Marquette Students: Liberal or Conservative?

From we live our lives among giants, an interesting attempt to determine the political views of Marquette students.

I have described Marquette as a moderate institution from the start, so I looked up the political classifications on Facebook. Now, you can’t look up for than 500, so it just said more than 500 for three of the categories, so I compared the last name of the 500th person on those three lists (the search results are alphabetical).

Very Liberal = 269
Liberal = 500+ Hager
Moderate = 500+ Higgins
Conservative = 500+ Grodecki
Very Conservative = 132
Libertarian = 99
Apathetic = 143
Other (I like to assume they mean fascist) = 271

The methodology here would not pass muster for a peer reviewed academic journal. We wonder, for example, about self-selection of students who get Facebook accounts, and self-selection of students in listing their political views.

And we wonder what the “other” category means.

But still, the results are sensible, and accord well with a careful analysis of voting patterns in Marquette wards.

And kidos to blogger Logan for an innovative approach to the issue.

Marquette students can take pride in the fact that they attend a university with intellectual diversity (at least among the student body) and no stifling orthodoxy. This is in contrast to much of the UW Madison campus, where political science students (for example) are over 4 to 1 liberal.

Question for “diversity” advocates: you do like the fact that there is no stifling orthodoxy among students here, don’t you?