I would like to clarify the following quote attributed to me in the Nov. 4 issue of The Tufts Daily, "We're such a highly educated country, and yet we're the most conservative country in the western industrialized world."
While I may have uttered those words, it was in the middle of an out-loud struggle on my part to understand the Bush victory, and I did not conclude that conservatives are less educated than liberals. The reporter chose a sentence that expresses a view I ended up rejecting. I am sure that members of my own extended family voted for Bush.
They are not uneducated, though they do hold views very different from my own.
We are a divided nation, and we must try to understand one another, not engage in negative stereotyping of the sort I would have been doing had I take the position suggested by the quote.
Susan Ostrander
Professor, Department of Sociology
