Your point may be true, but this is not a good example, since the question discussed was of political nature, and even very smart people will ignore whatever evidence contradicts their political choices. That your argument was ignored had nothing to do with the innumeracy of the faculty members, and everything with them being liberals. If the room had been full of Google engineers, the outcome of the discussion wouldn't have been any different. (Although obviously they wouldn't use the phrase "confuse the issue by introducing numbers and percentages.")