In a column in The Arizona Republic, EJ Montini makes a point that needs to be repeated every election season, just so people don’t forget. You can use facts to distort the truth. Political campaigns do it all the time.
Montini is writing about the ad being run against Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred DuVal stating that he voted to raise tuition at our state universities when he was on the Board of Regents. What a terrible guy, right? Why does he hate our kids?
The Republic fact-checked the ad and said it was true. Montini’s response:
Was the ad factual? Yes. Was it true…? Ahhh, no.
Yes, DuVal and others on the board raised tuition. The legislature made big cuts in university funding. The Regents made up for the shortfall with tuition hikes. A pretty straight-forward cause — less funding — and effect — higher financial burden on students.
But the ad’s just stating the facts, right? Doesn’t that make it true? Montini nails the answer in his example of the difference between a selective presentation of facts and the truth of the matter.
Take this sentence, for example: In northern Arizona recently a 9-year-old girl wielding an Uzi shot and killed an unarmed man who was not threatening her.
If an accuracy-minded reporter were to run a “fact check” on that sentence it would receive a four-star rating for veracity, just like the Republican Governors ad bashing DuVal.
The facts included in the sentence are correct. But is it truthful?
Or would truth require us to mention the fact that the girl was at a shooting range with her parents? And that she had been firing an Uzi under an instructor’s supervision? And that the weapon’s recoil sent the Uzi flying over her head? In other words, it was a tragic accident.
Facts don’t mean much without context.
Except in politics.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2014.
Both my kids attended University of Arizona schools at that time, so i was tracking this issue pretty closely. Montini’s complaint that facts do not make truth applies equally well to this column.
Yes, the legislature cut state funding for the university system, and yes, the Regents replaced the shortfall with money raised by tuition increases. Those are facts, but the truth is that the Regents made no effort to curtail any less critical spending. I examined several years worth of University of Arizona budgets and was shocked to see how little actually went into teaching and learning. A huge percentage of the money UA spent went to bureaucrats, their underlings and their underling’s underlings. It could have made a difference in the amount we paid for tuition…that doubled during the 5 years my kids attended UA colleges…if the Regents had asked for some expenditure reductions in the areas of bureaucracy at the colleges. Just how many assistants to the dean and how many secretaries to the assistants does one college need? The truth is the Board of Regents chose to replace the money taken by the legislature by requiring students and their families to dig much deeper into their own pockets instead of asking the bureaucracy to do its part to make up the shortfall.
When we first arrived in Arizona almost 10 years ago, we caught off guard by the state leadership’s disregard for public education. The rapid defunding of our local schools since then has been shocking.
In recent national surveys, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities highlighted the fact that Arizona was #1 (again) in the nation in cuts to higher education and #3 in cuts to K-12 schools. Higher ed funding in Arizona is 48% lower this year than it was in 2008. In other words, in just the past six years our state government has cut university budgets almost in half.
With this recent series of cuts in mind, it should come as no surprise to anyone in Arizona that we also lead the nation in tuition increases. Costs to students (and parents) have risen by 80% in the same six year time period. Why? Prior to the catastrophic cuts in 2008, Arizona had already been strip-mining university funding. If you don’t believe me, just try Googling “Arizona university cuts” for 2006. And 2003. Etc., etc. The universities can only cut so many positions and services before they can no longer absorb the costs. Each massive wave of cuts has also come along with an increase in student enrollment and the same inflationary price increases the rest of have seen in the last decade — higher cooling costs, liability insurance, etc.
By 2011, the AZ Board of Regents had issued the following update to Governor Brewer’s office: “The University System has eliminated more than 2,100 positions (an 11% reduction in workforce); merged, consolidated or disestablished 182 colleges, schools, programs and departments; closed eight extended campuses; delayed degree programs, and has been forced to raise tuition significantly to retain quality and program offerings.” This, again, was after years of cuts and reductions that had already occurred. The response from our AZ state government? Another $200 million in university cuts for 2012.
In the meantime, the groups that have been profiting ideologically and/or financially from this trend have been spending a lot of money to distract people with stereotypical images and inflammatory messages. Forget the HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars in budget cuts to our local schools and research universities…let’s talk about unions! Bureaucrats! Those worn stereotypes ignore the fact that Arizona is a long-time ‘Right-to-Work’ state that dissolved union organizing rights; that AZ public schools have already gone through several staff reduction cycles ; and the fact that national surveys show that Arizona now has the lowest K-12 public school administrative costs in the entire U.S. Old stereotypes are much easier to repeat than factual data any day of the week.
C’mon, Arizona. The “Yes, but…” conversations need to stop. We can’t continue shrugging our shoulders and saying things like “YES…our elected state officials have continued to cut hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars from our universities, BUT I feel that the Regents/U of A are to blame for the largest tuition hike in America because they have too many secretaries.”
We’re abdicating our responsibility as voters here, and this type of argument is a bit like spending time debating the cost of the bathroom tile while some guy is busy tearing all of the plumbing out of our house. We can undo the damage here, but our focus had better change soon.
Are “the facts” and “the truth” the same thing?
Well, accurate facts may be a starting point if you are to get at “the truth,” but, as Safier points out, you may need to investigate the context before you can use accurate facts to get at an intelligent or reasonable interpretation of these facts.
But what if “the facts” are entirely withheld, or you are given bad facts, inaccurate data? Is there any way of getting from no facts or from inaccurate data to “the truth,” if the parties that control access to the data won’t deliver the goods or correct the faulty inputs for you? Probably not.
If commentators in the press are aware of contextual information that would change the interpretation of the facts deployed by candidates in political campaigns, they should by all means add relevant context. But before they can make that move, first they must require candidates and elected officials to deliver the sound information on which any intelligent / reasonable interpretation must be based.
EJ Montinny is to the left of the weakly. Enough said. Leftys are the most untruth spin doctors in the world next to the radical muslims.