CampusReform.org's Shane McGonigal posted an article that looks as though it's reporting real information, but really just uses numbers to lie.* He says:
The University of California (UC) represented the single largest employee group to donate to President Obama’s campaign in 2012, funneling $1,092,906 to assist the President in his bid to gain reelection. That number includes the university’s PACs, individual members or employees, and employee’s immediate families.
In comparison, Microsoft’s employees placed a distant second on the list, donating $761,343.See what he did there? He gave us information, and even a comparison. It's that helpful? Not really, actually, since the comparison is completely meaningless. The University of California is a gigantic institution. In fact, it's not even really a single institution — it's an entire system of schools:
- University of California-Berkeley
- University of California-Davis
- University of California-Irvine
- University of California-Los Angeles
- University of California-Merced
- University of California-Riverside
- University of California-San Diego
- University of California-San Francisco
- University of California-Santa Barbara
- University of California-Santa Cruz
By way of contrast, Microsoft has 56,934 employees in the United States.** In other words, all of the Microsoft affiliated sources donated $13.37 per employee to the President's reelection campaign, more than twice as much as the UC donations.
As another (valuable, unlike McGonigal's) comparison, take Goldman Sachs, the top gross contributor to the Romney campaign, with affiliated contributions hitting $994,139. Goldman Sachs has only 38,700 employees.*** That's $25.69 per employee, more than four times the per employee donations to the President from the UC-affiliated sources.
Why OpenSecrets.org chose to put the information out in this way (without scaling by the size of the employee pool) is a mystery to me, but that doesn't excuse McGonigal's laziness (or deceptive intent) on using it to support his particular argument.
Some other points are worth bearing in mind. McGonigal seems to be trying to use this data to demonstrate the 'leftist bias' in academia. But the donations from UC-affiliated sources probably aren't mainly from professors or administration, where we might be concerned about leftist bias. Instead, the number is almost certainly driven largely by employee unions, which swing left — but without any negative implications for universities.
Data can be used to support lies just as well as to support truth. Always question the data someone uses to support their predetermined narrative.
* I don't know whenever McGonigal is purposefully obfuscating the truth, or just failing to understand it at a rather basic level.
** I'm only counting employees in the United States because they're the only ones eligible to donate to campaigns. I'm assuming that effectively all of the UC employees are in the United States.
*** I don't know how many of those employees work in the United States, but if it's significantly fewer than the 38,700 that only reinforces my point.
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