Do Liberal Professors Have That Much of an Effect?

According to The New York Times (seen via Foreign Dispatches):

David J. Zimmerman, an economics professor at Williams College, recently looked at the political views of 3,500 students who had shared rooms as freshmen, noting their leanings when they started college and again three years after graduation. Generally, roommates kept the same political persuasion -- except those freshmen whose roommates were on the far left of the political spectrum. No matter what their politics at enrollment, they were more likely than similar students to be conservative as adults.

We can derive several conclusions from this:

1. This means the political skew of college faculties has almost no effect. If we look for leftist brainwashing, we should look at primary and secondary schools instead. Most people who exit college on the left entered college on the left.

   As far as I can tell, two types of people move left in college:

   • Ex-Creationists who have come to accept the fact of evolution.

   • Clowns who think they're pro-life until their girlfriends get pregnant.

2. Self-congratulatory leftists can stop patting themselves on the back for being so educated.

3. Rush Limbaugh was almost right when he said that we need two Marxists on every college faculty so we never forget what those people were like. We need more than two and they should be perpetual college freshmen.

But wait, there's more:

The study also found that the higher the SAT score, the more liberal the views.

If I remember correctly, liberal critics of the old SAT said that it was useless above 1300. I suspect that's where the percentage of liberals reaches a maximum.