Jeff Millman: The poll truth: dispelling myths about Penn students

During winter break, it's very likely that most students experienced some symptom of Penn withdrawal. This may have included cravings for Penn, irritability, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, restlessness, sleep disturbances, decreased heart rate, increased appetite or weight gain. Once back on campus, most students recovered. However, there are some who suffer from a severe form of Penn deprivation, which causes vacationing students to hallucinate and misperceive the characteristics of the student body. To cure these students, we turn to science and scholarship, of course. So, welcome back, and let's get reacquainted with our fellow students. The enterprising students of my class, "Public Opinion and Democracy," make all of this possible. At the end of November, the class conducted an e-mail poll of 289 randomly selected full-time Penn undergraduates, resulting in a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percent. This means the poll was reliable. Michael Delli Carpini, a visiting Political Science professor who directs polling for the Pew Charitable Trusts, supervised to ensure it was conducted properly. By extrapolating the poll results across the entire undergraduate population, the curious and the recovering can dispel common delusions. The first delusion is that the student body is about 40 percent Jewish. False: Penn is 24.6 percent Jewish. You also hear all the time that a large majority of the white population is Jewish. Another falsehood: the white population is 35.1 percent Jewish. The second delusion is that our generally high level of family wealth and our access to higher education indicate Penn students are more politically active than most kids our age. False: Penn students are only marginally more active politically than the general college-aged public. While only 17 percent of college-aged students voted in the 1998 federal election, 22 percent of Penn students voted in this past midterm election. More startling is that 40 percent of Penn undergraduates, including 85.7 percent of Latino students, were not even registered to vote in this election. The third delusion is that the stances The Daily Pennsylvania's columnists, the peace-marches, the Dick Cheney protests and the teach-ins indicate our campus is generally against war in Iraq. Wrong: Penn students are actually more supportive of war than the national public -- 79 percent of Penn students support war generally, but 69.5 percent of those wanted war to be contingent upon a breakdown of the weapon inspections and/or support of the U.N. Security Council. Only 13.5 percent of Penn students opposed the war outright. In contrast, a November Gallup Poll reported that 37 percent of the nation is opposed to war. The poll confirms the typical hunch that our campus is left-leaning, which is not surprising given that the five states with the most Penn students, themselves contributing a majority of the student body, are all states that Al Gore won in 2000. Penn students still are widely unsupportive of Bush's environmental, economic and tax policies. Fittingly, 58.2 percent are Democrats or Democrat-leaning and 38.4 percent are Republican or Republican-leaning (Wharton students are nearly twice as likely to be Republicans or Republican-leaning as College students). But the poll clearly shows that Penn students overstate how liberal they are. The slim majority of 50.2 percent that consider themselves liberal is well within the margin of error. Also, a majority of undergraduates reject affirmative action and more people support school vouchers than are unsupportive of them. While this poll develops a vivid and deep snapshot of undergraduates, a cursory reading of the results is just as dangerous as basing thoughts on myths or anecdotes. That's because numbers can hide significant social cleavages. For example, the fact that our school is 61.6 percent white distorts some of these numbers. Whites are more likely to describe self-segregation as a problem. Seventy-three percent of African Americans felt increased minority recruitment of faculty was an important issue, but only 17 percent of whites feel the same way. Only 3 percent of whites supported affirmative action admissions policies at Penn compared with 67 percent of African Americans. The key realization is you can't typecast Penn students in neat, well-defined categories. We're more complex and often more conflicted. This poll is a call for more balance in the political articulation and activism of undergraduates. If you think your opinions are unpopular on campus, please speak up and organize! You may have more support than you realize. Of course, like in any poll, these numbers could have been manipulated to serve my own political wishes. I encourage you to come to your own conclusions by looking at the complete poll data online at www.stwing.upenn.edu/~millmanj/poll. Jeff Millman is a senior Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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