It's Not Just Me

It seems that my objections to David Brooks' last article are widely shared. Here's the first complaint letter printed by the Times and it sums up all my main points:

Having earned a doctorate in electrical engineering at M.I.T., am I no longer allowed in the lab given that I apparently relate to the "postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy''?

It seems to me that the statistics show a correlation between education and political support regardless of numeracy or literacy. The fact that corporate chief executives and accountants are more likely to support George Bush is consistent with this observation: they are probably best educated that a third of his tax cuts go to the richest 1 percent.

a second letter:

At M.I.T., 94 percent of campaign giving was to the Democrats. What does Mr. Brooks think the people at M.I.T. do? Does he think that the electrical engineers, computer scientists, roboticists, biologists and economists run screaming from numbers and sit around reading Derrida?

Academia is full of very smart people earning very little money relative to what they could earn. They are curious people, dedicated to pursuing the truth and teaching others.

Business is full of very smart people whose sole responsibility is to make money, for stockholders and themselves. The first group supports Democrats. The second group supports Republicans. Draw your own conclusion.

This reminds me of something another blogger (I believe it was Grobstein) speculated about David Brooks a while ago to the effect that the editors must be so inundated with complaint letters following each of his columns that they usually print none, fearing it will make them look bad and perhaps incompetent. I suppose the response to this latest column was enough to overwhelm their letter censoring capabilities.  

Originally published 9/13/04