I’m posting some additional results from the campus poll I fielded with my students. For one, much has been made recently about the possible impact of Bowdoin’s curriculum on students’ political views. The newly elected Mayor of New York is a Bowdoin grad, and because he holds very liberal positions on many issues, some have argued that his education at Bowdoin might have played a role. Maybe, maybe not. College is a “formative experience,” and what you know and think about issues and controversies can change and evolve as you age and as you experience more diverse perspectives. I know that my experience in College, at Fairfield University in Connecticut, had profound impacts on my political views. But none of those experiences amounted to propaganda or indoctrination–I simply learned a lot about stuff I never knew previously, and I had loads of conversations with faculty and students over my four years in college. It was fantastic.

Still, can we see some evidence of a change in political views here at Bowdoin? We do not have panel data to properly answer these questions, but here is a sensible initial hypothesis. If Bowdoin has the effect of exposing students to an avalanche of liberal views (inside and outside of the classroom), we might expect seniors to be more liberal than first-years (who are still learning their way across campus). We asked students in our sample to state their political views on a 0-100 scale, with very liberal being closer to 0 and very conservative being closer to 100. Here are the means from the sample across the class years.

We don’t see much change. Students at Bowdoin are certainly more liberal (the mean across all students is 29 on this scale), but the change across class years is largely flat. Which is to say, with these simple data the evidence of a causal impact of the curriculum on students’ political views is minimal.