Even keeping in mind Mark Twain’s observation that there are
three kinds of lies—regular lies, damned lies, and statistics—Curmie has been
fascinated by statistics since he was a little boy. Of course, knowing the numbers is only part
of the story; it’s the conclusions we draw from that raw material that matter.
First, we need to consider the possibility that the facts
are not only misinterpreted, but actually wrong. Ask anyone who paid even a little attention in
high school English who the groundlings were at the premiere performance of Hamlet,
and you’ll get a variation on “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick
maker.” The evidence is two-fold: it
cost only a penny to attend, and there are dirty jokes.
But the fact is that we don’t know how much it cost to
attend. We have a grand total of two contemporary
sources that state what the standard admission fee was at the Globe. It’s a reasonable surmise, but still not a
certainty, that Hamlet cost the same as other plays. But whereas we assume that a penny was an
insignificant amount of money, it turns out that as a percentage of the
disposable income of a journeyman laborer, the price of admission to the Globe
was almost identical to a cost of a ticket to the National Theatre today.
Curmie also has it on good authority that, notwithstanding
Victorian era claims to the contrary, well-educated and even wealthy people
think dirty jokes are funny at least some of the time. That whole “my head in your lap… country
matters” business? [Note: in Elizabethan
England, the “t” in “country” would have been part of the first syllable.] Oh, Will, you naughty rascal!
One more thing: the Globe was an outdoor theatre, dependent
on daylight for spectators’ ability to see the stage action. The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker
were butchering, baking, and candlestick making at that hour. Hamlet’s audience would likely have looked
like that of a Broadway matinee today: people who don’t need to work or are
visiting the city, or those who worked different hours (the Inns of Court often
did business at night, for example).
Curmie was thinking about all these things when he read the Generation Lab poll commissioned by Axios about the concerns of today’s undergraduates.
Titled “Exclusive poll: Most college students shrug at nationwide
protests,” the article suggests, among other things, that perhaps the protests
on American campuses won’t hurt President Biden’s re-election chances as much
as might have previously been believed.
Students don’t blame him for the situation in the Middle East as much as
they do Hamas, you see.
Curmie apologizes for bluntness, but the idea that literally
anyone would suggest that Biden was more responsible than the
actual combatants has crossed the line into full-blown lunacy. If you want to say he hasn’t handled the
situation as well as he might have, you’ll get no argument from Curmie. But to say that he’s more culpable than Hamas
(or Likud, for that matter) is begging for a nice padded cell.
Curmie does stop short of declaring the entire poll and its
interpretation redolent of bovine fecal matter, but that one eyebrow did indeed
shoot upward and the opposite eye did close to a squint. Believing that it definitely cost exactly a
penny to attend Hamlet or indeed that the groundlings were who your high
school English teacher said they were requires considerably less of a leap of
faith than trusting these poll results.
For one thing, the questions are incompetent. Notice that neither antisemitism nor freedom of speech and assembly is an option. Of course “the conflict in the Middle East” didn’t generate as many responses as issues that affect students directly: healthcare, education funding, etc.
The Vietnam War, the source of student protests in Curmie’s youth, was a different matter: college-aged young American men were being drafted and used as cannon fodder for a war many of them thought was unjust. It’s hardly surprising that there were a lot of protests on university campuses. What’s happening now in Gaza has little direct relevance except to those with relatives in either Israel or Gaza.
More to the point, given that there are an estimated 15.8 million
undergraduates in the country, that “small minority (8%)” of students who have
taken part in a demonstration on one side or the other represents over one and
a quarter million students. That’s a lot
of folks in Curmie’s neighborhood. There
are multiple unknowns here: the percentage of demonstrators on each side of the
dispute, for example. It’s evident that a significant majority support the Palestinian (not to say Hamas) position: we’ve certainly heard
more about them, and one doesn’t often stage a demonstration in favor of the status
quo. “Don’t divest” comes up rather
short as a rallying cry.
We also don’t know why those students were involved in
protests. For some, no doubt, the
demonstrations were more social than political.
For others, they were an excuse to skip class. And to suggest that there was a fair amount
of naïveté in evidence is only to state the obvious.
But even granting that the Venn diagram of those who see the
conflict as a major concern and those who have actively taken part in protests
isn’t exactly concentric circles, there is a good deal of overlap. The statistic that jumped off the charts to
Curmie but apparently not to Axios’s Sareen Habeshian was this: the number of
students saying they’d demonstrated about the situation in Gaza and Israel was
over 60% as high as the number who consider the Middle East a “most important”
topic.
That’s an extraordinarily high number. Even if half of the demonstrators weren’t
true believers, that leaves a third or so of those who regard the conflict as of
high importance willing to demonstrate on behalf of their beliefs. When was the last time, Gentle Reader, that
you saw a demonstration about those issues more students allegedly care more
about: better healthcare, education funding, or gun control?
Even demonstrations about abortion access (speaking of an
absurd omission in a poll about what matters to college students!) have faded
as the Dodds decision moves further into the past. (Perhaps abortion issues may have been folded
into the umbrella of “healthcare,” explaining why it was the number one response
to the survey? If so, why?)
One of Curmie’s professor friends suggests that today’s college students, a group we might call the post-COVID generation, are angry at the world at large, and the conflict in Gaza and Israel is as good a flashpoint as anything else. Perhaps. But Curmie, old fart that he is, revisits Buffalo Springfield’s biggest hit, linked above, which is chillingly relevant 57 years after it was recorded. It’s difficult to decide what the most telling line is. “There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong”? “Young people speaking their minds / Getting so much resistance from behind”? Or maybe the opening line, “There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”?
The one thing that is clear is that this survey tells us
more about Generation Lab and Axios than it does about what today’s undergrads
are thinking.
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