They saw it as finding a means to an end – which I vehemently argued against. My position was yes, you’ve found a way to prove the hypothesis. However, you’ve included unrelated variables to manipulate the regression analysis to the point where instead of saying (for example), “Young, unwed mothers are likely to have underperforming school-aged children,” you now have to say…

“Young, unwed mothers of color who have a familial history of drug-abuse living within a census tract that is 60% of area median income in an area that has been traditionally red-lined by mainstream banking and where local schools have been cited as failures according to No Child Left Behind are more likely to have male children aged between 2 and 6 who have reading deficiencies through 1st Grade, but no problems with math so long as their teacher has attained at least a Masters level degree from an Ivy League school and is aged between 22 and 45.”

The Professor didn’t like that – none of the Rutgers professors liked that. In fact, one of them was so much against it that when he applied for another job at an institution where I have some small degree of sway, I lobbied heavily against him being hired.

As far as his statement about “How do you think the numbers are calculated in a made-for-TV world,” I can’t argue that because maybe some stations (*cough* FOX News, *cough* MSNBC) do tweaking to make certain things look a certain way. In fact one of the things I learned in statistics class is that you should only trust real polls, people like Gallup and such since they provide a full report of their testing (variables used, possible choices if polling, etc), whereas TV likes to focus on a Q & A type of approach, and obviously that’s “more sexy” as Nash would say to the common people.

Bear in mind that this is in front of the class…

So he went back in the data set and included just enough extra variables so that the data reached the percentages that he was looking for. I went ape shit. I started screaming and yelling that it was intellectually dishonest to state a hypothesis and a null hypothesis and to manipulate data to prove the hypothesis over the null hypothesis. He actually found my rant amusing and said something to the effect, “How do you think the numbers are calculated in a made-for-TV world?”

I got mad…and still am!