Chalk talk

College profs lean left, study says

WASHINGTON - College faculties, long assumed to be bastions of liberalism, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. Fifty percent of the faculty members surveyed identified themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

The findings, assembled by political science professors at Smith College, the University of Toronto, and George Mason University, are based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools.

The study appears in the March issue of the Forum, an online political science journal. It was funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-leaning group that has given grants to such conservative organizations as the Independent Women's Forum and Americans for Tax Reform.

LONDON - Turkey Twizzlers have become a symbol of all that is wrong with British school lunches.

Jamie Oliver, Britain's best-known celebrity chef, has for the past month been on a personal crusade to improve school lunches. He blames Turkey Twizzlers - an entree made of pressed turkey parts - and other school-lunch menu items for obesity and health problems among British schoolchildren.

Oliver says the government spends less than 70 cents on each school meal, less than half of what it spends on meals for prison inmates and less than half of what France and Italy spend on their schoolchildren.

Last week, the British government announced that primary schools would receive money to build and rebuild school kitchens. The government has also instituted plans to make schoolchildren exercise more, even providing personal trainers for those having the most trouble getting, or staying, fit.

- The Washington Post