yea, umm.

Umm, hello. I have a big Spanish test tomorrow, so naturally I'm sitting in the student lounge downloading SuSe before they shut off my wifi access. I have Fedora on now, but Red Hat's style just doesn't work with me.

Anyway, what drags me out of exile to post here? An interesting essay by the Decembrist on accusations of political bias in education. He argues that since we view donations by workers at corporations to candidates as an attempt to further the corporation's interest, we should also do the same for the individual donations given by faculty members of Harvard and other institutions.

You've probably seen the stories about the fact that college professors are largely liberal, backed up in part by data showing that Harvard, the University of California system, Columbia and U. Michigan were among Kerry's top contributors.

[...]

Why not treat the evidence as showing that these major institutions of higher ed believe that their interests would have best been served by a Kerry administration? Perhaps they recognize that research funding would not be threatened by tax cuts and would not have been burdened by ideological restrictions, student aid would increase, that incoming students would be better prepared, etc. That's certainly the way contributions from Citicorp or Halliburton employees would be analyzed.

Logical, right? Mark does have a point, and that is certainly why those donations were given. However, the Decembrist misses the point by arguing about the reason for these donations. The problem here, as seen by many conservatives, is that, in a country virtually evenly divided on politics, the defining institutions that govern transition to adulthood are dominated by a single ideology. Control by a single set of ideas is not a good setup for organizations that pride themselves on introducing people to wider viewpoints. Nor is it an encouraging sign for the continued relevance of those institutions.

Ahh, but now I have my Linux, so I'll be going back to work.