‘Dozens’ of signatures don’t represent whole

Publication Date: 11/19/2009

In response to Kevin Casimer’s letter, I find it funny that every time a controversial issue presents itself to our dear Exponent, people tend to interview the people they want to interview and select few ideas they agree with to point out in their letters. I wonder after obtaining “dozens” of signatures, how could one say “a large number of students” agree with what he wants to say? There are roughly 39,000 people on this campus and even if he collected a sample of 1000 people (which is the largest, reasonable buffer I could give for a word “dozens”) agreeing with his opinion, that would still be about 2% of the whole population.

Personally I couldn’t care less if Mr. Chapman wrote whatever he wanted on his personal blog and I went on all day to ask some of my friends, about 20 people, to see where they stood on the issue. Most of them were not even aware of what was happening and even after briefly explaining the situation, they couldn’t care less. So can I now justify an argument of a large number of students are indifferent toward this issue and we should drop it?

Mark Rhee

Senior in the School of Management