According to article they got their data by looking “at tweets originating from within one mile of a college campus center with 1,000 to 4,999 full-time students, and within three miles of a college campus center with over 5,000 full-time students. (Of course, this means that some tweets may be originating from residents living near the school). They then compared the overall set of words in the tweets with the amount of hate-words they contained to come up with what you might call a hate-ratio.”
I was surprised by the inclusion of Fordham (racist), Yale (sexist), and The New School (homophobic).
Well, Yale is about a mile from Albertus Magnus College, which takes the dishonor of first place for derogatory tweets about women excluding a certain word. Albertus Magnus College showed a rate of about 6 times Yale’s rate of such tweets. So it could be that whoever near Albertus Magnus College who is running up the score there may also have some spillover to Yale.
However, is it possible to know whether the tweets originating from near a college come from students and others associated with the college, or people not associated with the college? I.e. are those people tweeting derogatory words about women near Albertus Magnus College associated with that college? Note that Albertus Magnus College was a women’s college from 1925 to 1985, and still enrolls 65% women.
Eastern Michigan University is in Ypsilanti which is currently experiencing a huge spike in gang-related violence.
The vast majority of EMU students are commuters and don’t live within 3 miles.
(In other words, at least in relation to EMU, I’d bet the majority of the tweets don’t come from students. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case with any other commuter schools on the list.)
This “study” seems problematic to me for multiple reasons. While there are some interesting results, I don’t necessarily agree that more profanity necessarily means one community is more hateful. Because this data is automated, it likely does not take into account the context these words are used. For instance if the n-word is used in tweets about song lyrics or as slang by member of the African American community, is it still a slur in that context? That’s a question that should be considered. Similarly the local residents surrounding the community and the fact that only public data is included is bound to confound the data.
Interestingly enough, I took a look at the words that they used to filter the results. Some of them are too cringeworthy for me to repeat on here, but words such as fugly, jihadist, and dick are included which have other meanings when used in different contexts. So I’m wondering if that can also influence the results
I can’t wrap my head around Seattle Pacific making any kind of anti woman list. It is largely a commuter school but in a nice part of town. It is close to some industry which is about the only possible explanation I can come up with unless it’s tweets from cyclists or runners on the trail or the boats in passing by.
Amused to see Pacific Lutheran on the PC list, most folks around here would assume both schools would be on the PC list as they are fairly interchangeable in most minds.
5 out of 10 “Most Anti-Black” Tweets are small urban colleges in New York City, 2 are small urban colleges in the Bronx. This methodology is fairly useless in a large/dense urban setting.
Homophobic tweets coming from the New School??? Impossible to believe considering the population and location. There’s something wrong with this data. Weil Cornell medical school with anti-black tweets?
I agree that the populations surrounding the schools influence the results.
Three miles to the west of the New School or Weill Cornell medical school puts you in New Jersey. East puts you in the middle of Queens. Worlds apart. Worlds apart.
The same thing happens when you ask fandango to find you a nearby movie theater. They tell you to go to New Jersey. It’s only a mile away!
Additionally, there is a certain personality type who likes to tweet. I don’t think that people who use twitter are reflective of the community as a whole at all.
sigh…I still can’t wrap my head around such silly and ignorant mis-use of anecdata…maybe we need a national law that requires everyone to take AP Stats to graduate from HS/
Forget the clickbait article and the methodology that dings universities in the “wrong” part of town. Have you looked at the list of words considered hateful or PC?
I’m not going to post any from the former category,* but I can think of at least a few (unprintable) words they missed. The PC list, however, is all but worthless. If the proper name for any race/religious group/demographic (muslim, arab, jew, gay…) is a “politically correct” term, this magazine’s methodology would class a tweet like “(expletive) arab (expletive) needs to go back to Kenya” as politically correct. “Gas the jews” would fall in the same category.
Finally, I’d love to know why calling someone a “dwarf” would be politically correct while “midget” isn’t.
@NotVerySmart Very good point, it’s hard to design an algorithm that actually detects bigoted vs pc language.
It’s interesting that they included Caucasian under the race section as that generally isn’t a concern when thinking about racism at a school.
Overall I agree with other posters that this isn’t a very worthwhile study, though I am wondering if there would be ways to make accurate lists of the most sexist/racist/homophobic colleges?
Why is the racism info-graphic blurred out in the complete report? Very suspicious. And I am not surprised by this report. Much of it confirms stereotypes in some instances. There is no one perfect way to determine sexism, racism, etc…in a community. I think this is just as legitimate as anything else.
This methodology makes me think more of an interesting high school project than a legitimate study that shows anything meaningful. Sure, there are going to be places where the studies match the reality, but there’s just too much noise to be meaningful. I know many in the LGBTQ community have reclaimed several of the words and of course there’s the obvious slur that is used in a non-racist way among some African-Americans. Redskins could refer to the football team, including those who are tweeting that the name is inappropriate. I grew up in the south and (at least at that time) redneck was probably more a compliment than a slur.
Most colleges in the south…NOT ALL…but a bunch…The princeton review has a list of LGBT friendly and and unfriendly schools as well as Conservative and liberal schools. I believe they have a friendliest students list as well.
About “dwarf” versus “midget”: from what I’ve heard from listening to people to whom those terms are applied, the former is seen as the proper term (since “dwarfism” is an actual medical condition), whereas many consider the latter to be an insult, and non-existent as a genuine category.
All of that aside, I’ve been extremely short my whole life – always the shortest or close to the shortest in my class from elementary school through law school! – and I was called “midget” (with obviously insulting intent) more than enough to consider it offensive myself.
