FEATURE
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IMPRESSIONABLE MINDS: THE ROLE OF PROFESSORS IN CHANGING STUDENT OPINION ON BREXIT By Charlie Cavill, Philosophy, Politics and Economics (2019)
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aving spent the majority of their lives in full-time education, university students are undeniably very well-accustomed to absorbing, and repeating, information from their teachers. Beyond the scope of the syllabus, school teachers also have character-building roles, essential to normal childhood development, which could include helping to resolve playground conflicts, cultivating students’ moral compasses, and influencing their tolerance and respect of others. However, could such an ingrained disposition to assimilate the principles given by our teachers present problems as we enter into the world of adulthood? With this in mind, it is possible that at this crucial stage of development, university students’ impressionable minds may be subject to the influence of their professors, no longer only on trivial playground drama, but on more serious issues which may greatly affect our future, such as, in recent years, our views on Britain’s exit from the European Union. In order to test this concept, one must find evidence that university students are, in fact, changing their opinions within a given time frame, and then consider the likelihood that professors may have had an impact on this change. Taking data from five waves of the British Election Study (BES), Wave 10 (W10) to Wave 14 (W14), one can track changes in individual answers to the question: (See figure 1 opposite).
‘How well do you think the UK government is handling the process of Britain’s exit from the EU?’ (Fieldhouse et al, 2018) The five surveys were conducted between November 2016 and May 2018, with an average of 31,600 respondents per survey (Fieldhouse et al, 2018). Having adapted the data to reflect only the views of university-age respondents (18-22
year olds), four cross-tabulation tables were produced, as a method of tracking changes at an individual level from one wave to the next. The graph below shows the percentage of people who have given a different answer to the one they chose in the previous wave, signifying a changed opinion during the time elapsed. Explicitly, looking at responses between W11 and W12, just under 30% of these respondents changed their answer from ‘Very Badly’ in W11, to something else when asked the same question in W12; considering responses between W13 and W14, 25% of people changed their answers from ‘Very Well’ in W13 to something else in W14. As a final illustration, just under 50% of respondents changed their answer from ‘I don’t know’ in W12 to something else in W13, signifying the formation of an opinion between this time. From this data it is clear that young people have been changing, and forming, their opinions on Brexit over the past two years. Could their professors be responsible?
Students could be influenced by a variety of sources, including, but not limited to, their parents, peers, politicians, celebrities and the media. Students could be influenced by a variety of sources, including, but not limited to, their parents, peers, politicians, celebrities and the media. Borrowing an idea from management theory, ‘good’ decision-making (or in this case, opinion-formation) is reliant upon ‘good’ information, classified by O’Reilly (1982) as being of high quality, accessible to the individual and from a trustworthy source. Although our parents may be trustworthy on the whole, as well as being both sufficiently and directly accessible, many are not political experts. Unfortunately, this means that the quality of their information is often unsatisfactory, according to the theory. Considering our peers, one could easily argue that in many cases, it is the blind leading the blind, as the data encapsulates fluctuations in opinion regardless of degree discipline or
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