Tran|Script

Says The Chronicle of Higher Education in the article “College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics, Study Finds“:

Previous [ISI] surveys have found that, in general, college does not bring students up to a high level of civics knowledge. According to the institute’s 2008 report, based on a survey of 2,500, people whose highest level of educational attainment was a bachelor’s degree correctly answered 57 percent of the questions, on average. That is three percentage points lower than a passing grade, according to the survey’s authors.

Let’s leave aside the idiotic assertion that “That is three percentage points lower than a passing grade” when of course what a passing grade is is decided by the Institute. Let’s forget that “civics tests” have become a favorite press tool of the right in the past several years, and in many recent, high profile cases have been faked. Let’s look over the fact that two minutes of research shows that ISI has been in the news recently for being the administrator of the Collegiate Network, an organization that forms much of the link between the conservative activists turned alleged phone tamperers down in Louisiana:

Three of the four young men charged in the alleged bugging attempt at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office Monday were involved in the well-funded, opportunity-rich world of conservative campus journalism in recent years, a link that provides potential clues about how the men knew each other and why they came to hatch the alleged plot.

James O’Keefe, Joseph Basel, and Stan Dai each founded or lead the alternative conservative newspapers on their respective college campuses.

[...]

Fostering the growth of alternative media on campus — publications that are more often National Review-style opinion journals than reporting-intensive newspapers — has been a tactic of the conservative movement for decades. The Collegiate Network, for example, was founded in 1979 and supports over 100 papers per year. CampusReform.org, the campus component of the Leadership Institute, employs 16 staffers. [Talking Points Memo, 1/26/10]

Bai, Basel, And O’Keefe Were All Involved With Collegiate Network Student Papers.

Let’s forget that the major funder of the institute releasing this study is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, to the tune of $6 million. That’s a fund controlled by Richard Scaife, known as the “Funding Father of the Right”.

Forget the felonies, forget the funding.

Lets just consider this.

On its home page, the ISI explains what the report is, not with text, but by embedding a video of Glenn Beck praising the study. If you let this clip play on the ISI web site, you can see Beck play a video showing pictures of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and people talking about gas chambers and mass executions — he labels it the “History Progressives Don’t Want You To See”. [Because, for those unfamiliar with Beck's rhetoric, Obama is Hitler, and is utilizing a world police force to eventually enslave and gas us.]

This is the video proudly displayed on the FRONT PAGE of the report site. Can the Chronicle not click a link? Are they incapable of performing a Google search?

Why would I subscribe to a magazine that did not even do the most rudimentary vetting of the “studies” it is covering?

This is garbage. I half believe the reason why the Chronicle keeps its paywall up is that the pieces that float out to the open web are so patently ridiculous that if they dropped the paywall they would be ridiculed out of existence in a week.

Garbage, garbage, garbage. And hopefully shame.