views, or they may be shaped by their professors’
political views, as many argue.
The simple method I used to determine how liberal or conservative
students in a major are is to simply give very liberal students a 0,
liberal students a 1, moderate students a 2, conservative students a 3,
and very conservative students a 4. (I am not opining my political
views; it just made sense to make the leftmost students left on the
x-axis.) A major with perfect balance between liberals and conservatives
would thus theoretically score 2. I ignored all majors with fewer than
25 political students, which left only 61 majors to analyze.
In terms of the 0-4 scale, the most liberal major was entomology, which
scored 0.6667...in other words, entomology students are on average to the
left of liberal...it was interesting that a major in the scientific realm
tested most liberal considering how much people talk about humanities
classes being more liberal than science courses. It was followed by
theatre arts (.7455), anthropology (.9271), fine arts (.9714), college
scholar (1.0172), film (1.0328), English (1.1046), international
development (1.1111), development sociology (1.1200), and natural
resources (1.1241). The ten most conservative majors were finance,
accounting, and real estate (1.9167), materials science and engineering
(1.8500), finance & fiscal policy (1.8409), atmospheric science (1.7869),
economics (1.7434), ILR (1.6897), information science (1.6806), animal
sciences (1.6713), mechanical & aerospace engineering (1.6700), and
classics (1.6563). Most large majors fell in between. Note that even
the most conservative major at Cornell tested left of center. Over the
entire campus, the political ratio was 1.4367, closer to liberal than
moderate, a key result.
I also took percentages of the most extreme, moderate, libertarian, and
apathetic majors. The extreme list is not particularly interesting,
because it eventually ends up being dominated by "very liberal" students
since there are few "very conservative" students at Cornell (or at least
on Facebook.) The majors with the most moderates tend to be the majors
that tested most conservative, with finance & fiscal policy (41.67%), ILR
(40%), classics (36.36%), economics (34.08%), materials science &
engineering (33.82%), finance, accounting, and real estate (32.14%) and
atmospheric science (31.34%) making both lists (but this time medicine
(34.21%), international development (31.58%), and chemistry (30.92%) join
the list as well.) Dance is by far the most apathetic major, with 30.26%
claiming to be apathetic (nearly as many as the number that are liberal.)
German (19.35%), materials science (18.38%), math (18.01%), cognitive
science (17.50%), earth & atmospheric science (17.07%), college scholar
(16.44%), applied & engineering physics (16.25%), philosophy (15.71%),
and electrical & computer engineering (15.37%) also make the apathy list.
And finally, I come to the libertarians, who cannot be lumped in with the
rest, since they may be economic or social libertarians, who would tend
to vote differently from each other. Due to the sheer number of
political treatises they must read, philosophy had the most libertarian
students (11.43%), followed by information science (9.57%), systems
engineering (8.11%), materials science & engineering (8.09%), chemistry
(7.73%), cognitive science (7.5%), finance, accounting and real estate
(7.14%), film (6.49%), applied & engineering physics (6.25%), and finance
& fiscal policy (6.25%). (Computer science (6%) just misses the list;
note the number of engineering majors here).
What precisely can we learn from these results? Perhaps not a lot, due
to the fact that Facebook is probably not a serious enough website to
compile statistics, but it does seem that conservative claims about how
liberal this campus is are well-founded since the most conservative
majors all tested left of center (even if narrowly). Kerry defeated Bush
in the Cornell 2004 mock election, 70% to 22%. Giving all the Kerry
voters 1 point for being liberal and the Bush voters 3 points for being
conservative, the average political ratio for the school should be
1.4747, and on Facebook, it is 1.4367, which is not too different (bear
in mind that some Kerry voters would no doubt be “very liberal”, which
might push the average closer to the Facebook average). So maybe
Facebook tells more truth than any of us give it credit for.