I was so excited to see Jack Shafer's column today on Slate criticizing yesterday's NYT page-one MEL-topping eature on college girls opting for motherhood over careers. If that sounds simplistic well, so was the article. Shafer takes the NYT and author Louise Story to task for the vague framing of her assertions with over-used and under-conclusive words like "many" and "seems" and "I'm just going to pretend that I have enough evidence to support my wobbly thesis and hope no one will notice" (grammarians, I know. That's two words).

Shafer has no patience for the "weasel-words" employed by Story and her editor to patch together the story - "many" is used 12 times (including in the headline) to no real end:

None of these many's quantify anything. You could as easily substitute the word some for every many and not gain or lose any information. Or substitute the word few and lose only the wind in Story's sails. By fudging the available facts with weasel-words, Story makes a flaccid concept stand up—as long as nobody examines it closely.

Alos, story uses no real numbers, doesn't reveal her questions, sent it out to a specific sample (i.e. juniors and seniors, and also happened to interview roommates, by the way), and there's no way of telling how leading the questions might be (i.e. "Do you think you can be a good mother even if your career requires you to spend time neglecting your children so that they feel abandoned?"). Shafer also point out something that irritated us:

Story discounts her allegedly newsworthy findings by acknowledging that a "person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later." If they're less than perfect predictors, then why are we reading about their predictions on Page One of the Times?

We'll add to Shafer's comments by directing you to yesterday's rant against this article (uneveness of quotes and sources, total lack of ambition and drive on the part of the respondents). But don't listen to us, listen to you! We got some good comments yesterday, like so:

Not only was today's NYT piece totally specious, but the three Yale women they quoted are all ROOMMATES WITH EACH OTHER. What are the odds they would agree on a topic? Pretty good, probably.

We'd like to remind the reader about the whole skewed-sample thing mentioned above. That point was not lost on another emailer: "To take three from the same dorm room in one article seems like cheap journalism to me," and continues as follows:

As you pointed out, where are the driven artists, writers, academics, politicians in this picture? Where is the drive period? If after that exploration, they determine that motherhood is their passion -- that is wonderful. But motherhood shouldn't be a default position... I think (hope) the article exaggerates the trend. In particular, I have to believe the girl responsible for the final quote "I accept things as they are, I have no problem with the status quo" is a tiny minority. It is a sad, sad day when college students don't want to change the world.

(NB that girl, Angie Ku, is the third roommate in the June Cleaver dorm.)

Anyone else have opinions on this story? Love it? Hate it? Love me? Want to swoop in on a white horse with a big fat ring and take me away from all this? Seriously, dude, say the word. I'm dying to check out.

UPDATE: The intrepid sleuthsters at Gelf Magazine have the survey here! Highly unscientific comment from a source at Yale who does not room with anyone quoted in the above-referenced article: "People are furious over this, and loving the Shafer, incidentally."

This is my favorite question, I think: "How do you think college-age men at Yale feel about whether wives should stay at home with their kids?" A combination of total hearsay/speculation and driving home a loaded, loaded point.