Apparently emulating Rush Limbaugh's style, Andrew Criado starts off with one simple statistic and then blows it up into a huge piece of right-wing propaganda ("Liberals' hold over college campuses is diminishing," Dec. 4). If Criado were a journalist instead of an advertising major, he might have been concerned with the facts and actually investigated the results of the poll.

Criado incorrectly infers that "61 percent of college students stand firmly behind President Bush, and that number is growing." Indeed, the poll found that 61 percent of college students say they support Bush. However, only 22 percent say that they "strongly support" President Bush. And only 39 percent of respondents say they will vote for Bush in the upcoming election. And those numbers are not growing; they have remained virtually the same since the previous poll in April. Despite Criado's assertion that college students are anti-affirmative and against abortion rights, the April 2003 poll shows that 54 percent of college students support affirmative action and only 20 percent of college students think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

Criado takes one poll result and tells us it is a sign of a huge conservative movement on campus. In fact, if you look at the results of the Harvard IOP polls since 2000, percentages of students identifying themselves with the Republican or Democratic parties have remained relatively constant. More students identify themselves as independent rather than affiliated with either party. To paraphrase Criado: As usual, those pesky facts of gotten in the way of his assertions.